Story by Alexandra Mortati | Photos courtesy of Donna Baldwin
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 Donna Baldwin featured in PMQ’s March 2026 issue.
One of Donna Baldwin’s first jobs was working for the legendary John Arena at Metro Pizza (then called New York Pizza) in Las Vegas. In fact, she was one of its first employees. But she never expected to end up in the pizza business—“not in a million years,” she said.
Yet here she is today, co-founder of Truly Pizza, a globally acclaimed two-store company with locations in Dana Point and Laguna Beach, California. Even so, her path back to pizza was a circuitous one.
Metro Pizza was Baldwin’s first taste of the service industry and led her to a career in resort hotel management—and at some famously ritzy properties, too. “I was hired by casino developers Steve and Elaine Wynn to open The Mirage as VIP service manager,” she recalls. The Mirage became the first luxury mega resort casino in the world, with over 3,000 rooms and a reputation for five-star service.
Baldwin was part of a hospitality management team that became the gold standard for its industry. “I was going to school to be an architect and doing side jobs to make money at the same time,” she said. “I interviewed with Mr. Wynn, and I was very young, so when he asked me what made me think I could do the job, I said, ‘I think I’m smart enough to learn, and I like people and to be in service. You need both.’ I got that job, which led to other customer service jobs with Steve and Elaine, and they instilled in me how people should be taken care of and cared for.”
California Dreamin’
That professional focus on hospitality and service fit perfectly with Baldwin’s personal commitment to her community and resulted in her leadership at the foundation that built the Cleveland Clinic in Las Vegas. This experience helped Baldwin to hone her networking and “friend-raising” skills.
But drawn to the southern California lifestyle, she found herself spending more and more time in Laguna Beach. “I moved out here knowing no one but was so welcomed into the community,” she said. Meanwhile, she had maintained her friendship with Arena and kept current on his travels in the pizza world. She would often attend pizza events and met various pizza community luminaries.
As her new life in California evolved, she found that she still had a passion for hospitality. “I started consulting for boutique hotels, and that’s when I met Dayna Lee. Dayna and Ted Burner from Powerstrip Studio are wonderful designers, and one of the caveats I had when planning Truly Pizza was that I got to design the building with them. I called them and said, ‘I can’t think of anyone I’d rather do this with than you two.’”
For Baldwin, developing a harmonious team with common values and goals is one of the most important components of success for Truly Pizza. “We have a really strong team between John, Chris Decker and Mike Vakneen for operations, Dayna and Ted for design, and my niece Emily, who does our social media. My husband is my business partner—we started dating and became business partners at the same time.”
‘Let’s Just Sit Still’
For Baldwin, building relationships in the pizza community at large is important. “What has been the most gratifying has been getting to know all the other pizzerias and pizza makers,” she said. “I’ve never seen a community so open and willing to help each other. It’s competitive but not competitive. It’s a very heartwarming group of people. We all do different things and support each other.”
As the Truly Pizza project moved forward, she said, “I learned so much about the different styles of pizza just by tagging along with John and asking questions. We’re doing something different with our fermentation process….Chris likes to say our squares ‘look like a brick and feel like a feather.’ It’s very digestible, which was super important to me. We have two different styles, and both are very light.”
Her concern with those qualities relates back to Baldwin’s ballet training in childhood. “I was a ballerina, and I would leave school at noon and go to the university to practice. The indoctrination of ‘I shouldn’t eat pasta or this or that’ stuck in my head. Many don’t think of pizza as healthy, but our pizza is light, airy and easy to digest, and we use fresh local ingredients.”
That’s certainly one of the reasons Truly Pizza is so highly acclaimed. 50 Top Pizza last year ranked it at No. 9 in its list of the best pizzerias in the U.S. and at No. 48 worldwide.
But Truly Pizza’s first location was built from the ground up. “It was a BMW Automotive and Upholstery store with a little apartment on top,” Baldwin says. “When John and I started this, we were going to do a slice shop where you go up to the window to order and have limited tables in a garden setting. But the building was designed so beautifully that we wanted to have full table service. We wanted Truly to feel like you stumbled into someone’s back yard on the Amalfi Coast.”
For others out there, Baldwin’s advice is simple: “Go for it. Don’t let fear stop you. If you have the right partners who have respect for one another and enough capital, you should reach for the stars. You know in your gut if people are good, so surround yourself with good people.”
She added, “There’s nothing wrong with saying you don’t know how to do something. We all must take our egos out of it, because something shouldn’t be about our egos; it should be about whether it’s the right decision for all involved.”
“I always go back to what our brand is—LIVLOV: Everything should be done with love in mind,” Baldwin said. “I’m spiritual, and so is John. When we have a hurdle to cross, sometimes we say, ‘Let’s just sit still and see what happens.’ We want to see where it heads so we can plan our next move.”
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.
