When Laura Meyer won the World Pizza Championship for pan pizza in Parma, Italy, the Italian judges called her the male word for champion. Despite her first-place victory, she was the only winner who didn’t get a trophy that day. Hers was mailed a year later.
“They basically refused to acknowledge that a woman had won,” she said, recently recalling the snub. She was the first woman to win — and the first American. That was 2013.
“Women have always been part of pizza, but it’s very macho. It has a macho problem, like most of the job world,” she said from Tony’s, the prestigious pizza parlor in San Francisco where she is owner Tony Gemignani’s right hand and runs its International School of Pizza. “Guys stare at my chest. They think I don’t see. Guess what? I see. My very first day of work, a coworker just watched me do my job like I was a show, entertainment, an ooh-la-la toy. So many people think I could only be as high up as I am because I’m Tony’s wife. I’m not his wife. I’m his talent.”
Broadly and frequently, male chauvinism is baked into pizza at every step: from the presumption that pizza delivery people are men to the dearth of female pizza-maker statues. “Pizza making is a profession where men tell you that you belong in a kitchen, but not as a career,” said Meyer. “They celebrate grandma slices but not the actual grandmas.”
She is trying to change that.
Meyer is a star in a recent surge of prominent female pizzaioli across the country: Sarah Minnick at Lovely’s Fifty-Fifty in Portland, Ore.; septuagenarian Norma Knepp in Pennsylvania Amish Country; Nancy Silverton at Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles; Audrey Kelly of Audrey Jane’s Pizza Garage in Boulder, Colo.; and this year’s best chef in the Midwest, according to the James Beard Foundation: Ann Kim, a pizza maker in Minneapolis.
“Women can make progress in pizza that is harder in the macho restaurant world,” said Kim, the Minneapolis pizza maker. “I love that because that world can be limiting. It has finite goals of money and awards. I prefer the infinite reach of intention and purpose. The most-popular item on my menu is a Korean barbecue pizza that, for some people, is their first taste of Korean food. It’s all the things we say we want food to be.”
In Male-Dominated Pizza Circles, Women Are Grabbing A Bigger Slice Of The Pie
Photo: Bruce Bisping/Star Tribune via Getty Images
Caption: Ann Kim, owner of Hello Pizza in Edina, holds a Sicilian pan pie and a Hello Rita pizza.
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