New Clovis pizza restaurant offers ‘a different taste’

Sunny Badhan, left, and his sister, Sonia, run the new Chicago’s Pizza With A Twist restaurant at Herndon and Clovis avenues. PHOTO BY DANIEL LEON

A new restaurant with a unique twist on pizza has opened in the Clovis Crossing Shopping Center.

Chicago’s Pizza With A Twist, a Sacramento-based franchise with nearly 30 locations in four states, serves specialty pizzas bursting with flavorful Indian sauces, spices and toppings.

“We have traditional pizza but the name is Chicago’s Pizza With A Twist, so the twist is we also provide Indian-style pizza as well as pasta, wings, breadsticks, calzones, and salads,” said owner Sunny Badhan.

One of the popular signature items on the menu is the Chicken Tikka Masala, a pizza made with an Indian tomato-based sauce known as tikka masala and topped with fresh ingredients like chicken, mozzarella cheese, mushrooms, red onion, bell pepper, garlic, ginger, cilantro, and green chilies.

Other favorites include the chicken curry and butter chicken pizzas made on curry- and butter-based sauces, respectively.

“We create the sauces for each pizza,” said Badhan, who takes pride in the fresh ingredients prepared daily. “For example, if you buy the chicken tikka masala pizza, it’s going to come with freshly made tikka sauce and the chicken is also flavored. If you buy the tandoori pizza, we create the tandoori sauce; if you buy the curry pizza, we have the curry sauce; if you buy the butter pizza, we have the butter sauce, and so on. We don’t use red or white sauce on all the pizzas.”

The Chicken Tikka Masala is one of the popular Indian-style pizzas offered at Chicago’s Pizza With A Twist. PHOTO BY DANIEL LEON

Another trendy pick by local customers is the Chicago’s Favorite, a traditional pie that comes with the typical toppings of a combination pizza.

To enjoy along with its creative food options, the restaurant offers a Coca-Cola Freestyle soda fountain with over 100 drink choices, plus about a dozen beers on tap for the 21 and up.

For Badhan, the newly-opened establishment on Herndon and Clovis avenues complements the first Chicago’s Pizza With A Twist franchise he opened on Kings Canyon Road and Clovis Avenue in 2016.

“A very close friend of mine got into this business,” said Badhan, an owner of multiple businesses in the Fresno-Clovis area. “I was looking into it, but we never talked about it. He got in and I told him I was interested, too. I waited for six months or so just to see how he was doing. He was doing pretty good, so I decided to open one of my own and this is my second.”

The lack of creativity from traditional pizza parlors was another factor that fueled Badhan’s desire to start his own franchise.

“I don’t want to mention any names, but when you go to this pizza place or that pizza place, they only have white and red sauce,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to open my own — to offer a different taste.”

A native of Woodlake, Daniel Leon is a recent graduate of Fresno State with a degree in Mass Communication and Journalism. Daniel served as Sports Editor at The Collegian, Fresno State’s student-run newspaper, prior to joining the Roundup. Got a story idea? Email him at editor@clovisroundup.com