Pizza Thief, the hottest new pizza spot in the recently anointed best pizza city in America, started when two long-time friends decided to quit their day jobs and open a business together. The Portland, Oregon newcomer focuses on slices (and pies) both traditional and regional ingredient-driven, and features an adjoining bar (Bandit Bar) with cocktails, as well as Italian natural wines and local beers and cider.
Darby Aldaco is a baker and pizza maker who worked for Nancy Silverton and others in Los Angeles until he received a call from his former roommate Tony Pasquale, who had decamped to Portland and worked as an executive at Adidas, which has its U.S. headquarters in the city.
That call led to the formation of the partnership that launched Pizza Thief and Bandit Bar. La Cucina Italiana caught up with Aldaco last week, just two months into the new venture, to find out more about the slices—and the chocolate chip cookies and fruit-filled hand pies he serves for dessert. Here’s an edited, condensed version of the interview.
How did you and Tony decide to partner and start Pizza Thief and Bandit Bar?
We were roommates in around 2006 in LA. That's how I met Tony. He always wanted to open a bar. It was kind of his thing. And more recently he'd been in corporate life with Adidas up in Portland. When their corporate offices moved over to Montgomery Park, he saw this space for lease and called me up. He knew I just left a position at a bakery. I was opening up Triple Beam pizzeria and he said I should come up here and open a spot with him. So I said, Okay, let's see how this job goes. And I got a little burned out on that job. It was a lot of work. And that's what made me realize I should just be doing my own gig. It was like the fourth place I'd opened up for someone else. I figured, This is the time to do my own thing.
Do you have a connection to Italian or Italian-American food?
That would be Tony, Tony's Italian. His parents are from Italy. I'm Mexican, actually.
Cutting the slices at Pizza Thief.
So how did you get into pizza?
That's been my thing since I was a kid. Pizza is probably everybody’s favorite food but definitely mine.
There’s been a lot of talk about Portland’s pizza scene. As someone who baked and made dough and pizza in Los Angeles, how do you rate the pizza in Portland compared to LA?
Pizza here is better than LA. Tony's lived here for 10 years and I’ve been coming to visit for that long. For the last three or four years (as we were working on what became Pizza Thief), all we did every trip was eat pizza. So I've pretty much eaten at every single pizza place in town. The pizza scene here is so great. Better than LA or San Francisco for that matter.
As a baker, are you able to discern what they're doing with the dough? I mean, is that what's exciting in Portland?
There are some geeks here who are really into the dough process. There are your for-profit places and then there are your passion places, and the guys who are really into the dough, and making some beautiful doughs, those are the passionate people. But then there are also some really big profit people like Baby Doll's, which is one of my favorite pizza places here. I feel like LA, it's a massive city with very few choices of good pizza. There's a lot of mediocre pizza.
In LA, you were working at Nancy Silverton’s Triple Beam after being a baker. I read that you learned how to make pizza from an Italian consultant there. Is that true?
His name is Cesare. He used to work for Roscioli and he was a head baker. He was Canadian, actually. And Nancy Silverton and that group hired him to consult on the pizza dough for Triple Beam. So he came in and I worked with him for a month and a half, just learning how to make the dough.
Can you talk about the call you got from Tony that led you to form this partnership with him?
He called me up. He said he found the space. And I said yeah, let's do this. So we started the process. I was working at Triple Beam. I think in the fall of 2018. I thought I was gonna start traveling up here [to Portland] but then there were delays with the space and the lease. So I have good friends who run Bub and Grandma's bread in LA; they're pretty huge. They actually do all of Mozza's bread and pretty much everyone in LA. They also do pizza dough. I needed a gig to fill time before I came up here. So I took a manager role at Bub and Grandma’s and started doing all the pizza dough for Mozza, doing flatbreads, and stuff for the farmers’ market. That’s where I started testing out ingredients and toppings that I want to use for the pizza here. So it was a paid job where I actually got to test out my product, which is nice. I got to continue my daily training there as well and learned about working with sourdough.
Tell us more about the process for creating the dough you use at Pizza Thief.
I really was intrigued by the process for the Roman-style dough that we were making at Triple Beam but it was just a straight-up King Arthur white flour, with commercial yeast. I was wondering how you could bring in whole grains and then also use natural leavening like sourdough starter instead of commercial yeast, or even incorporate a pre-ferment to give it a little more flavor, more depth. So I started working on that on the side. While I was at Bub and Grandma's, they had deck ovens, so I could bring my dough and test it out there. We would eat pizza for family meal, and that's how I started working on it.
You liked the sourdough?
Yes, but I went full circle though. I went all the way back and decided sourdough is too complicated. Can't be done. I don't want to do it. And that's when Tony got pissed at me and said, “What do you mean? The dough's perfect. Stop. Stop playing with it.” That's the dough, the final dough we stuck with that had whole grains and was also naturally leavened, so it's 100 percent sourdough.
Focaccia from Pizza Thief.
Pizza Bandit serves gluten-free slices and pies too. Why?
Everybody started telling me I had to have a gluten-free option up here. We put so much energy into our dough and I didn't want to just slap out some quick, you know, cheesy, crappy-tasting gluten-free pizza just to have the option. We made a lot of different mixes and then found Caputo flour. Their gluten-free flour pretty much has every element that we were mixing on our own. We were combining 20 different ingredients to make our own mix. And they have it all in one mix. Only thing was there's zero flavor. So we brought in cornflour to the mix. Then we baked it in a pan. Let's say it is almost like a Pizza Hut thickness.
So were people right in insisting that you carry gluten-free pizza?
Yeah, definitely. We've sold a lot of them.
How has it been adapting to Portland after living in Los Angeles for so long?
I've had issues with the seasons. In California, I feel like you have so much, especially in SoCal. I know when everything is in season. Here it's just all over the place. I feel like everything's behind a few months from California. So I had to adjust to that.
So it hasn’t all been easy?
I definitely had a hard time with fruit because we do hand pies and I felt like I missed most of stone fruit season. Right now there's a little pocket, a little window of peaches, and I'm starting to find as much as I can. And I'm just waiting for apple season.
Darby Aldaco uses sourdough for the flavor-packed pies at Pizza Thief.
There are great berries out there, no?
Yes. I've been combining a lot of berries. I opened up with rhubarb, which is everywhere here. We had raspberries and now we've moved into the blackberries, which are beautiful right now. And the peaches are perfect right now. It’s just having to wait. I'd see all my friends' Instagram posts from LA and I’d get excited. I hit the market and then like nothing tastes good.
Pizza Thief gets described as New York-style but that’s more about the shop than the actual pizza, right?
It's New York-style in the sense that it's 18-inch pies and we have a slice shop. Like we wanted to have everything available in slices. But it's sourdough and it has whole grain in it. So I don't feel it's anything like a New York-style pizza.
Aldaco, a trained baker, insisted on have cookies on the menu at Pizza Thief.
Besides pizza and hand pies, what else are you making there?
We sell focaccias—three different flavors right now. We sell it by the slice, just big squares of it. We make cookies and hand pies pretty much every day as well. My background is more pastry so I wanted to have a really good cookie on there and a nice hand pie.
What do you have to say about Bandit Bar?
It’s a full cocktail bar. Another thing is, we're big beer drinkers, and we have a pretty intense tap list here for Portland. We've worked with a lot of the main players and got some really nice beers on tap.
What about the atmosphere?
It's kind of a darker scene in there. It's a separate room. It's a little more high-end and more classy. Whereas the pizzeria is very bright and poppy, I guess you could say, very family-friendly with outdoor seating. The bar has a sleeker, darker kind of feel.
The door at Pizza Thief, featuring the pizza-eating raccoon logo.
Last but not least: How’d you come up with the name and branding for Pizza Thief?
We both sent in our ideas for logos. In LA, I have a whole family of raccoons that live on my roof. So I sent a lot of images of raccoons drinking beer with a pizza. Tony sent some more modern graphics. And we had a guy who kind of combined the two and came up with the raccoon with the triangle pizza hanging from his mouth. The name came from both of us. In high school, we both realized that we had stolen pizzas. And I got in trouble. We had that as our background, so we went with Pizza Thief. But we thought the raccoon would bring a little cuteness to the whole name. And that's how it all came to be.