You can learn a lot about the world by considering the history of one distinct slice of it. The talk that Profs and Pints will stage at Denver’s Woodie Fisher Kitchen & Bar on Tuesday, January 20, 2026 at 6 p.m., takes on origins and evolution of a whole pie, pizza, and is sure to leave audience members savoring the fascinating field of culinary history.
Photo: Pizza Hut
Carol Helstosky, the University of Denver historian and food scholar who will be giving the talk, wrote the book Pizza: A Global History and has devoted a substantial portion of her career to studying modern Italy and the cuisine of that region.
The ingredients for her talk will include history, geography, culinary science, and some interesting business lessons offered by the stories of globally successful pizza chains.
Those whose fondest memories of college include ordering pizza delivery to their dorms probably will end up wishing they’d had Professor Helstosky for a class. With several pizzas on Woodie Fisher’s menu, any cravings arising from the talk should be fairly easy to satisfy.
Advance tickets: $13.50 (plus processing fees). You can buy them here.
Tickets at the door are $17, or $15 with student ID. (Note: Admission does not include pizza or drinks.)
Pizza in roughly the form we know it today started as an inexpensive and filling meal for sailors and dock workers in eighteenth-century Naples, Italy.
Visitors to the city regarded the pizza they encountered there as disgusting, but slowly and steadily pizza rose to become one of the world’s most popular foods, with chefs and consumers alike putting original spins on it.
Helstosky will start by looking at pizza’s “origin myths,” debunking many of them.
From there, she will take you on a culinary journey through space and time from old Italy to the United States and then on to far corners of the globe.
Explore pizza’s incredible success in a variety of geographic contexts, and learn about those individuals and communities who sometimes intentionally and sometimes unwittingly contributed to pizza’s popularity. You’ll get to know figures like Queen Margherita, for whom Pizza Margherita was named.
We’ll look at how and why pizza surged in popularity in the United States after World War II, and we’ll examine the origin stories of major U.S. pizza chains and the roles those chains played in spreading pizza around the world.
For pizza and history lovers, it will be a talk with everything.
1999 Chestnut Pl., Denver.
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