Every Night Is Pizza Night
New York Times Bestseller
Best-selling author J. Kenji López-Alt introduces Pipo, a girl on a quest to prove that pizza is the best food in the world.
Pipo thinks that pizza is the best. No, Pipo knows that pizza is the best. It is scientific fact. But when she sets out on a neighborhood-spanning quest to prove it, she discovers that "best" might not mean what she thought it meant.
Join Pipo as she cooks new foods with her friends Eugene, Farah, Dakota, and Ronnie and Donnie. Each eating experiment delights and stuns her taste buds. Is a family recipe for bibimbap better than pizza? What about a Moroccan tagine that reminds you of home? Or is the best food in the world the kind of food you share with the people you love?
Warm and funny, with bright, whimsical illustrations by Gianna Ruggiero, Every Night Is Pizza Night is a story about open-mindedness, community, and family. With a bonus pizza recipe for young readers to cook with their parents, Every Night Is Pizza Night will make even the pickiest eaters hungry for something new.
Reviews (61)
Great concept, but very busy
I bought this to read with my daughter who is turning three soon. I am a big fan of Kenji and I really like the general themes in this book. There's a great vocabulary and the illustrations are mostly wonderful. Unfortunately, I find many of the pages too busy. We have a few hundred children's books in the house and do quite a bit of reading, yet I have not encountered a book quite as cluttered as this one. There's a couple pages it took me, an adult and avid reader, a moment to figure out the intended flow. If some of the pages were simplified this would easily be five stars from me. As a very minor aside, I do not understand why anyone puts a dust jacket on a children's book. They get destroyed in short order, in my experience, and just generally seem a waste. The same image is printed on the covers anyway. Update: I’m bumping this to five stars because my daughter absolutely loves it. On multiple occasions during a meal she has said “I do not NEED it, I do not WANT it, but I will TRY it”. She can quote most of the book. I’m leaving my criticisms above, but they are no longer a concern and the book is clearly effective.
Delightful book about exploring new food genres
Can more than one food be the best? This is a delightful book that follows Pipo as she explores testing out new food genres from her neighbors in an effort to scientifically prove that pizza is in fact the best food of all. Unfortunately (though fortunately) for her, she struggles with the results of all her tests, as it turns out there are a lot of other amazing foods out there! This book is made even more fun by the artwork inside. I’ve shared a couple glimpses without giving anything away, but the illustrator had a lot of fun with this book, and it shows. This book would be best for kids that can follow a storyline (without rhyming), probably starting around age 3. My 2-year-old isn’t quite ready for it yet, but I’ve already ordered a copy as a gift for my kindergarten-aged niece. Overall this is a fun book that helps encourage kids to not just try new foods, but explore different cultures, which we could all use a little more of.
Food! Science! Fun! Inclusivity!
I’m a big fan of everything that Kenji does, so I couldn’t wait to receive my preorder of this book. My kindergartener loved it (and I did too)! It’s exactly what you’d expect from Kenji (food, science, fun, and inclusivity) in the form of a children’s book. We can’t wait to make Pipo’s Pizza, but we’d love to try Farah’s tagine too!
Vibrant and Engaging for our 2yo.
While intended for slightly older kids, our two year old absolutely loved this book! He may not be familiar with bibimbap or tagine chicken, but he definitely recognized the vibrantly illustrated veggies that went into them. Kudos for a delightfully relatable tale that successfully engaged my kid with wonderfully vivid illustrations by Gianna Ruggiero. We are avid, but relatively new, fans of Kenji whose online videos have some phenomenal examples of both "everyday" or international food made accessible with his conversational explanations as he cooks. Eschewing production value for quality and accessibility, Kenji has a unique and refreshing style, which includes not running and paid product placement that I've seen. Despite this, we didn't assume this book would be great, and didn't preorder. I'm glad we did order it though, and if you are passionate about quality, practical food you will probably be glad you did too! PS, Spanish Tortilla is our family favorite of about 20 dishes we've made based on his videos. Kenji's Creamy Mushroom soup was the brazing liquid for our pork chops today. PPS, I didn't know what brazing was a month ago. (We have no affiliation with anyone associated with this book, and paid for it like anyone else)
Cute book, we enjoyed it!
I bought this because of the postcard ad I saw in the copy of the Food Lab that I bought for myself recently. My toddler is already an adventurous eater, and had eaten many of the foods mentioned in this book before we got it, but she absolutely loves this book and insisted that we read it every single night for the first few weeks after we got it, it is still a regular favorite. The illustrations are beautiful, and the subtlety at which through food, it encourages individuals to consider other cultures has a lot of redeeming value right now. I have long believed that food diplomacy could solve a lot of our social ails. I would particularly recommend this book for parents of children who actually are picky eaters, since the plot of this book approaches that topic with care in a way that might encourage trying new things.
Wonderfully illustrated with a good message about trying new things
I got this for my niece (who isn't too picky of an eater but doesn't like to try new things) and she LOVED IT! The illustrations are super fun and it rereads well with so much going on on a page that you're always finding new things happening. The overall story is very positive about trying new foods and discovering new things. Best of all the book contains recipes for all of the foods featured in the book so you can make them with your kids after they read about them. Really fun read that peaked her curiosity about what they were eating in the book and made her want to try more foods. Mission accomplished!
Expanding Horizons
We love Kenji in our house, and this book didn't disappoint. It addresses picky eating and diversity and it's just all around amazing. Highly recommend if you 1 - have a kiddo with that ONE preferred food, 2 - want a beautifully illustrated book with diverse characters or 3 - enjoy any of Kenji's work!
Great Drawings, Great Food Vocabulary
I preordered this for my nephew and as was to be expected with anything K Jenji Lopez-Alt puts out, it's high quality and uses a lot of exciting food terminology. Excited to subliminally message my nephew with a global food vocabulary that is higher than his parents' own lol.
So impressed!
This is such a cute book. The girl in the story reiterates how she will try these other foods, for science, and my boys loved that! It opened the door to them trying new things and telling me, “it’s for science”. It was so neat to see the different people and different foods throughout the story and how it brought the food in each home to a special place in their heart. Buy it! Worth every penny!
A must have for the modern foodie kiddo and folks learning to love food!
Bought two-one for our kids and one for our son’s classroom library for his birthday. Our kids loved it! We loved it! Son’s class loved it! His teacher, who knew of the book, was so excited to be gifted the book. It really reads well, and normalizes multiple cultural ways of eating and keeps it through the eyes of fun and childhood. Also, we made pizza that night, and so did our son’s teacher.
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