Gray Welch looked inside the refrigerator of his Hinds County home in 2021, scouring over what ingredients he had available to him to make some sample pizzas for his friends to try later that day. As the cool air hit his glasses, he took inventory, seeing pepperoni, shredded cheese, cream cheese, bacon, green onions and Ritz crackers. He’d already recently made a dip using these same ingredients for his friend’s wedding.
“What would it hurt to put it on a pizza?” he thought to himself.
First rolling out his dough, Welch spread a homemade red pizza sauce for his base before sprinkling a house blend of cheese. Next, he added bacon, dispersed dollops of cream cheese around the surface and topped the pie with green onions. To finish off his creation, he crushed up the buttery Ritz crackers and draped them across the pizza before drizzling on some sweet-pepper glaze.
Placing the pizza in a wood oven, Welch watched as the Neopolitan style crust bubbled to a crisp brown-to-black char at the edges to give it a firm, crispy texture and a smoky, slightly sweet calcified taste.
After about 90 seconds, he removed the pizza from the high-heat oven and let it cool before cutting it into eight slices. Taking a bite, he ruminated on the flavors and came away with a somewhat unexpected thought: “It doesn’t taste bad. It’s actually good, really good.”
When he served the sample pizza to those whose palates he trusted to determine what would ultimately join the menu for the pizza pop-up he was planning, they concurred. Dubbed “The Captain,” this combination of flavors is now one of the most popular pizzas sold at Poppy Pies, a local brick-and-mortar pizza joint in the Belhaven district of Jackson, Mississippi.
“As much as I would love to say I got out my calculator (and) perfectly decided the flavor combos that would be super good, (I didn’t),” the Jackson restaurateur told the Mississippi Free Press. “I think it works really well because it was an accident. All the positives about it are that it’s a very southern pizza. It works really well, too.”
Welch started selling his pizzas at Fondren pop-ups before purchasing a wood-fired pizza food truck that he ran for two years before setting up shop inside the Belhaven Town Center on Manship Street. Typically known for its normally available Neapolitan and Detroit style pizzas, as well as the New York-style pies it sells two days out of each week, Poppy Pies recently earned a recognition from the Michelin Guide for its creative pizzas and quality ingredients.
“ We keep it really simple,” Welch said. “And if anything, that might be a complaint that people would have, is that we don’t really do specials. We don’t really change things up. … Ultimately, I lean more towards the philosophy of keeping it really simple, and I think that’s what we do well.”
‘The Turtle in the Race’
Ironically, Gray Welch fell in love with the pizza-making process more than the actual taste. He had worked in fine-dining restaurants and never considered working for a pizzeria, having previously looked down on them. But when COVID hit and work dried up, he needed to find work as he was expecting his first child, Poppy. He learned that Sal & Mookie’s was opening a location in Madison, and having never worked for an establishment that was newly open, he opted to get over his prior pretension and apply.
“Immediately, everything that I thought about food kind of changed a little bit. I was like, ‘This is fun,’” Welch recollected. “Fine-dining is high execution; you’re really trying hard. But I didn’t know that I was missing the actual fun of the foodmaking process. So when I found that, I just kind of gravitated towards it.”
”I feel like when you’re a very driven person and you have a lot of opinions, you got two choices, right?” he added. “You can either shut up and do what other people tell you to do or try to prove your opinions for yourself. And so that’s what I ultimately ended up doing.”
Welch jokingly said it was delusion and stupidity that led him to want to own and operate a pizza restaurant in the first place. He had his friends sample his pizzas before he began selling them at pop-ups in the Fondren and eventually bought a wood-fired pizza food truck that he opened in 2022. He named the business after his daughter, Poppy, stating that it just made sense and had a nice ring to it. If you can find success through pop-ups in a food truck, you can conquer the world, Welch posited.
“That’s really hard because … you have to figure out how to get people to come to you,” he said. “Once you start canceling stuff or getting in touch with people at the last second and backing out, (you can lose business because) those relationships carry food trucks and pop-ups. If people like you, you will stay busy. If people don’t like you, you will not be busy.”
Running the truck involved asking permission to set up at certain locations, traveling around the city, loading up the trailer, unloading it and catering private events. While the work can be fun, the strain can have its toll, Welch said.
One business that Poppy Pies had a close relationship with was Fertile Ground Beer Co., which opened in Jackson in May 2022. The brewery had been looking for food vendors who could sell goods that paired well with its beers. Poppy Pies proved to be a reliable partner. After two-and-a-half years as a food truck, the mobile pizzeria made enough in sales that Welch decided to transition to operating as a brick-and-mortar restaurant in the Belhaven Town Center, right behind Fertile Ground, in 2024.
“I think our path has been smooth and steady,” Welch said. “There’s no huge leaps. There’s no crazy ego thing because that’s a good piece of advice that I received. We have been the turtle in the race—(focusing on) not damaging relationships, (on) doing the same events year after year where people have a very positive association with us. So we opened our restaurant with a nice backlog of goodwill in the community.”
Poppy Pies sells three types of pizzas: Detroit style, Neapolitan style and New York style. The dough for the pizzas takes about three days to prepare, leaving room to correct mistakes given that the weather and water temperature can affect the quality and flavor of the dough.
The Neapolitan pizzas are the brand’s bread and butter, a style that leans more Italian than the traditional American style of pizza. These pies are cooked at a high temperature between 90 seconds and 2 minutes, wherein the pizza crust develops “leopard spots” of sear, which help it fall on the light and airy side.
“Detroit is the exact opposite of that,” Welch explained. “It’s like if you made a really good focaccia as a base, so a lot more bread. It’s got like double the amount of sauce and cheese. Our Neapolitan is a 12-inch pie. Detroit is 8-by-10, but it has way more food in a smaller package.”
The Detroit pizza is baked in a metal pan in which the cheese falls in between the pan and bread and gets really crispy, like a cheese cracker. It’s Gray’s personal favorite of all the pizzas, with its crunchy outside and fluffy, cheesy middle. The restaurant only serves New York style pizza on Tuesday nights and Sundays for capacity reasons.
“It is my dream in the future to be able to do all three styles all week, but based on the oven that I have, we can only bake two of the New York style pizzas at a time,” Welch explained. “This is a much lighter option, where it’s not quite so heavy on toppings. But we really try super hard to have that really good bread that is crisp, nicely cooked.”
‘The Standard’
Poppy Pies kitchen manager Aiden Nelson previously worked with Gray Welch when the latter was an assistant kitchen manager at Sal & Mookie’s in Madison. He always remembered Welch being an amazing leader who was super passionate about his job and made sure every dish that left the kitchen was properly made.
“He really cared that everything that left the kitchen was held up to the establishment’s standards, and even sometimes beyond their own standards and to match his own standards, which were oftentimes higher than what the restaurant required of us,” Nelson told the Mississippi Free Press. “He’s always had a care to make people happy.”
That passion rubbed off on the employees around Welch, including Nelson himself, who spent two years pursuing his associate degree in biology at Holmes Community College before joining the staff at Poppy Pies last year. He’d worked in the restaurant business since he was a teenager, taking on various roles like busser or bartender.
“(I’m here) all because of people like him in the past and bosses like him creating that passion inside of me,” Nelson said. “(Welch) was always very hard on people, not in a negative way at all. He made sure people understood what was expected of them.”
“ I think that I have found a home in Poppy Pies,” he added. “And I do think that I have a serious future here. And I want to thank Gray, and again, all the other people around here that help keep the place running. I wanna thank them for pouring into me.”
Poppy Pies owner Gray Welch said he believes that recipes don’t make a restaurant special; it’s more so about getting the most out of people through great leadership. It’s about accountability, consistency and keeping people honest. There will be days where pizzas may get burnt or someone forgets to put ranch in a customer’s bag, but it’s about correcting those mistakes and showing patrons that they care, he explained.
That standard has helped earn the restaurant its Michelin Guide recognition, which he initially thought was a phishing scam when he saw the subject line in his email inbox. Welch isn’t sure if the recognition is deserved and said he feels a bit of imposter syndrome, but he is gratefully accepting of the honor nonetheless.
“I think the most rewarding part of that is they don’t just come one time,” he said. “They come when it’s slow. They come at lunch. They come at dinner. They come when it’s really busy. It’s very surreal, and I think it helps you figure out what it means and what it doesn’t. I think it ultimately just means we consistently produce excellent food.”
He knows that people will see the association with Michelin and believe that they are going to get a life-changing experience, but that may not be the case. Food is subjective, and while some people may love his pizza, others may not and that’s OK, he said.
“I think what we have proven is that consistently over time we deliver on a certain style of pizza, and we do a good job at that,” Welch concluded.
Poppy Pies is located in the Belhaven Town Center at 800 Manship St., Suite 106, in Jackson, Mississippi. The pizzeria is open on Tuesdays from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. and from Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
