If you grew up in a small to mid-sized town in the Willamette Valley, you know the experience: A pizza party after the soccer season at Pietro’s or Papa’s. Drinks by the pitcher, a parmesan shaker on every table, a ball pit.
Here was the hypothesis, which really began when a coworker asked, is this a thing? Pizza from chains like Abby’s or Pietro’s or Papa’s or Pizza Caboose in Tigard or Cedici’s in Albany, is something of a genre, a style, “Willamette Valley-style” pizza.
We’re not talking about the award-winning, second-best pizza on the planet pizza you might find in Portland. In this Willamette Valley, Portland is a distant and romantic place reserved for school clothes shopping and traveling Broadway shows. We barely ever think about Portland. It might as well be Seattle. Forget Portland.
This is the rest of the Willamette Valley. The 541 if you will.
So I put the question to Twitter: “If I say ‘Willamette Valley-style pizza,’ what am I talking about?”
By far the most mentions were for Pietro’s.
A pepperoni pizza from Pietro’s Pizza in Milwaukie.Samantha Swindler/ The Oregonian
“Either Pietro’s clones or gourmet toppings on a variety of crusts, whether it’s rustic or thin New York style – and actually have seen some Pietro’s clones with higher end toppings, too!” wrote Kyle Odegard.
“Pietro’s! Gold Coast Pizza!” said Valedez Bravo.
For people with a connection to Corvallis, American Dream Pizza also came up.
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Pietro’s and American Dream are completely different, in terms of the actual pizza. Pietro’s, for the uninitiated, is a not-too-thin-not-too-thick-crust pizza with a crunchy almost cracker-like bottom dusted in cornmeal. The cheese is a mix that includes some cheddar and the toppings are plentiful but nothing fancy. The tomatoes, if used as a topping, are put on top after the pizza comes out of the oven.
Papa’s, Abby’s. Pizza Caboose and Cedici’s are all similar in style. Some people might call this pizza “mediocre at best.”
American Dream, which actually started in Portland, uses freshly-made sourdough crust and the pizza is usually ordered by the slice, you decide what you want on top. Yes, the toppings here are plentiful and the crust isn’t quite thin and isn’t quite thick. Yes, the tomatoes are raw.
And yes, for people who didn’t grow up on American Dream Pizza, which is barely known in Portland but is a Corvallis institution, “mediocre” would be one of the nicer things they might say.
I grew up in Corvallis and I can say without any irony that American Dream is one of my favorite pizza places in the world. And I know people who grew up in the Eugene area that live and die by Papa’s, people from Tigard who will try to convince you the pizza at Pietro’s is good, actually.
So what defines Willamette Valley-style pizza?
It’s the vibes, baby.
Willamette Valley-style pizza is the pizza that brings you back to a participation trophy and a pitcher of Pepsi. It’s the pizza you ate around a big table, family style, with friends and friends’ parents, in between runs around a play area or after coloring in a paper plate.
It’s a feeling that has nothing to do with actual taste.
Case-in-point: I recently took my three-year-old to the Portland American Dream. I have lived in Portland for nearly 15 years and never set foot in the place. It was wild. When you’re in Corvallis, you sit at a booth and start counting the people you know. The Portland outpost, by comparison, was relatively quietl. A person behind the counter brought us some paper and crayons and we drank soda water from the soda machine.
A slice and some ranch (required) at American Dream Pizza in Portland.Lizzy Acker/The Oregonian
The pizza, when it came, was very close to what you’d get in Corvallis. I liked it! Thick, buttery with braided crust, heaping with sausage and hazelnuts. The three-year-old went wild with the parmesan shaker. But, the vibes were off. I wasn’t home (I haven’t lived in Corvallis since 2001).
The next day, we went to Pietro’s in Milwaukie. There’s no play area here but there is an arcade and tickets to be won.
Nona picks out a toy from the Pietro’s Pizza prize counter.Samantha Swindler/ The Oregonian
I didn’t grow up loving Pietro’s and the pizza was … edible but not great. Maybe a step up from a grocery store frozen pizza or maybe not. The three-year-old mainly ate breadsticks.
But the experience! We changed one five-dollar bill into a lot of no-monatery-value Pietro’s coins and I introduced her to skee-ball and the joy of pulling tickets out of a machine. Before too long, we’d changed that $5 into fun, a plastic zebra key chain and a blue raspberry Dum Dum.
When asked if she liked Pietro’s, the three-year-old nodded, too busy making her tongue blue to respond with words.
That’s Willamette Valley-style pizza then. It’s not a regional style. In fact, you could probably find this pizza anywhere in the country. The pizza itself, irrelevant. Instead, it’s a memory. A blue tongue, a pizza party, a special treat. It’s been several days since we went to Pietro’s. No surprise here: the three-year-old wants to go back.
— Lizzy Acker
503-221-8052; lacker@oregonian.com; @lizzzyacker
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