Rice crispy treat donut

Inside Pizza Grace, Where Dessert Gets the Same Respect as Dough

By Eric Barton | Dec. 21, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Most restaurants treat dessert like an optional ending, one last sugary bribe to earn your praise. At Pizza Grace in Birmingham, co-owner Geri-Martha O’Hara puts enjoys challenging that concept.

O’Hara’s career has been built in places where standards are non-negotiable, and where “good enough” is a synonym for “start over.” Pizza Grace recently earned a Bib Gourmand distinction from the inaugural Michelin Guide American South, after she and her husband, Ryan O’Hara, assumed ownership and debuted a reimagined space and menu. Her role is not to create an optional sweet ending to a meal. Her role is to make the final dish hitting the table feel as intentional as the beginning.

Ryan and Geri-Martha O'Hara

O’Hara grew up in North Alabama, in a small town, where food was not an aesthetic; it was something you made with whoever was in the kitchen. Her oldest sister, Audra, loved to bake, and the two of them spent weekends making the kind of desserts that do not occur to most kids, like baklava and homemade pies. She went to a small Catholic school with the same 20 kids, and she remembers the comfort of a community that repeats itself until it becomes yours.

That steadiness at school mattered, because her family life broke early. “My parents divorced when I was five, so that is challenging for any kid.” She says she coped “through a tight-knit community and close family friendships,” many of which are still in her life now, which feels less like sentimentality than a clue to how she thinks hospitality should work: people come back because they feel appreciated.

Granita

After getting a bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship at the University of Alabama in 2007, she started climbing in pastry, eventually becoming executive pastry chef at Dodiyo’s in Homewood. She frames that period as her first real leadership education, and she does not romanticize it. “I learned that you have to say ‘yes' sometimes, even when you don’t feel qualified, and figure it out as you go.” She also credits the late George Sarris for showing her what relentless effort looks like in practice, not on a motivational poster.

Pistachio tiramisu

Geri-Martha O'Hara Pizza Grace Birmingham Alabama Popsicles

Chocolate popsicles

In 2010, she moved to New York City and worked under pastry heavyweights including Johnny Iuzzini, Dominique Ansel, and Michael Laskonis. The biggest shift to working in those kitchens wasn’t a single technique but an environment that treated perfection as a baseline. “Their coolers were filled with the best of the best ingredients from around the world, and the culture was built on excellence in every aspect.”

She returned to Birmingham to work as pastry chef at Bottega, where she absorbed Frank Stitt’s and Dolester Miles’s insistence on restraint and ingredient-first cooking. That kitchen is also where in 2010 she met Ryan O’Hara, then a line cook; they started dating two years later. Eventually, the two of them wanted something that felt like theirs, so they began with a driveway pop-up, making artisanal ice cream for friends and neighbors and feeling, as she puts it, “an incredible sense of excitement,” and gratitude for how quickly the community showed up.

Dark chocolate mousse

That driveway became Big Spoon Creamery in 2017, and then additional locations in Homewood and Huntsville. In 2025, it led to Pizza Grace, where O’Hara’s desserts now have the same job as the sourdough pies: take something familiar, don’t overcomplicate it, and make the ingredients do the work. “Much of my approach as a pastry chef is expounding on classic and familiar ideas and highlighting the best ingredients available.”

German chocolate cake.

Chocolate cake

Working with your spouse is its own kind of kitchen pressure test, and she describes it plainly: “The best part is getting to see him every day, even when our work schedules are crazy,” and “The worst part is that it is difficult to turn off work at home and just be a husband and wife.” So they do what serious operators do. They keep iterating, keep raising the bar, and, in her words, keep “evolving, being curious, pushing the envelope, and making both of them the best version possible.”

Because at Pizza Grace, dessert is not a curtain call—it is the point where O’Hara proves every course is equally important.