Pizzeria Owner Turns Pies Into Stunning Celebrity Portraits

Some artists use paint, pencils or clay as tools to make their art; Domenico Crolla uses cheese and tomato sauce. Crolla is the owner of Bella Pizzeria in Glasgow, Scotland, and has gained notoriety as an international award-winning pizza chef, as well as a pizza artist. Crolla uses a round pizza pie as his canvas, and paints using tomato sauce and cheese to create amazing likenesses of celebrities like Beyoncé, Jay Z, Rihanna, Marilyn Monroe, and President Obama, just to name a few of the dozens of pizza paintings he has created. Crolla does not sell his artwork for consumption, although he has auctioned off these pizzas in the past for charity.

"I created my first designer pizzas, the Mortal Kombat  pizza and [portrait of] Bruce Lee , in October 2011. I wanted to show the Chinese that pizza could be crafted in the same way that they model peppers or carrots into table and plate decorations," Crolla told The Daily Meal. " So I came up with a technique to carve the mozzarella on the pizza to form faces or logos. I suppose I was good at art in school, but my pizza art is the first time I've used art since then."

The Daily Meal has learned that the newest Crolla project will be a portrait of Mark Zuckerberg for his upcoming birthday. Here is a sneak-peak at the pizza portrait:

Crolla said that he would love his creations to be made into posters or a book so that everyone could enjoy them, since pizza does not last that long.

Here are more Crolla creations:

His Holy Cheesiness Pope Francis.

Cheese we can believe in.

Clearly, gentlemen prefer pizza.

Joanna Fantozzi is an Associate Editor with The Daily Meal. Follow her on Twitter @JoannaFantozzi