Story by Rick Hynum | Photos by Claire Thorington
Most Americans would be proud to have a daughter like Candy Yiu. Born in humble circumstances and raised in a 100-square-foot apartment with four siblings in a Hong Kong skyscraper, she worked and paid her own way through college to earn a Ph.D., landed a plum job at a multinational technology giant (Intel) and accumulated more than 200 patents in wireless technology.
But Yiu’s parents are Chinese, and as their youngest child—and a girl—she might as well have been invisible. Growing up, she slept on the floor while her older brothers and sisters got the bunk beds. Her ultra-traditional mom and dad—who can’t read—thought a college education would be wasted on her. As the years went by, none of her academic or career achievements impressed them, not even the patents covering LTE and 5G cellular services. They never once said they were proud of her.
Then she founded The Turning Peel, one of Portland, Oregon’s most acclaimed pizzerias—a high-volume, 800-square-foot shop that generates $1.5 million a year. It’s a magical, vibrant and verdant world entirely of Yiu’s own creation, where vines thick with juicy grapes hang over your head on the patio and loaves of sourdough bread are yours for the asking, no charge. Here, Yiu has created a small, intimate neo-Neapolitan operation with the feel of a secret garden—and a cheerful, loving, always smiling caretaker who can’t bear to see anyone spend a single dime more than they have to.
The Turning Peel has also transformed Yiu’s relationship with her parents for the better—while elevating Yiu herself to the pantheon of Portland’s pizza making elite.
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A Self-Made Woman
Yiu’s younger days could be straight out of a Dickens novel, if Dickens had lived in Hong Kong. There were times when her siblings had to take turns eating because there wasn’t enough food for everyone on a given day. When Yiu was born, her mom had begun to earn a higher income but not enough to move into a bigger space. And Yiu was yet another mouth to feed.
Make no mistake: Yiu knew her parents loved her. But shaped by traditional expectations about gender, education and birth order, they failed to recognize just how extraordinary their youngest child was.
“I always say it’s a gift to be poor when you’re young,” Yiu says. “I don’t regret one bit of my childhood. If not for that, I wouldn’t be who I am today. What I have—the drive, the willingness to work harder, the anger at being told I wasn’t good enough because I was a girl—it’s hard to teach that to your own kids. I feel like I’m the lucky one.”
Although a self-made success, Yiu gives much of the credit to others—teachers, social workers, professors who believed in her. In high school, she loved math and science, but her grades didn’t reflect her passion. She still managed to get into college, no easy feat in Hong Kong, where nearly 90% of students are weeded out before they’ve even finished high school. She overcame daunting odds and constant money worries to earn her Ph.D. at Portland State University.
Yiu’s hard-fought journey through academia is a longer story, but suffice it to say that when Portland State accepted her, she recalls, “My parents were very upset with me. My mom didn’t even talk to me for three months, but I thought because I’m the youngest, I will just do what I want….I flew to the U.S. with just $200 in my pocket, and the department chair got me a tutoring job for $1,029 a month. After rent, I had just $100 a month for food. But my dream had come true. I was living in the U.S. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I survived.”
And, thanks to her cutting-edge research, she began traveling the world and rubbing shoulders with leaders in the tech sector—a heady experience for someone who’d never left Hong Kong. After earning her Ph.D., Yiu spent 13 years developing cellular network technologies for Intel. The money was coming in at last, and she was still jet-setting around the planet. But when she became a mother, she hated being away from her baby son. She was actually delighted when Intel instituted several rounds of layoffs a few years ago and eventually sent her packing.
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Experiments in Dough Making
By then, Yiu had fallen in love with baking sourdough bread. Next came Neapolitan pizza, which she discovered through a friend. “This was not like anything I’d eaten before,” she recalls. “It’s light and tasty, the mozzarella is stretchy—the basil, the tomatoes, everything going into my mouth told me this was amazing, and I wanted to make it, too.”
Trained as a computer scientist, she set about devising her own experiments with a sourdough starter named Bao Bao, flour and salt, various hydration levels, and a temperature-controlled storage space called the Bao Bao Sanctuary.
“I plotted it all out with this giant table on a clipboard—hydration, water temperature, cooking temperature,” Yiu says. “I experimented with more than 1,000 pounds of dough. I slept on a futon in the basement, and I’d wake up every two hours. I’d measure the height and temperature of the dough and experimented with hydration—you know, 65% to 67%, 68% to 69%, 70% to 71%, 72%. We did a one-hour bulk fermentation, then balled and post-proofed them. Then we’d do two hours of bulk fermentation and post-proof them for a little less time. Then it was three hours, four hours, five hours….I finally settled on a formula that I liked, with 70% hydration, for a crust that’s chewy, crunchy, airy and light. It’s not traditional Neapolitan pizza, which is soft and you cut and eat it with a knife and fork. You can hold up the entire slice with all the toppings and no flop, yet it’s still chewy.”
Yiu’s dough, made with 00 flour, undergoes three days of fermentation. Loaded with fresh ingredients, the final result is so good, readers of The Oregonian named The Turning Peel the best pizzeria in Portland in 2024 and 2026. Eater Portland also named it one of the city’s best for 2026, with food writer Ben Coleman noting, “The sourdough crusts are precisely dialed in for maximum chew with just a hint of fermented tang. The sauce is a particular highlight: bright and almost jammy without overwhelming the classic balance of flavors.”
High-Volume and Affordable
When Yiu and her husband opened The Turning Peel in late summer 2023, she knew exactly what she wanted it to be: esthetically stunning, affordable to just about everyone, high-volume and super efficient. “We didn’t want a fine-dining restaurant with really expensive prices, but we didn’t want a slice shop, either,” Yiu explains. “We wanted to build a place where you can bring a date or celebrate any occasion in a beautiful environment, and we wanted it to be 20% to 30% less expensive than a similar pizzeria. The only way for that to work is to go very high-volume. And we thought, if we can’t do that, it’s OK—we’ll just close down.”
They started out offering lunch service only, and on their first day in business, she recalls, “We sold two pizzas. I was, like, ‘Oh, my god, was this a mistake?’ But every day there were more customers, and soon we were selling 30 or 40 pizzas a day.”
Restricted to a tiny 4’-by-6’ kitchen and baking her pies in two deck ovens instead of a wood-fired oven, Yiu designed her menu with simplicity and fast prep times in mind. “We thought about how we would execute every single dish on the menu with standardized portions of every ingredient measured to the gram,” she says. “We wanted to limit the majority of our dishes to simple chopping and cutting. From stretching the dough to topping, cooking and finishing, we can put out a pizza about every 30 to 60 seconds.”
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Some customers don’t quite get The Turning Peel’s concept, though. The space itself—including its patio, called The Oasis—is so gorgeous, it looks and feels like a fine-dining restaurant. Art and nature intersect here, with antique decor and plant life flourishing in bursts of color. At the entrance, wisteria vines crawl along the porch and up to the roof; you’ll find California lilacs, rosemary and, on the patio, rockrose and boxwood shrubs, star jasmine, Boston ivy slinking around the windows, even a quince tree—plus the aforementioned hanging grapes, which anyone can pluck and eat while waiting for their pizza.
The building itself was originally a craftsman house constructed in the 1950s and spans just 800 square feet. Yiu built out the patio herself and furnished it with antique ice cream parlor chairs and hurricane lamps. “I always said, ‘I don’t want to have the best pizzeria in town. I just want to have the best patio,’” Yiu notes. “It’s open year-round and covered and heated in the winter.”
So when guests step into this arcadian setting, some expect the full-service treatment its beauty seems to promise. What they get instead is QR code ordering right there at the table. Point a smartphone at a table tent, scan the code, place the order, pay with a credit card, and the order goes straight back to the kitchen.
To achieve the high volume she aims for, Yiu needs to keep things moving at a brisk pace. “If you’ve got 80 people spending five minutes on average to place their order, that adds up to 400 minutes,” she says. “No matter how you do it, it’s not going to work. So we decided to use QR codes, but if they’re not tech-savvy, they can order at the counter….Some customers are not happy about it, because they made reservations, and the restaurant looks so pretty that they expect a full dining experience. We do give them that experience, except for the ordering part. We still bring everything to the table.”
Fortunately, disgruntled guests usually learn to appreciate the process for its speed and efficiency, Yiu says. “Most of them have messaged us later and said they started liking the QR code because, once they sit down, they don’t have to wait 15 minutes for the server to come and take their drink order and wait again to place their food order.”
Nothing Goes to Waste
With a team of 12 full-time and part-time employees, The Turning Peel topped $1.5 million in sales last year. And it’s only open 3.5 hours for lunch three days a week (Sunday, Monday and Wednesday) and for dinner 3.5 to 4 hours every day except Tuesday. Customers kept clamoring for delivery, so Yiu reluctantly partnered with Uber Eats. “I really didn’t want to do delivery, because it’s Neapolitan pizza,” she says. “But we did some testing, and it holds up surprisingly well. Now the delivery part of the business is growing.”
Importantly, her dough, once fermentation is complete, has to be used that day. Which is fine with Yiu, because she loathes waste. “Throwing away food is emotionally difficult for me, because growing up in Hong Kong, we never threw food away,” she says. “I was determined to open a restaurant with almost zero food waste.”
Every scrap of leftover dough—if there is any at the end of the day—goes to making what Yiu calls “pizza bread.” And you couldn’t pay Yiu for it if you begged her. “We’ve given away 12,000 loaves since we opened,” she says. “I feel bread is for people to share and to make connections with. In villages, people have shared bread for hundreds of years, and I want to maintain that tradition.”
She doesn’t want her customers to waste food, either. So, for those who tend to leave their crusts on the plate, she developed special crust dips that sell for $1.50 to $2.50: whipped ricotta with either honey and garlic oil, or honey and mixed berry compote, plus hot honey, ranch and other options.
“It’s a Miracle”
The Turning Peel is a restaurant to be proud of. Even Yiu’s parents see that now—especially after they made their first trip to the U.S. last year. “When I was growing up, my dad and I hardly talked, only a few words here and there,” Yiu remembers. “We didn’t even say ‘I love you.’ They never gave me advice. They didn’t understand my work in wireless communications. They couldn’t relate to my life.”
Then they stepped inside The Turning Peel. “They knew what a restaurant is,” Yiu says. “And when they ate here, all of a sudden…now they understand. And they are so proud of me. They can’t stop telling people that I own a pizzeria. My dad is always giving me advice—‘You should do this, you should do that.’ My mom can’t stop talking about it. Now they even ask me for advice.”
And for Yiu, that’s enough. She has no desire to open a second location, although she’s working on expanding her current space. “If I had to close Turning Peel today, it’s already been worth it,” she says. “I have everything I need. I believe there’s a reason for the path that you’re on. It made me who I am. I love The Turning Peel. It’s a miracle that I landed here, and I wouldn’t change a single thing.”
Rick Hynum is PMQ’s editor in chief.
