ABOUT · CULTURAL STANDARDS
How We Write About Celebrations
Our public cultural sensitivity standards before our first basket ships.
1 · Our Standard
A 5-tier framework, in plain language.
OyPizza touches food, holidays, and humor across many cultures. Not all touches are the same — writing about a celebration we live every year is different from writing about one we don't. So we sort everything we publish into five tiers.
T1 · Lived. Holidays, foods, and humor the founder grew up with. We write these in first person — Hanukkah, Pesach, Shabbat, Yiddish jokes, the Russian-Jewish-American immigrant lens. We can be irreverent here because it's ours to be irreverent about.
T2 · Adjacent. Cultures we live alongside in NYC and have direct relationships with — friends, family, neighbors, makers we work with. We write about these with care and we name our partners. We do not speak for the community; we speak from the friendship.
T3 · Researched. Cultures we genuinely admire but do not live. We write factually, cite sources, and never put humor on the holiday itself. We may sell the food — we don't joke about the celebration.
T4 · Partnered. Cultures where we don't write the story at all. The maker writes it. We publish their voice with their name on it. The OyPizza voice steps back; the partner's voice leads.
T5 · We Don't. Sacred contexts, mourning rituals, and holidays where casual brand voice has no place. We do not represent these. Not partnered, not researched — not at all.
2 · What This Looks Like at Launch
Eight launch stories, sorted by tier.
At the May 28, 2026 launch we publish eight short stories about the foods in the first basket. Here is how each one is written:
Sufganiyot · T1. First-person. Hanukkah memory. Voice: ours.
Halva · T1/T2. First-person on the eating; named partner on the making.
Babka · T1. First-person. Bakery memory. Voice: ours.
Mooncake · T4. Partnered. Written by the maker. We publish.
Panettone · T3. Researched. Factual. No humor on the holiday itself.
Baklava · T2. Adjacent. Named neighborhood partner; story credits them by name.
Gulab Jamun · T4. Partnered. Maker's voice. We publish.
Hutzpa Sauce · T1. First-person. Founder's recipe. Voice: ours, fully.
3 · Voice Rules
Three things we don't do. Three things we do.
We don't joke about a holiday from a culture that isn't ours. We can sell the food. We can love it. We can't be the one cracking the joke about how someone else celebrates.
We don't use a culture's sacred symbols as decorative branding. Mooncake is a food. The Mid-Autumn moon imagery belongs to Mid-Autumn — it doesn't become an OyPizza graphic.
We don't fake a relationship we don't have. If we haven't worked with a maker yet, we say "coming soon" — we don't dress up a stock photo as a partnership.
We do credit makers by name on every T2/T4 story.
We do publish corrections openly when we get something wrong.
We do let our brand voice be Jewish — that's the founder's voice, that's the wink. The voice wraps the catalog. The catalog stays multicultural.
4 · Corrections
If we got it wrong, tell us.
We are going to get things wrong. The honest move is to fix them in public, not quietly.
Email corrections@oypizza.com with what we got wrong and how you'd like it addressed. We respond within 7 days. Substantive corrections get noted on the page itself with a date — not silently re-edited and forgotten.
Speed of correction matters more than speed of defense. We will choose the correction.
5 · Why This Matters
A standard you can hold us to.
Multicultural celebration food is a wonderful idea and a fragile one. Done well, it's a table everyone gets a chair at. Done badly, it's somebody's tradition turned into a punchline by somebody else. We wrote our rules down before we shipped a single basket so the line is visible — to us, to our partners, and to the people we want to do this with.
Last updated April 27, 2026
READ ABOUT WHY WE EXIST →