Italian Chef Fired in Australia for Refusing Pineapple on Pizza, Becomes First Man in History to Lose His Job Defending a Flatbread's Honor

Every war needs a martyr. The pineapple war has finally found one, and he was holding a pizza peel.

Davide Tamburella, the Italian head chef at La Costa in Brisbane, was fired on 20 May, a fortnight after his boss hauled him into a meeting "to address performance concerns." The main concern was a fruit. Tamburella had refused to put pineapple on pizza because, in the words of the Fair Work Commission ruling, "he considers, as an Italian, that putting pineapple on a pizza is an insult to his culture." Other men lose their jobs over embezzlement. This one lost his over a garnish.

It was not a moment of weakness. It was his third refusal in four years, which is not an incident. That is a doctrine. He also told management its directions "need not be followed when it is offensive to his culture," the kind of sentence that sounds noble from a pulpit and less so from a kitchen with a $15,000 booking waiting.

That booking is where it all came apart. Managing director Elliot Ingram says the client paying for a large function told him: "Look, I need to get some ham and pineapple pizza." The chef answered by asking his boss to "check how important it is for Italians not to put pineapple on a pizza." Nobody has ever answered a catering order with a homework assignment and kept the job.

The setting made it worse. Queensland grows all of Australia's commercially grown pineapples and has a heritage-listed, 16-metre fibreglass Big Pineapple on the Sunshine Coast. Refusing pineapple in Queensland is like refusing to say "mate" in Sydney. Legal, technically. Unwise, spiritually.

Ingram, a man with 17 years in hospitality, says he has learned to "pick your battles." He picked this one with great diplomacy: "Do I go and buy a ham and pineapple pizza? It's probably not my absolute favourite. But I'm not going to turn my nose up at it, that's for sure. And, look, we have had ham and pineapple pizza on the kid's menu previously." The chef's whole stand, it turns out, was a stand against the kids' menu.

The restaurant's website still promises: "We promise, it'll only take a moment to realize you're not in Brisbane anymore, you've made it to the Italian Riviera." It took one moment. It took one fruit. The Riviera was in Fortitude Valley the whole time, two doors down from a nightclub.

Tamburella took his case to the Fair Work Commission, where Commissioner Jennifer Hunt threw it out because he filed too late. The commission never ruled on the pineapple. Somewhere, the fruit got away on a technicality.

Nobody won. La Costa closed in July when its lease ran out. The chef's employer-sponsored visa process went back to square one. Ingram told the Daily Mail there was "more to this story than a pizza topping," which is what everyone says right before the story turns out to be about a pizza topping.

On LinkedIn, Tamburella once posted about "respecting the ingredients." He now works at another Brisbane Italian restaurant, and the BBC checked: pineapple is not on the menu. He has found the one kitchen in Queensland where the war is already over. The pineapple, meanwhile, is still 16 metres tall and still has not been fired from anything.