Portland Pizza Maven Sarah Minnick Will Appear on the Netflix Series ‘Chef’s Table: Pizza’

Sarah Minnick, the venerated pizzaiola behind North Mississippi’s Lovely’s Fifty Fifty, will appear on Netflix’s next Chef’s Table spinoff season, highlighting pizza chefs from around the world. With this appearance, Minnick will become the first Chef’s Table chef based in Oregon.

Chef’s Table: Pizza, the latest iteration of Netflix’s Emmy-nominated food documentary series, will highlight six chefs in individual episodes, including Rome’s Gabriele Bonci and Kyoto’s Yoshihiro Imai. Minnick will appear as one of the season’s three American chefs, featuring the edible-flower-topped pizzas from Lovely’s Fifty Fifty.

For those unfamiliar, Lovely’s Fifty Fifty opened in 2010, specializing in pizza and ice cream made with seasonal produce. Since then, Minnick has developed a national reputation for her pizzas, in particular the way she uses Oregon-grown fruits, vegetables, and flour for hearty, flavorful pies that change on a week-to-week basis. The Lovely’s Fifty Fifty episode of Chef’s Table: Pizza, directed by Chef’s Table vet Danny O’Malley, will follow Minnick around her life as she visits longstanding suppliers, makes ice cream, and bakes sourdough pies topped with summer produce.

During the two weeks of filming, Minnick visited two Oregon farms — Flying Coyote and the recently sold Ayers Creek Farm — while also trawling a farmers market. “People take for granted [the concept of] ‘local farms, producers, growers,’” Minnick says, “but we do that 100 percent. I really wanted to show that.”

Originally, the Chef’s Table team reached out to Minnick pre-pandemic, though the project was delayed for obvious reasons. When Minnick and O’Malley’s crew filmed last August, the chef ended up being grateful for the timing, which allowed her to use a wide range of visually appealing, late summer produce.

“I needed that part to be easy,” Minnick says. “And just visually, I wasn’t going to fake any ingredients; I just can’t. I said, ‘Don’t come in January! It will not be right.’”

Chef’s Table: Pizza premieres September 7 on Netflix.