Birmingham’s renowned Post Office Pies has made another “best of” list. USA Today has listed the Avondale restaurant as one of the top 30 pizzerias in the country.

Earlier this month, 24/7 Wall Street examined the “best” lists on a number of websites including Food & Wine, Eater, and Thrillist, as well as regional websites. The site found a number of restaurants listed repeatedly, and from that number, 24/7 Wall Street used rankings, reviews, and “editorial discretion” to narrow the list down to the 40 best pizza restaurants in the country.

This morning, USA Today published a shorter version of that list, naming 30 restaurants.

Helmed by Birmingham native chef John Hall, Post Office Pies opened in 2014 and is owned by the same management team that runs Saw’s Soul Kitchen. In 2015, a second location of Post Office Pies opened in Tuscaloosa, but closed in 2017.

Hall left Birmingham in 1999 and cooked in kitchens around the South, including later working for chef Frank Stitt. Over the years, Hall built an impressive culinary resume, cooking with Michelin-starred chefs and restaurants, such as Chef Léa Linster in Luxembourg and New York’s Per Se, Gramercy Tavern, and Momofuku Ssam.

After living in New York, Hall returned to Birmingham in 2013. Post Office Pies was inspired by his late-night stints making and delivering pizza out of his New York apartment. Made from fermented dough that takes 12 hours to rise (the same recipe that Hall used in New York), the wood fired pizzas at Post Office Pies are crafted with local ingredients, handmade mozzarella, and cooked in brick ovens.

Since returning to his native Birmingham, Hall has been an ambassador for the city. An evangelist for using local ingredients and teaching the city’s youth about food, he gave celebrity chef Carla Hall a tour of Jones Valley Teaching Farm. Carla Hall described the tour in her 2018 cookbook, “Carla Hall’s Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration,” writing that their conversation reminded her that it’s possible to get the next generation to love vegetables, and inspired her recipe for chunky tomato soup with okra.

Late last year, Carla Hall invited a group of chefs, including John Hall, to the James Beard house in New York to cook their interpretations of dishes inspired by her cookbook.

Hall has long spoken about his plans to open a second restaurant. In February, after some prodding from an audience member at the Southern Foodways Symposium, Hall shed some more light on his future culinary hopes, announcing that he has been working on securing a building for his “new venture.”