April 25th, 2016
Portland, OR
While we were staying in Seattle, we took a quick side trip up to Portland. Our friend Dave kindly leant us his car, and we drove up to see our friends Arron and Amanda, who had recently moved to a house there from New Haven. We got there around mid-afternoon and we were easily able to convince our friends to go for dinner at Apizza Scholls.
With all four of us having spent time in New Haven, we are pretty harsh pizza critics. We decided to order one of the New York Red pizzas, and another one with sausage and peppers. The New York Red was probably our favorite, although the sausage pie was also solid.
Apizza Scholls is said to be the best pizza in Portland, although they do have some limitations on how many toppings you can get on a single pie (3 ingredients, no more than 2 meats). We didn’t have a problem with this. To us, simpler is often better.
The style of this pizza is very similar to what you would find in New York or New Jersey.We’ve seen a few reviews referring to this pizza as “New Haven-style”. Well, sorry everyone, but this is not New Haven style pizza.
The story is that the owner, who was traditionally a bread maker, couldn’t find any pizza that he liked in Portland, so he started Apizza Scholls (originally named Scholls Public House) in 2004. The style of pizza was modeled after the NY greats: Totonno’s, Grimaldi’s, and Patsy’s. All of these NY pizzerias serve coal-fired pizzas, but Apizza Scholls actually bakes their pies in an electric oven. Hey, whatever works! We honestly couldn’t tell the difference.
The sauce on the New York Red was really good, and the crust was amazing. Probably better than the crust at Grimaldi’s or Patsy’s (but maybe not quite as good as Totonno’s). Somehow, they managed to get that awesome char on the crust with an electric oven.
We thought that this was a great first stop in Portland, and we would 100% come back here again. After looking at these photos again, I think we need to plan another trip back to Portland ASAP.
To visit:
Apizza Scholls
4741 SE Hawthorne Blvd
Portland, Oregon 97215
Published by