Birmingham, Alabama’s Pizza Grace gaining national buzz for making locals happy
The pepperoni pizza, with its distinctively spicy pepperoni featuring Aleppo pepper, is a runaway best seller at Birmingham's Pizza Grace. (Michael Tomberlin / Alabama News Center)
There’s a certain soulful approach to Pizza Grace.
You’ll taste it in the beautifully handcrafted pizzas and colorful, seasonal salads made with fresh, local ingredients. You’ll notice it in the genuinely friendly interactions with the staff. You’ll feel it in the bustling dining room with its view of the even busier kitchen. There’s a sense of camaraderie — a palpable human connection — that thrives in this place.
The idea of grace at Pizza Grace goes beyond elegance and goodwill and gratitude. Beyond blessings, even, although chef-owner Ryan Westover and his wife, Helene Jones, who founded this restaurant together in January 2022, recognize the blessings.
It’s a way of intentionally moving through the world and treating people (and feeding people) with kindness and respect and understanding.
Pizza Grace, Westover says, “is a chef-driven, very small concept … a very focused concept.” It’s definitely part of the farm-to-table movement. “We really try to source local, work with local farmers and try to just incorporate ingredients that are of high integrity and standards into whatever we do,” he says. “That mentality plays into the culture of the restaurant, also — how we want to treat our staff. We want to make sure they are being provided livable wages, things like that. So, I would say it’s a focused, conscious restaurant, as much as we can be.”
Birmingham’s Pizza Grace finds community of thankful customers from Alabama News Center on Vimeo.
Pizza Grace turned 2 recently, and Westover and Jones, who is the restaurant’s director of operations, have had a great start.
Southern Living named Pizza Grace one of the South’s Best New Restaurants in 2023. Then, there was follow-up recognition when the magazine called Pizza Grace one of the Top 30 Restaurants in Birmingham. The biggest accolade so far came when Pizza Grace was named a semifinalist for the 2023 James Beard Best New Restaurant award.
“I’m especially proud that it’s not ‘Ryan Westover, Chef,’ it’s ‘Pizza Grace,’” he says. “That allows the restaurant to really stand on its own, to have its own identity separate from its ownership. … It allows this business to take on an identity and thrive.”
That’s exactly what has happened.
Pizza Grace is a lovely place of textured brick walls; warm copper light fixtures; a glowing neon sign; a gleaming, stainless kitchen; and blond wood tables in the Mercantile on Morris redevelopment on that historic, cobbled downtown avenue. Customers walk to it from their offices and apartments and lofts nearby. They drive in from the ‘burbs. They travel even farther from other cities and towns across the state, across the Southeast and the country.
From the appetizers and salads to the pizzas, to the original dipping sauces to the desserts, and the local craft beers and curated wines, this is destination dining.
Pizza Grace on Birmingham’s Morris Avenue is highly acclaimed for the quality of its food, but it’s also a people place. (Michael Tomberlin / Alabama News Center)
Westover, who is trained as a pastry chef with a background in both fine dining and corporate pizza, has been a pizza maker since he was 18. “I worked at Domino’s in Canton, Georgia. It was the cool place to work. I started as a delivery driver, and then I made my way inside and pretty much never left. … I pursued much finer dining and high-end pastry and things like that for a decade, and then I came back to pizza later. But I think having those practices of baking and the standards of a fine-dining pastry chef plays super well in whatever you do.”
It certainly plays well here.
The best-selling pepperoni pizza (it outsells everything else two to one) with an abundance of cupped and charred pepperoni is likely unlike any you’ve had before. Part of that is the zing from Aleppo pepper. “I love it,” Westover says. “It’s fabulous. It is much spicier than your typical pepperoni, but it’s not going to burn your mouth. It just has a nice warmth to it, I think, that keeps you coming back and keeps each bite interesting.” It really doesn’t need anything more, but some people like to drizzle it with spicy-hot Eastaboga Bee Company honey.
The vegetable pizza, likewise, is like no other. A blend of meaty Magic City Mushrooms, tasting lightly of lemons, is the star topping here along with fresh kale, garlic confit, chewy provolone and sea salt on a layer of homemade pesto. Herbed breadcrumbs add a lovely bit of extra texture and taste.
Even the simpler pizzas are not so simple. The marinara has a rich, homemade red sauce and garlic confit; the cheese pizza is a blend of Parmesan, Asiago, Romano and provolone with herbed breadcrumbs. Additionally, there’s a homemade meatball pizza and a cheesy, garlicky white pie with ricotta.
The margarita, with marinara, quality mozzarella and fresh basil, indicates a meticulous approach to the food. “We use Crave Brothers moz, which is a zero-carbon-footprint operation out of Wisconsin,” Westover says. “Small batch, really beautifully grass-fed mozzarella. It’s sweet; it’s got that grassy sort of nuttiness to it. We’re just trying to get something that has a little more nuance, a little more care to it and thoughtfulness.”
He’s quick to say, “It’s important to make sure this place is being represented not as any type of traditional pizzeria. I’m not claiming any sort of Neapolitan (background). I’m not trying to convince people that I’m Italian. Pizza is my favorite food. … I don’t see myself as a traditional pizza person. We try to keep everything simple and straightforward. We have one creative pizza that we’ll work in and out. So, that’s where you might see something a little funky or different. But the other five or six pizzas are going to be real straightforward.”
He accomplishes this with a “small and mighty” team of eight; it’s a team he’s proud of, and there’s interesting depth here. Two of his pizza makers come with decades of experience from two different coasts known for their individual approaches to pizza — one is from New York, the other from Los Angeles. All this proficiency comes together nicely in Birmingham.
The seasonal menu right now at Pizza Grace also features starters like homemade garlic bread, sweet pot dumplings with that hot honey, fingerling potatoes (fried in Wagyu beef tallow) with spiced sour cream and a seasonal salad.
The winter salad deserves a mention. It’s a crisp, colorful mix of fresh kale, Brussels sprouts, apples, hazelnuts, bits of citrus, dried cranberries and aged cheddar tossed with a sweet potato and ginger vinaigrette and crackers. Westover’s attitude about the salads, which surprised him with their popularity: “Find the good stuff; don’t do too much to it; it’ll be fine.”
Westover says his approach to ingredients is “local first, domestic second. And then if we can’t get it that way, we’ll find someone who has it from Italy or Europe.”
This means he regularly goes to the local farmers markets — the Market at Pepper Place and Birdsong Farmers Market, specifically — to buy from producers he has come to know personally. “I’ll try to be there every Saturday,” he says. “I like to see what’s looking good, and we’ll build the menu out around that. Our big farmer partners right now are Ireland Farms, BDA Farm, Love Light Farm, lots of the orchards and citrus producers at Pepper Place. We have a lot of access to interesting ingredients.”
The main ingredient, though, for this pastry chef is the beautifully textured and flavorful crust. His three-ingredient, naturally leavened dough — made from a starter that is at least 22 years old — is the basis for this business, and it’s made in small batches each day for the next day.
“We have a bread-first, a baker’s approach to it,” Westover says. “We want to incorporate things that make bread, in my opinion, very good.” Quality flour, a certain technique of mixing and fermentation. A commitment to natural leavening from that starter. “I think having that mentality allows us to focus on the crust, number one, and everything else is second place,” he says with a laugh. “I hate to say that, but it’s ‘bread first’ here.”
When asked about the responsibility of keeping a decades-old starter alive and happy, Westover sort of shrugs. “It just needs basically what people need — food, water, air, shelter — and it just needs those things on a regular basis.”
Which brings us back to the basic idea of grace.
“I would say that, in a sense, the concept of grace is when you get things you didn’t necessarily deserve,” Westover says. “A lot of it is based on how many people had poured into my life … especially when I was younger. A lot of creative types, a lot of chefs, are messy people, especially when they are younger.” The industry is messy, too, he says, adding that he’s grateful for those who have afforded people like him the “space to be independent, to make money, to have a career that’s respectable. … So, that’s sort of the idea of grace. … There is a sense of paying that forward.
“When we talk about the concept of grace, a lot of it is an internal culture and is something we’re trying to live up to. It’s not necessarily something we do right every day, but … when someone has given us so much, it’s our responsibility to push that forward. So that’s the foundation of what we’re trying to do here.”
He adds, “We’re not up here grandstanding or acting like we’re morally superior somehow. We’re not. We’re super-flawed people, and we’re trying to live up to standards that are better than we are, trying to get to a place that allows us growth, allows our team opportunities. We are in a challenging landscape. This is a super-hard industry. A lot of times it would prey on people’s passion in exchange for no money. … We have to try to do better. We’re working toward those things. We’re not there. We’ve got a lot of work to do. But as we grow, those are the kinds of things we’re looking at.”
Westover says, “I think I’m most proud of personal growth right now. I think I’m most proud of my wife and our relationship through this whole thing. It’s been very challenging, but I feel like that relationship has really grown. I’m very proud of that, because I think this industry has ruined many marriages, and in some magical way, it has made ours stronger. And that’s something to be celebrated.”
Pizza Grace
Mercantile on Morris
2212 Morris Ave., Suite 105
Birmingham, Alabama
205-644-5221
Hours
Tuesday: dinner only, 5-9 p.m.
Wednesday through Friday: lunch, 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m.; dinner, 5-9 p.m.
Saturday: noon to 9 p.m. or until sold out (check social media if you are eating late or driving in).
