Story by Rick Hynum | Photos by Rory Doyle
Just two-and-a-half years ago, Marisol Doyle was a pizza-making unknown who took a gamble that might have seemed a little, well, crazy: opening a Neapolitan-style pizzeria deep in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.
It could have been the premise of a bad TV sitcom. She was born in Mexico, her husband and partner, Rory, hails from Maine, the pizza style is distinctively Italian, and we’re talking about small-town Mississippi here. But it turned out to be not so crazy after all. Today, the Doyles own one of the most acclaimed pizzerias on the planet—literally.
That’s Leña in Cleveland, Mississippi, a small college town where many locals had never even heard of Neapolitan pizza back in early 2023. Now they can’t get enough of it. And with Leña recently debuting at No. 38 in the U.S. on the Italian guide 50 Top Pizza, Marisol’s culinary prowess is verging on viral status.
Related: How Leña Brought Neapolitan Pizza to the Small-Town South
It’s an underdog’s journey that should inspire every small-town pizzeria owner. But the unassuming Doyles rarely get a chance to pat themselves on the back. Their restaurant keeps getting busier and busier, and lately they’ve been spending what little free time they have jetting back and forth to Italy and New York to collect multiple national and international awards. (Yes, there are more.)
Fortunately, you can’t let fame and acclaim—and partying with the pizza world’s elite—go to your head when there’s so much dough to slap out, so many scrumptious pies and bagels to fire in the wood-burning oven, and lines are stretching out the door on a hot, sweaty summer’s day in the Delta—because, by golly, those folks want in.
“Once we come back to Mississippi,” Rory told PMQ Pizza, “we’re in a little bubble. There are people that are hungry and want to eat, so we have to get back to work and feed them.”
Marisol agreed. “I just retreat and go into work mode,” she said. “I try not to think about it too much because there’s still a lot of work to do.”
Racking Up Awards
Like we said, the Doyles are unassuming folks, although they’ve got a lot to brag about these days. In addition to the 50 Top Pizza ranking, Marisol also received that organization’s One to Watch award for 2025. Rory, meanwhile, is a freelance photographer who just won the first-ever James Beard Award for Narrative Photography, thanks to his coverage of a restaurant combatting food insecurity in Rolling Fork, Mississippi.
But, first, let’s tally up those pizza community honors: It started in June 2024 when The New York Times proclaimed Leña as one of the 22 best pizzerias in the U.S. That’s a great big “wow” in itself. Then, a few months later—September 30, 2024, to be exact—The Best Pizza Awards, a global project by Molini Pizzuti out of Milan, Italy, ranked Leña No. 83 in the world, placing Marisol alongside luminaries ranging from Italian legends Francesco Martucci, Franco Pepe and Gabriele Bonci to the USA’s Tony Gemignani, Dan Richer and Giorgia Caporuscio.
For this year, the Best Pizza Awards moved its ceremony up a few months to June 25, and, behold, there was Leña again, this time at No. 77. Then came the cherry on top: 50 Top Pizza, that is—basically the Academy Awards of the pizza world, presented on July 1 in New York City. And making your debut at No. 38 on that list, along with the “One to Watch” award, is nothing to sneeze at.
After all the previous accolades, you might think the 50 Top Pizza recognition wouldn’t have surprised the Doyles. You’d be wrong.
“They sent an email,” Marisol recalled. “I think I found out in late March, but they tell you to keep it a secret until the awards day. At first I thought it was maybe a scam email, but, yeah, it was real. So it just kind of came out of the blue.”
“It was very surreal to be there [for the awards ceremony in New York] and to have Rory there to cheer me on,” Marisol added. “It still hasn’t really sunk in, to have this pizzeria in a small town in Mississippi recognized…I’m incredibly honored and happy and over the moon.”
Related: Read our 2023 Q&A with Marisol and Rory Doyle
Mississippi Meets Mexico Meets Naples
PMQ Pizza first featured Leña on the November 2023 cover. At that time, they’d only been in business for a few months, but the talent and skill already shone through. The Doyles had taken a five-day course at Naples’ Scuola di Pizzaiolo in 2020, and Marisol returned in December 2022 for a more structured and intensive course with the AVPN. Already well-versed in restaurant management from previous jobs, she proved to be a natural with dough, too, and they opened Leña in April 2023, with a menu that reflects Marisol’s eclectic influences—a little bit Mexico, a little bit Mississippi, a lot of Naples. She even dishes up a taste of NYC with her signature bagels on Sunday mornings.
Every week brings a new pizza special, like the recent Farmers Market Pie boasting heirloom tomatoes, mozzarella, stracciatella, Parmesan and a housemade basil pesto, and the Sonoran 3.0, featuring refried beans, mozz, shredded tinga chicken marinated in a tomato chipotle sauce, and a house chipotle crema.
We could go on and on. The Mexican Street Corn, the Blanca Soppressata, the Potato Bacon Blanca, the Eggplant Parmesan, the Chicken Spinach Artichoke—every seven days Marisol plates a new artisanal delight, seldom repeating herself. And Rory, who runs the front of house, captures the culinary magic with his camera for social media.
Still, this is a pizzeria tucked away amongst soybean fields and corn acreage in the Deep South. Such restaurants rarely win global fame. But The New York Times piece last year changed that, directing foodies to more out-of-the-way pizza spots in addition to the usual big-city institutions—and transforming business for Leña in the process.
“We knew that article was coming out, but we didn’t know we were going to be featured in a list [of the country’s best pizzerias],” Marisol said. That morning her phone exploded with calls and texts, not to mention messages on Facebook and Instagram. “I was just thinking, ‘Oh, this is gonna change the restaurant. I hope we’re ready.’ For the first few weeks, it was just very busy, but we were able to handle it because of where we are—people have to travel really far to get here.”
The hectic pace continued, even through January and February 2025, which were usually slow months for Leña. “Then we got the messages from Best Pizza Awards and 50 Top Pizza in March,” Marisol added. “So we were trying to plan for our trips, like, can we go to Milan again? And we just made a decision to close for the weekend and make it a trip and a celebration. Rory had just been nominated for the James Beard Award too. We also won Outstanding New Business from Main Street in Mississippi. It was just a whole month of back-to-back awards. We went to Milan for the Best Pizza Awards, then to New York for 50 Top Pizza.”
For the 50 Top Pizza ranking, they already knew they’d made the cut, but exactly how high they were on the list remained a mystery. Making their first appearance on the list at No. 38 “was a shock,” Marisol said.
“We thought maybe we’d be tied for 50,” Rory recounted. “So we’re there at the ceremony and just incredibly honored to be in the room. And then they’re counting down and getting into the 30s. But they also give out different themed awards to break up the flow of the countdown [and build suspense]. Then they called out Leña for the One to Watch award. That was completely unexpected. It was really amazing, and it also feels like there’s a little bit of extra pressure to keep it going.”
Between the 50 Top Pizza and Best Pizza Awards ceremonies, the Doyles keep finding themselves hobnobbing with pizza royalty. “We’ve seen Franco Pepe now a few times,” Marisol said, “and Rory makes fun of me because I always want to say hello to him. We try to introduce ourselves to them, and I always make it a point to say that I’m from a small town in Mississippi. Sometimes they’re shocked, like, ‘What? Mississippi? What’s going on there?’ Dan Richer took some time to talk to us and gave us advice. We’ve said hello to Tony Gemignani, and he always says congratulations and good luck. It’s pretty cool to see them relaxed, not working, and just talking about pizza and nerding out about dough.”
“When we were in New York, we went to a couple of pizzerias too, and met Tommy Ardito from Brooklyn DOP,” Marisol continued. “He was really, really generous with his time. Giorgia Caporuscio [of Don Antonio] sat down and talked to us. She’s so nice, and she was cheering us on. I’ve found they’re very open to giving advice because they want people to succeed.”
Rory adds, “It’s still kind of hard to make sense of it—sharing a room and an awards platform with these people. It’s pretty nice.”
Focus on the Community
When the Doyles go traveling to pick up their awards, Leña’s fans have to dine elsewhere until they get back—not unlike Una Pizza Napoletana, Mangieri’s celebrated shop in New York (and No. 1 again on 50 Top Pizza’s USA list). But Marisol and Rory will be the first to say Leña is a team effort, crediting the hard work of their eight fulltime and part-time employees.
“When you make a list like that, and then another list, and then another, I find it motivating,” Rory said. “It’s a reflection of the work that the team has put in. When a list comes out, we meet with the team, and we say, ‘Look, you guys did this. We were acknowledged because of what we’re doing here together. And it’s not the time to take our foot off the gas. We don’t know who’s coming in the door tomorrow, so let’s make sure that our service tomorrow is better than today.’ That’s the approach we’ve taken every time one of these great pieces of news has come in, and our staff has handled it perfectly.”
Accolades aside, the Doyles aren’t looking to branch out to other towns or to franchise the Leña brand. They plan to dance with the date that brung ‘em to the party: the people of Cleveland. And that’s their advice for other pizzeria owners, too.
“The most important thing to us was always our focus on the community,” Marisol said. “Focus on the food that we’re bringing to the community we love. Focus on how to make the best pizza we can offer with really good quality ingredients and good customer service. Focus on creating a good experience for our community.”
As Rory noted, they train team members to “kill our customers with kindness. That’s something that we stress over and over. Also, from the very beginning, we wanted to make sure our staff knows that we are grateful for them. None of this happens without them. We try to treat them better than other employers—not just in the restaurant industry, but in general. Follow the golden rule. Treat people the way you want to be treated.”
And while you’re at it, the Doyles said, don’t worry about getting on anyone’s best-pizzeria list. Just keep doing what you do well, do it honorably, and get better and better at it. “It’s probably fair to say that if you’re focused on making one of these lists, your intentions are wrong to begin with,” Rory pointed out.
“We never even thought about getting on a list or that kind of recognition,” Marisol added. “Never in a million years. It was not on our radar. We are completely humbled and grateful for it, but it was not part of our goal.”
Rick Hynum is PMQ’s editor in chief.
