By Rick Hynum
John Arena likes to think of himself as “an ordinary pizza guy.” The pizza community nationwide—make that worldwide—knows better.
For all his humility and self-deprecation, the co-founder of Metro Pizza in Las Vegas and Truly Pizza in Dana Point, California, is, in fact, a seminal figure in the pizza community and one of its greatest success stories. Throughout his decades-long career, Arena has mentored countless operators and chefs. He’s a master pizzaiolo, a member of the World Pizza Champions and a dough wizard who knows the ins and outs of virtually every style. He’s both a teacher (he led a course on the pizzeria business for years at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas) and a lifelong student of the pizza craft—because you don’t get to be as good as Arena without a learner’s curious, hungry mind.
He’s also a man with Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects movement and causes tremors, stiffness and slowness. For a boxer and an athlete who trained 40-plus years in the martial arts as well as a pizza chef who relies on the dexterity of his hands, the diagnosis, which Arena received about 10 years ago, could have been soul-crushing. It certainly is for most folks.
But everyone who knows him will tell you: John Arena isn’t like most folks.
Case in point: The John Arena Foundation, established last year in Las Vegas by the World Pizza Champions (WPC). The brainchild of WPC founder Tony Gemignani, Arena’s close friend and fellow pizza legend, the foundation aims to coax individuals with Parkinson’s off the couch and into action, with an emphasis on “creating and providing empowering culinary experiences and activities for people living with Parkinson’s disease and other neurological conditions that affect movement.”
It’s exactly what you’d expect from Arena—take a challenge, stretch and spin it like dough, top it off with love, hope and joy, and light a warming, life-affirming fire.
“Let’s face it,” Arena said. “As pizza makers, that’s what we do with our whole lives. We take something that maybe isn’t top quality and turn it into something good, something that people can benefit from. I see it as being part of the pizza ethos.”

Keeping On Keeping On
It would be inaccurate to say Parkinson’s hasn’t slowed Arena down—at least physically. He readily admits that it has. Then again, he noted, “I’m 70 years old. That would have slowed me down too. So that’s the way I look at it, you know? Yeah, I’ve slowed down. I’m a little stiff, I’m a little achy. Who isn’t at 70 years old?”
“So, to me, it’s just another thing,” Arena added. “Everybody’s got something, right? Does it affect your pizza-making ability? It definitely affects mine. I always prided myself on being the fastest guy on the line. If I was in the building, I wanted to be the guy who was making pizzas. And about four or five years ago, I started to realize that I was not helping as much as I thought I was. And that was a hard, hard realization, because my whole life has been about being a pizza guy. I had to come to terms with that and realize I couldn’t do it at the level I wanted to do it at anymore.
“But, for anybody that’s facing any kind of challenge like that, I think it’s more important to think about what you can do, not what you can’t do. ‘I can’t do this, but maybe I can do something else that’s also useful.’ In my case, maybe that something else is to serve as an example of somebody who just keeps going [with Parkinson’s] and to demonstrate in the real world what ‘keeping on keeping on’ can do for you in terms of dealing with the disease.”
Arena, of course, has always made himself useful in many ways, beyond making pies in the kitchen. (Just scroll up and re-read paragraph 2.) Moreover, Parkinson’s hasn’t slowed him down as a businessman. He and his Metro Pizza partners will open a spinoff concept—the first Metro Pizza Sliceteria—this year. Arena also joined with Metro Pizza Managing Partner Chris Decker, James Beard Award nominee Michael Vakneen, and hospitality veteran Donna Baldwin to launch the highly acclaimed Truly Pizza in June 2023.
50 Top Pizza named Truly Pizza one of the best pizzerias in the U.S. in 2024. And business there, Arena said, is “going gangbusters….It’s just incredible. The sales volume is off the charts. The public response has been amazing. It’s the busiest pizzeria I’ve ever been involved with.”
Meanwhile, Arena and Gemignani announced the John Arena Foundation at PizzaCon in Philadelphia last November. To provide the leadership, Anna Crucitt, co-owner of Mercurio’s in Pittsburgh, stepped up as a liaison between the foundation and the World Pizza Champions.
Crucitt and Arena are close, and her grandfather, who died when she was a child, had Parkinson’s, too. “I saw the not-so-great side of it, from what I can remember,” Crucitt said. “And it was so interesting to me that John, who’s been diagnosed for 10 years, still seems so mobile and high-functioning and capable. For the two or three people that I knew who had Parkinson’s, that was not the case. So I thought, he’s on to something when it comes to moving forward, keeping your body and your mind moving.”

Pizza and Parkinson’s Classes
And if a person with Parkinson’s is looking for a challenge that’s both physical and mental—and personally fulfilling—making pizza fits the bill. “We think [the foundation] is a really good opportunity for us to teach ‘Pizza and Parkinson’s classes’ in our communities,” said Crucitt, who leads her own pizza classes at Mercurio’s. “We want to teach Parkinson’s patients a new skill, using culinary as a way to learn something new while using their hands. I thought that would be a really good fit. And that’s absolutely what John was thinking as well.”
The long-term goal is to help people with Parkinson’s nationwide discover their own inner pizzaiolo or pizzaiola while educating them about the condition—and, most importantly, proving they can live joyful and productive lives with it. To host local classes, the John Arena Foundation has developed its own one-of-a-kind pizza-making space at the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas. There, Parkinson’s patients can engage in hands-on learning and creativity in a vibrant, supportive environment where they’ll acquire new skills and truly feel empowered.
The foundation’s first “Lunch and Learn” class took place there on January 29, as more than a dozen patients got an introduction to the craft from Arena, Decker and Vakneen—a roster of instructors that many aspiring chefs would pay top dollar to learn from. Members of the World Pizza Champions joined the class virtually, along with 50 to 60 other participants with Parkinson’s who tuned in via Zoom.
Arena later shared photos of the inaugural class on his Instagram account (@johnnypizzaguy), writing, “No doubt my Mom smiled in heaven on her birthday as we shared our craft and got people moving and learning.”

‘Get Off the Couch and Get Moving’
Arena knew virtually nothing about Parkinson’s when he first got the diagnosis. He’d never even met anyone with the disease, although nearly 10 million people live with it worldwide and that number grows every year.
Where are all these people? Arena wondered.
“I asked my doctor, and he said, ‘Well, that’s the thing. You don’t see them because they tend to not go out. They lose their self-confidence. They’re afraid, they’re embarrassed and self-conscious.’ I said, ‘Well, you’re going to see me out there because my creditors demand that I keep going to work. So I’m going to be everywhere.’ My take on it was, if you stay hidden, if you don’t go out, if you’re not contributing [to society] and staying active, it reinforces the belief in other people with the diagnosis that they’re alone. But if you’re out there and you’re visible, maybe you can make something valuable out of it. Maybe people will look at you and say, ‘Well, you were able to do all these things, and so can I.’”
Which brings us back to Arena’s unflagging humility. “My value has always been that I’m the most ordinary person in the world,” he asserts. “I’m the most ordinary pizza maker. I have no special skills, no special talent. I’m an example that any idiot could be a pizza maker. You see the superstars of pizza, like Tony Gemignani and Laura Meyer. And you think, ‘Well, yeah, of course, it’s because they’re special.’ But I can still go out there and accomplish things. And I’m just like all the other regular pizza guys out there. So if an ordinary pizza maker can do this, if an ordinary Parkinson’s patient can get out there and still lead an active life, well, then, so can you, buddy. So get off the couch and get moving.”
Crucitt thinks Arena is pretty special, too, as a human being and as a pizzeria operator. She also sees him as a driving force in the artisan-pizza movement that has transformed the industry in recent years.
“There’s something about his presence,” she said. “I just admire and respect him so much. He has been so vital to the pizza industry as a whole. He has encouraged the sharing of information and knowledge in the industry. That’s new, and he was doing it a decade ago. And if that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have the level of pizza that we have today….John really did that, and I don’t think he would ever take credit for it.”
The John Arena Foundation is just the latest addition to Arena’s ever-growing legacy, but its impact could be equally far-reaching. “He wants people to know that Parkinson’s is not a death sentence,” Crucitt said. “You can live your life a little differently but still keep living for something and keep active, keep following your purpose. And I hope that resonates with people who are diagnosed [with Parkinson’s].”
