Cashews On Pizza? The Inland Empire Is Nuts About It

Every regional idiosyncrasy has a story. Detroit’s signature square pizza was originally baked in drip pans repurposed from the auto industry. L.A.’s donuts come in pink boxes because Cambodian refugees who started the donut shops needed cheap materials. And so it goes with cashews on pizza, a salty, buttery, crunchy topping that has gained a cult following in the Inland Empire over the past half century.

The Inland Empire, while very much part of SoCal culture, prides itself on doing things differently from its neighbors. Sub sandwiches are called grinders, local restaurant chains like Baker’s and Farmer Boys are largely unknown elsewhere — and, yes, cashews reign supreme as locals’ favorite pizza topping.

The city of Redlands, located over 60 miles east of Los Angeles, is where cashew pizza originated in the 1960s, eventually spreading to neighboring cities like Riverside and Yucaipa.

Kirsten Morningstar, a professional recipe developer and Redlands resident, says, “It’s a point of pride for Redlands people to have our own cultural food, something we invented that’s all ours. It’s how you know someone’s from Redlands.”

Why cashews?

Similar to the invention of chocolate chip cookies, there is no “why”; the creation of cashew pizza was a fortuitous accident.

To understand cashew pizza, you first have to understand the Gay 90s, a former pizza joint near the railroad tracks on Colton Avenue in Redlands. And to understand the Gay 90s, you have to understand its owner, Dave Wilson, and his gregarious and whimsical personality.

Every town needs a local spot to bring people together; in 1960s Redlands, the Gay 90s was that place. Wilson and his wife, Lorna, bought the restaurant in 1967. Cutting his teeth as a cook in the Army, he renamed the restaurant Dirty Dave’s Infamous Gay 90s Pizza Parlor and revamped the menu but kept the 1890s saloon theme (the “gay ’90s” refers to the gaiety and societal progress of the 1890s).

Pizza was the “great leveler,” says Jerry Farmer, a longtime family friend of the Wilsons who wrote Dirty Dave’s Pizza Parlor: An Origin Story (Dirty & Me), about Wilson.

Dirty Dave's Gay 90s Pizza, Redlands, CA, circa 1970s

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Courtesy of Jerry Farmer

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Customers liked the Gay 90s for its cheap beer and tasty thin-crust pies, with recipes perfected by Wilson himself. People from all over came to eat, including college students and out-of-towners attending weekly summer concerts at the Redlands Bowl.

It was a beloved gathering place, and by all accounts, a dive: crowded and lively, the walls and ceilings lined with memorabilia. Roberta Gehring, a fifth-generation Redlands resident, recalls, “The train would come by and rattle the building, and [the staff] would say, ‘Hold onto your plates!’” The pizza was fresh and delicious, and locals loved the chaotic atmosphere.

(It would go on to make an indelible mark on American pop culture — brothers Les and Glen Charles, who attended the University of Redlands in the 1960s, drew upon the restaurant as inspiration for their TV show “Cheers.")

‘Larger than life’

At 6’4” and 200 pounds, Dave Wilson was a physically imposing figure who disarmed people with his impish charm and wicked sense of humor. He’d got the nickname Dirty Dave as a teenager, when he fought back against school bullies using hay hooks, leading other kids to say he was fighting dirty — though some assume the name came from his frequent use of foul language.

“He had this larger-than-life personality,” says Farmer. Wilson’s granddaughter, Stephanie Hemphill, adds, “He was a big papa bear.” 

Dave Wilson

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Courtesy Jerry Farmer

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Wilson had a penchant for stealing bites of everyone’s food. Friends, family, customers — no one’s plate was safe. “Quality control,” he called it. In the late ’60s, he turned this annoying habit into a business decision when, one fateful day, a customer’s pizza order forever transformed the Inland Empire pizza culture.

This customer was a regular of the Gay 90s, but nobody knew his name, including Wilson. One day, he arrived drunk, sat down at the bar, ordered a sausage, onion and pepperoni pizza, then asked for a packet of cashews from the concession rack behind the bar. Farmer writes in his book, “To Dave’s astonishment, the befuddled fellow ripped open the bag and dumped the nuts on his pizza. The look of pleasure in the drunk’s eyes must have triggered Dave’s bite-snatching habit. Dave reached across the bar, grabbed a piece of the poor guy’s pizza and crunched it down. Dave was utterly amazed. It was downright delicious.”

The Gay 90s special — pepperoni, sausage, onions and cashews, Dirty Daves, Olympia, WA.

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Courtesy of Dirty Dave's Pizza Parlor

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“Perhaps his body was just craving more salt,” Farmer muses. “Excessive alcohol consumption leads to dehydration.”

Wilson was stubborn and stern, and if you were close to him, he’d steal your ideas and claim them as his own. However this time, he gave credit where credit was due. He also had an astute sense of what people liked and strove to please his customers’ palates. He figured that, if he liked something, other people might like it too. He put the man’s spontaneous invention on the menu and called it the Gay 90s special, inspiring a culinary phenomenon that has stuck around for generations.

A new market

When the Wilsons’ house in Redlands burned down in the summer of 1971, they sold the Gay 90s and headed north to start anew. They landed in Washington state, where Lorna Wilson’s family lived, and opened the new Dirty Dave’s Pizza (eventually dropping the Gay 90s in the name, but not on the menu) in Olympia in March 1972. Dave Wilson passed away in 2013, but his children and grandchildren still own and run the restaurant, celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2022.

Wilson’s piano is still there, along with the 1890s theme and the eclectic mix of posters, old menus and photos on the walls. “So many places change with the times,” says Hemphill, who is the Washington restaurant’s marketing manager. “We want the menu and the vibe to stay the same. If you had a Gay 90s pizza in 1970 in Redlands and another one in 2023 in Washington, it will be the same, and that’s the key.”

Wilson’s legacy

The first cashew copycat appears to have been Don Frisbie, owner of Pizza Chalet, a now-defunct Inland Empire chain that had locations in Redlands and Riverside. Patti Johnson, who worked at a Pizza Chalet on Magnolia Avenue in Riverside in the early 1970s, clearly remembers her restaurant’s iteration of the Gay 90s Special, the #14 with pepperoni, cashews, sausage and onions.

Unlike with pineapples, a polarizing pizza topping, there doesn’t seem to be a large contingent of anti-cashew detractors. Rather, those who have tried it have quickly fallen in love and bonded with other cashew aficionados. However, there is some debate about which cashew combination is best (the Gay 90s special or a cashew Hawaiian) and which kind of cashews to use (salted, lightly salted, or unsalted). Everyone agrees that you should use roasted cashews and add them on top of the cheese in the final minutes of baking for a perfectly toasted crunch.

Morningstar, the recipe developer who now lives in Riverside, says cashews were a ubiquitous pizza topping in restaurants and at school pizza parties during her youth. Cashews, she says, are buttery and crunchy: “It’s exactly what pizza was missing.”

Dirty Daves, Olympia, WA.

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Gehring’s son David Copher is also a huge cashew pizza fan — so much so that the Inland Empire resident brings cashews with him on extended winter ski trips to Colorado. At Pazzo’s Pizza in Colorado, Copher asks staff to add the cashews to the deep-dish Sicilian-style pizza toward the end of baking. This year at Christmas, Gehring got him a two-pound bag of lightly salted, whole cashews to ensure he was well-supplied.

Copher isn’t the only one to bring his own cashews to restaurants, either. Members of a Facebook group called “Cashews on Pizza” discuss their love for the topping and lament that they can’t find cashew pizza outside of the IE. People are seldom confused about its origins: Everyone knows it started at the Gay 90s, though they may not know how or by whom.

Gay 90's menu from 1972

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Courtesy of Jerry Farmer

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Washingtonians, at least those in the Olympia area, have gained a similar fondness for cashews. The area’s pizza places have followed Wilson’s lead and put the Gay 90s special on the menu. In areas not touched by Wilson’s influence, though, cashew pizza remains unheard of.

“It’s super cool that something as simple as cashews on pizza can bring a community together. It’s exactly what my grandpa would have wanted,” Hemphill says. “Dave wasn’t self-centered. He didn’t think of himself as an inventor of cashew pizza. He just wanted to feed people and make them happy.”