Story by Alexandra Mortati | Photos courtesy of Candy Yiu
This article is part of PMQ Pizza’s “12 Women to Watch“ series, in partnership with Women in Pizza and in celebration of Women’s Pizza Month. It’s an expanded version of the profile on Candy Yiu featured in PMQ’s March 2026 issue.
Originally from Hong Kong, Candy Yiu, owner of The Turning Peel in Portland, Oregon, always dreamed of exploring the world. “Hong Kong is a very small city,” she said. “From one end to the other is about a two-hour drive….When we were little, we would joke that we were the frog in the well, but we always dreamed of jumping out of it. I carried in me this desire to always explore and see the world. I wanted to go anywhere I could.”
And Yiu has done exactly that. But now she’s perfectly content in Portland, running one of the prettiest pizza shops you’ve ever seen, a veritable Garden of Eden with pizza, where everyone is welcome and everyone can afford to eat.
After all, Yiu grew up in a traditional Chinese family that “didn’t have a lot of money. We lived in a 100-square-foot apartment as a family of seven. We didn’t even have enough food to eat.”
Education wasn’t emphasized by her parents either. Even so, she loved school. “It was something that I found I could rely on. I always had really inspiring teachers, and they helped me. Usually, the story is that the poor child is gifted, but my story does not go like that. I am not talented or gifted by any means. I have a hard time focusing on reading, even though I love books, so I am really bad at doing exams. I was really lucky because I made it into college in Hong Kong, where only 10% of people get accepted.”
Yiu might be just a tad too modest. As a student, she proved to be quite good at research. After publishing and presenting a paper at a conference in Hawaii—where she was the only Asian woman—she was encouraged to leave Hong Kong to continue her education. “Going to study abroad is very expensive, and no one ever thinks they can do it,” she said. “But I’m a person who believes in dreams. Because trying is free, so what’s the worst case if you fail? You just go back to where you, and you don’t lose anything. I was already at the bottom.”
‘The Universe Is Calling’
Not for long. She ended up at Portland State, graduated, and embarked on a stellar tech career. “When I was in Hong Kong, I dreamed of a job where I could travel around the world, and I found one here. Eight times a year I would travel around developing technologies. I worked for 13 years, and I invented a lot of technologies. But in those 13 years I was also in front of the computer a lot. After 10 years, the technology becomes less exciting. When COVID hit, I started losing the big picture and losing human interaction.”
All that travel took her away from her children, too. After returning from one trip, she recalled, her son didn’t recognize her. “I was crying and crying. So, when my second kid was born, I took a year off in 2019 to spend time with him.”
Of course, 2019 led to 2020—and the pandemic that changed the world. In a classic COVID-19 pivot, she began experimenting with sourdough and bread-making. Then she was introduced to Neapolitan pizza by a friend. “I was like, ‘What is that? It’s delicious!’ I tried to make it at home and ended up buying an Ooni oven. I was like, ‘This is light and airy, but why use yeast when I am making sourdough bread?’ So, I started making sourdough Neapolitan pizza, and people loved it.”
Before long, she was making and selling her pies at the People’s Food Co-Op, with her husband at her side. She kept selling out even as she made more dough. “We had a line! People were smiling and so happy. The connection with so many people and returning customers—I had never experienced that or felt that before. It was one of those things that fell into place.”
Leaving the tech industry for a culinary career was terrifying, she admitted. “In the tech industry, you have a very comfortable paycheck and health insurance, so to say, ‘Let’s quit that and do something else’ was very hard for me. Then, soon after we were in the co-op, I got laid off and I was like, ‘The universe is calling!’ Everybody was like, ‘I’ve never seen someone so happy to be laid off.’ I was not brave enough to quit, and I thought, ‘This is my chance,’ so I bought a little cart and turned it into a pizza truck. I started looking for a location to put my truck, but I’m so glad it didn’t work out because the stars started aligning.”
Fortuitously, Yiu and her husband had also become partners in a restaurant while she was still working in the tech industry. But it had to close for good during the pandemic. “My husband told me, ‘Why don’t you open a pizzeria here?’ I thought it was scarier than coming to the U.S., but it seemed like the universe was telling me to do it. Everything was right in front of me.”
‘A Very Homey Feeling’
That pizzeria became The Turning Peel, and Yiu had a vision for it from the start. “I told my husband, ‘I don’t need to make the best pizza in Portland, I just need to have the best patio!’ We call it The Oasis. We have ice cream parlor chairs and hurricane lamps. It’s covered so the seating can last all year round, but it ends up like a greenhouse. We built so much in The Oasis using our own hands.”
Yiu and her husband proved more than capable of transforming the defunct restaurant into The Turning Peel. “I didn’t know the standard process of making pizza in a restaurant,” she said. “I was afraid that if I went to work in a pizzeria for a few months and then opened my own—it just felt wrong. Even if I told them ahead of time, it didn’t feel right to me. So I decided to come up with my own recipes. I was going to learn my own way. I created a giant table and filled it with all my dough experiments’ data. Our process is not the standard process, and therefore later we couldn’t find machines that worked when we scaled, which is the hard part. The good part is that because we didn’t know anything to begin with, we’ve been able to create something very different.”
As the photos attest, the Turning Peel is a gorgeous space inside and out, teeming with life. Hanging plants loom invitingly over tables laid out with beautiful flowers. But it’s more than just a pretty place to eat. “There’s a lot we do to bring the community together,” Yiu said. “We are inclusive, including families and dogs. We created a dog path to the patio and are A.D.A. accessible. We want to be a really romantic place for people to go for a date night but not have to spend $100…We feel like that is a lot for many people. We want to create a place that’s affordable for everyone. Therefore, we have a range of prices for our pizza.”
Every week, Yiu offers a special pizza. “One was a pumpkin pizza, which we call the Fall Pie. It has a pumpkin puree base and thinly sliced pumpkin. I like to use the regular carving pumpkin. Once you slice it really thin and roast it, it gives you a crunchy texture. We add Italian sausage, sage and fresh mozzarella, and then garnish it with aged Parm and extra virgin olive oil. It’s really delicious.”
One of her all-time favorites is always on the menu: the Pepperoni Jalapeño Hot Honey pizza. “My pepperoni has a really smokey flavor, which, with the jalapeño and hot honey, is really delicious. In our restaurant, we hardly use any sugar. Most ingredients just have salt and pepper to allow you to taste the ingredients. When you eat a Margherita pizza, you taste the basil, you taste the tomatoes and you taste the cheese. When we make our soup, people always ask what the secret is. There is no secret! Our tomato soup is tomato, garlic, and onion. Not even water or stock…I try to make every ingredient shine.”
Despite its aesthetic splendor, Yiu doesn’t think of The Turning Peel as a fine-dining restaurant. “We want to present a very homey feeling. Like going to a friend’s home and it’s beautiful and they use really good ingredients. The menu we put out is smooth in execution. To prep the pizza ingredients, we try to keep it simple, authentic, and we’ve been able to price our pizza reasonably. We are one of the most affordable prices in town, and we still carry quality ingredients.”
‘An Amazing Husband’
Yiu is a shining beacon for women in a male-dominated industry—but she is quick to give credit to her “amazing husband” who backs her up on everything she does. “I am not perfect. But with my husband and I together, we can get any idea as close to perfect as possible. If he doesn’t like an idea, we don’t go for it, and it goes the same for me. We only go for ideas we both like.”
She notes, “Sometimes my ideas are pretty but not practical, and sometimes his ideas are practical but not pretty. A lot of the time I learn from my husband. I identify the things I’m not good at. Men are willing to try more. Even in school, there is a high percentage of women who quit or drop out of computer science. It’s not because they are not as smart as men, it’s just because of their fear. I feel like there are times where, as a woman, I feel not as strong, but I try to see where I can improve that part of me.”
Right now, her biggest challenge is The Turning Peel’s rapid growth. “I’m fortunate the business is growing fast,” she says. “I’m trying to learn how to scale…and build a system that is more systematic. We now have nine employees, and I need to assign tasks to everyone and make sure they make the same Turning Peel pizza. It’s different from when it was just the two of us. My husband works in tech, but he also helps me along the way. I’m not a very good teacher, so he helps me train the staff. I learn things just by touching and feeling them, and even though I have a tech background, he’s like, ‘We need to have things written down and develop a process and a system.’ So, that is our learning curve right now.”
Making a Wish
Every New Year’s Eve, Yiu and her family write down their wishes for the next year on a piece of paper and put them in a jar. “On the next New Year’s Eve, you open it up and see where you’re at,” she said. “My wish (on New Year’s Eve 2024) was to have a team of five people!”
Yiu made that one come true and then some. But adding new Turning Peel locations isn’t on her wish list. “I don’t think I’ll ever open a second place. I don’t think my heart can split that way. If I split, I don’t know how to control quality. I would rather not do that. I don’t want the pizza to be anything that isn’t what my customers came for.”
What she would like, she said, is a waiting area for her pizzeria’s customers. “There are two things I really hate. One: I hate when people come in when we’ve sold out. We sell out a lot of the time, and people think that it’s good business, but I don’t like to disappoint customers when they come all the way and we don’t have a pizza for them. We have been doubling our dough, and we are now at our capacity. I wish I could build more space for proofers, so we don’t have to sell out one day. Two: I don’t like it when people have to wait an hour for a table. If they have to, I want them to have a comfortable place to hang out. I want to be reliable for customers since they support The Turning Peel.”
So what’s her advice to other women eyeing the pizza business? “Follow your heart,” she said. “I feel like anything you do isn’t going to be easy as a woman in many ways. But if you are strong and work hard and follow your heart, you will succeed in one way or another. There are so many opportunities and organizations and resources to help you, and I think that is amazing.”
Alexandra Mortati is the marketing director for Orlando Foods and founder of Women In Pizza, a not-for-profit organization that empowers women in the pizza industry to share their stories, display their talents, inspire innovations, and connect with one another and the world. The article has been edited from the original version that appeared on the Instagram account for Women In Pizza. Click here to learn more about the organization.
