If a vintage movie theater collided with Cheers, it might look a lot like Ananas Pizzeria, a new spot across the street from Town Hall that arose from fond and grimy memories of the old Primo Pizza Parlor.

The Blazers play on TVs tucked beneath an ornate coved ceiling that feels too low to require this many columns. The red lighting is ruinous for illuminating influencers’ videos, but makes every beer order or serving of caesar salad heaped onto paper plates feel like a pivotal scene in a John LeCarré novel.

The pizza, like the room, feels somewhat airlifted from old New York. Khampaeng Panyathong had never made it before; he landed on pizza purely because this place already had deck ovens. But the chef—who also runs Taurus Ox and Ox Burger with his partner (both the business and life kind), Jenessa Sneva—proved he’s a quick learner. The 16-inch pies at Ananas have tender crusts; single-slice orders make a return visit to the oven and come out with a pleasant crisp.

It’s gratifying to see the next generation of restaurateurs rising—Melissa Miranda has a second spot, the guys behind Lupo and Stevie’s Famous expanded into the Clock-Out Lounge. Panyathong and Sneva (along with a partner or two along the way) now have three casual restaurants. Their first one, Taurus Ox, serves Lao food. Yet somehow it proved a springboard for great burgers and pizza, both dishes that might as well come with a tiny American flag, a Bruce Springsteen poster, and a soundtrack of someone chanting “U-S-A!” (even if one, yes, is technically Italian).

Ananas means "pineapple" in a surprising variety of countries—France, Italy, Iceland, Sweden, much of the Hindi-speaking world. No matter what you call it, pineapple is a volatile subject near pizza. Pineapples may be a symbol of hospitality, but in this context, Panyathong is a gleeful shit-stirrer.

“There’s a culture with food that has to do with a lot of trauma,” he says. “Just do what I say. Don’t talk back, don’t question.” That goes for inside the kitchen, but also the subject of what foods people happen to enjoy. Like, say, pineapple on pizza. And Chicago-style hot dog purists, get ready to clutch your pearls: “If I opened a hot dog shop,” says Panyathong, “it would be called Ketchup Dog.”

Ananas’s signature pie pairs chunks of pineapple with hearty smoked ham, a substantial improvement from sad, floppy Canadian bacon, which is the true villain in the pineapple pizza narrative. Next come pickled jalapeno and a sprinkle of togarashi seasoning. It’s a dramatic performance of a slice that cycles through multiple sensations and demands your attention throughout. I can’t say it made me a convert, but this pineapple pizza earned my long-overdue respect.

The real power player on this menu, though, is the Lao pie. It channels the unapologetic punch inherent to the foods of Laos (and the neighboring Isan region of Thailand), but also slips flawlessly into the gentle cheese and tomato sauce rhythm of pizza. The same ground pork you might find in khao soi, plus lardons, deliver pepperoni and sausage-like pleasures, only dialed to a more complex frequency. Bamboo shoots? On a pizza? Absolutely. A sprinkle of fresh dill delivers that signature herbaciousness.

As an essentially blank canvas, pizza can deliver a world full of riffs, cultural mashups, and topping combinations. Most of the examples out there in the world exist for the thrill of being different, not because mac and cheese or roasted beets or bananas actually improve a pizza experience. Rarely does someone create an ostensibly new pizza topping that works as well as Ananas’s Lao pie. Though it comes as no surprise if you’ve tried the burger that came before it.

Taurus Ox is, unequivocally, a Lao restaurant. But in the weeks before it opened back in 2019, its three business partners, all alums of higher-end kitchens, started messing around with a burger. It began with Panyathong and Sneva’s third partner, Sydney Clark, rifling through the ingredients the kitchen already stocked for its opening menu of thom khem, phad lao, and brisk Lao sausage. The other two helped brainstorm. What eventually emerged through trial and error, was glorious.

Two versions of jaew, the general Thai word for dip, bring in tomato and mayo flavors. Cured pork jowl (the same one on the Lao pizza). Provolone cheese and pickled onions. And a dose of taro stem and cilantro. Together, these elements form both a thoroughly accurate smash burger and a composition of herbaceous Lao flavors the leaves a low rumble of heat in your throat.

It’s one of the best burgers in the city, and it only happened this way because certain ingredients were already in front of the chefs. “I don’t think you can sit down and conceptualize it from scratch,” says Panyathong. And nobody could have predicted it would eventually rule this little space.

Taurus Ox was great from the start, but the burger always had its own velocity. It helped the restaurant survive, grow, even, during the pandemic’s darkest days, when Seattle was busy eating its feelings. Everything doubled, says Panyathong—revenue, number of employees. “Everything but the space.”

In an industry this difficult, mistakes and missteps are inevitable. The mark of a good restaurateur might be knowing how to recover. Panyathong and Sneva (and Joe and Lucy Ye, of Hangry Panda and Kedai Makan) had a short-lived bar called Money Frog on Capitol Hill; its demise gave Taurus Ox the larger space it deserved. And the burger got a place of its own.

In February 2023 the original Taurus Ox on Madison became Ox Burger. As before, it does way more takeout than dine-in. As before, decor consists of unplugged mixers and stacks of boxes. The kitchen is smaller than a standard SUV and open enough for customers to witness dishes being washed and the grill cook bopping his head to “Back That Azz Up.”

And the Lao Burger still possesses those perfect lacy-edged patties and flavors assembled perfectly enough to win over cilantro skeptics. The traditional cheeseburger here is impressive too, balanced with pickled onions and bristling with shredded iceberg lettuce. Fries, cut daily, are so big they could almost pass for jojos.

Clark, who shepherded the original burger, has moved on from the restaurant group; Panyathong and Sneva had a son on the same day Money Frog opened. They’ve weathered a number of curveballs and changes and adjustments that feels both extraordinary and pretty normal for 2024-era Seattle restaurants. Impromptu decisions seem to suit Panyathong; he signed the lease on the Ananas space on a whim. He liked the patio out front. Inside, “It was disgusting,” he remembers. “But I felt a soul.”