The Most Unique Pizza in Utah: How Bhinda Singh Built Curry Pizza from a Roadside Impulse Buy into a Guy Fieri Favorite

There's a moment, usually somewhere around your third slice of butter chicken pizza, when you stop trying to make sense of what you're eating and just surrender to it. The naan crust crackles under a rich makhani curry — deep and buttery, threaded with ginger and roasted garlic, topped with chunks of tandoori chicken and a snow of mozzarella that pulls apart in long, satisfying strings. You came in skeptical. You're leaving converted. That's the Curry Pizza effect, and it's been winning over Utahns — and eventually Guy Fieri himself — since a spontaneous roadside purchase in one of the most remote towns in the state changed the trajectory of an immigrant family's restaurant legacy forever.

This is curry pizza Utah didn't know it needed. And honestly? Utah should be grateful.

From Punjab to Provo: The Five-Generation Food Story Behind Curry Pizza

Bhinda Singh didn't set out to reinvent pizza. He barely knew how to make it.

Singh's family moved to the U.S. when he was 14 years old and eventually opened India Palace restaurants in Utah — a beloved, longstanding Indian dining institution that built a loyal following in Provo and South Jordan. But Bhinda's own road to the restaurant industry wasn't a straight line. After graduating from high school, he obtained certification as a mechanic and worked on cars for seven years before his father convinced him to join the restaurant industry in 2009. He's fifth-generation food industry, which means cooking runs in his blood whether he initially liked it or not.

The pivot that changed everything happened in 2017, somewhere along State Route 24 in Wayne County. Singh stopped at a pizza place in Bicknell to get a drink when he was traveling through town in his motorhome, and received poor service. Seeing that the restaurant was for sale, he decided to buy the place — and opened it without knowing how to make pizza.

Let that land for a second. The man bought a pizza restaurant without knowing how to make pizza.

When he arrived to start, he noticed the kitchen had no fresh ingredients. "When we walked into the kitchen, there was no flour, no veggies, no meat. It doesn't look like a kitchen to me. Everything was frozen," Singh said. His first customer ordered chicken bacon ranch. His solution? He Googled it.

The curry pizza concept itself came from an almost offhand suggestion. He had Indian restaurants in Provo and South Jordan at the time, and a friend suggested that Singh just "marry" pizza and Indian food.  Then luck, as Singh tells it, intervened again. A regular customer turned out to be a chef trainer for California Kitchen and Boston Pizzas across the West Coast. Singh traveled with him to 36 states to learn about fusion pizza. 

What started as a joke — curry on pizza? — became something nobody in Utah had tasted before. In a fever of experimentation, Singh slathered his new honey curry creation on a naan-inspired pizza crust, dressed it up with mozzarella cheese and popped it in the oven. Once it arrived in its melty, spicy-sweet glory, he knew he had something special. Bicknell — a town of about 300 people — knew it too. They sold 43 honey curry pizzas in one day, the first day it was made. 

The curry pizza idea, as Singh likes to say, was born right there.

The Curry Pizza Experience: 22 Sauces, Naan Crust, and Wings That Will Change Your Life

Walking into a Curry Pizza location — whether it's the original in Bicknell, the West Valley City spot off I-80, or the South Jordan and Lehi outposts — you're hit first with the smell. Slow-roasting curry. Something turmeric-golden and warm. It's not a pizza smell. It's something more interesting.

The fast-casual setup is familiar: a counter, toppings on display, an open oven working at full heat. But instead of marinara and pesto, you're scanning through 22 house-made curry sauces — tikka masala, makhani butter curry, peanut curry, mango korma, honey curry, and more, all made fresh daily. The crust is Bhinda's own creation: a naan/pizza hybrid made with low-gluten flour, which means the dough doesn't need to rise like regular pizza dough, so Curry Pizza can make it fresh every single day. It bakes up thin, crispy, and slightly blistered — more like a flatbread elevated to its highest possible calling.

The butter chicken pizza is the gateway drug and the thing you'll dream about afterward. Made with chicken tikka, mozzarella, onions, roasted garlic, ginger and cilantro on makhani curry, the pizza comes with the cheese on top of the toppings — a holdover from the days when Singh didn't know how to make pizza the traditional way. One recent visitor on TripAdvisor summed it up plainly: "Great butter curry pizza, with chunks of tandoori chicken! So yummy. Pizza crust is thin and crispy, toppings are generous."

The honey curry pizza is the sleeper hit. It's the one that started it all, and it remains one of the most distinctive things you can eat in Utah. Sweet, floral, faintly spiced — totally unlike anything in the state's pizza landscape. Visitors who made the drive to Lehi from out of town described it this way: "The pizza is so unique. We love the honey curry one. The crust is perfectly thin and crisp and the honey adds a great flavor."

And then there are the wings. This is the move that Salt Lake City Weekly correctly identified as underrated genius. The idea of mixing Indian spice blends into traditional chicken wing sauce is extremely clever. You can get common flavors like garlic parmesan and Buffalo, but you're much better off going with the butter curry or the honey curry. Trust that advice completely.

Don't skip the garlic naan sticks either — they're what happen when India Palace's naan bread expertise gets handed over to a pizza kitchen. And if you've never had a mango lassi made fresh in-house, this is your moment.

How a Guy Fieri Feature Confirmed What Utah Already Knew

In 2019, Curry Pizza appeared on Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives — the kind of national validation that most Utah restaurants spend years chasing. For Singh, it felt like confirmation of something he already believed: that the fusion concept he'd accidentally stumbled into had genuine, universal appeal. The Food Network spotlighted how Singh combines classic Indian sauces and toppings with his thin and crispy naan-based pizza dough — a simple description for something that's actually a culmination of generations of cooking knowledge colliding with pure American improvisation.

The accolades kept coming. Curry Pizza earned inclusion on Yelp's Top 100 Restaurants in the U.S. in 2020 and received City Weekly's Best of Utah Award. For a restaurant born in a 321-person town in rural Utah, that's a genuinely remarkable arc.

One traveler who stumbled into the Bicknell location on the way to Capitol Reef captured the surprise and delight that defines the Curry Pizza experience perfectly: "I think of this meal as more of an experience than just a meal. The pizzas were really good and there was something special about eating such a different pizza while looking out at the mountains."

That's it exactly. There's something about the specific combination — Punjabi cooking traditions, an American pizza format, a remote Utah landscape — that makes curry pizza feel like it could only exist here. Like Utah's food scene did something genuinely its own.

Bhinda's Pizza and Utah's Broader Food Conversation

Singh has always been clear that he wants Curry Pizza to be a community institution, not just a restaurant. His goal is to help people who want to work and who have the passion to open a restaurant but are unable due to lack of funds. He intends to keep the business family-owned and pass it through generations. He volunteers both locally and in his home country of India.

The West Valley City location runs a weekly Cars & Curry Thursday event — a gathering that combines Singh's love of cars (those seven years as a certified mechanic didn't disappear) with his food. It's a very Bhinda thing. The man contains multitudes.

With locations now in West Valley City, South Jordan, Lehi, Provo, and the original in Bicknell — plus expansion into Idaho — Singh is building something that belongs to Utah's food identity in a real way. Indian fusion pizza wasn't a category before Curry Pizza. Now it's a destination.

Planning Your Visit to Curry Pizza

Locations:

• West Valley City (Original SLC-area): 2927 S 5600 W, West Valley City, UT 84120 — Open Monday–Saturday, 11am–10pm
• South Jordan: 1086 S Jordan Pkwy, South Jordan, UT 84095
• Lehi: Near Thanksgiving Point — great stop before or after a day at the outlets or THANKSGIVING Point attractions
• Bicknell: 125 N. Highway 24 — the original, perfect for a Capitol Reef road trip stop

What to order: Start with the butter chicken pizza or honey curry pizza. Get the curry wings in honey butter or butter curry — not Buffalo. Add garlic naan sticks. Finish with a fresh mango lassi.

Best time to visit: Weekday lunch at the South Jordan location is quieter. West Valley on Thursday evenings has the Cars & Curry event. The Bicknell location is ideal as a road trip lunch stop on your way to or from Capitol Reef National Park.

Pro tip: The naan crust is made fresh daily — it's noticeably different from frozen-crust competitors and worth noting if you have gluten sensitivities, as the low-gluten flour makes it more digestible for some people.

Bhinda Singh bought a failing pizza restaurant in a town of 300 people without knowing how to make pizza, accidentally invented a fusion cuisine that landed him on national television, and is now feeding families across Utah and Idaho with food rooted in five generations of cooking. Curry pizza Utah didn't exist before him. Now it's hard to imagine Utah's food scene without it.

Go get the honey curry pizza. You'll understand everything once you do.

Find Curry Pizza on Instagram at @currypizzautah or visit currypizzautah.com for updated hours and locations.