Portland Pizzerias Are Also Some of the Best Ice Cream Shops

Ask any peewee team, any fourth grade class, any 8-year-old “planning” a birthday: When it comes to the social event of the season, it’s the pizza party, that hazy fantasia of tomato sauce–caked mouths and melted sundaes. We all know the pizza party—not the sad office-break-room smattering of congealing cheese and shriveling pepperoni, but the true, soda fountain Sprite–fueled happening. It couldn’t just be pizza. It had to be pizza and ice cream.

That pizza parlor nostalgia was the main thrust behind Pizza Jerk, one of the first Portland pizzerias to draw the gaze of food writers on the national stage. Founder Tommy Habetz—former Bobby Flay disciple, Gotham Tavern alum—knew he had to keep a soft serve machine churning to actualize his East Coast pizzeria fantasy. These days, curlicues of white and green (lime), yellow (banana), and, eerily enough, gray (black raspberry) punctuate dinners of pepperoni-and-pineapple slices and vegan margheritas.

But this is Portland, so even when embracing the iconic duo, things get a little avant-garde. Yes, the ice cream counter at the front of Lovely’s Fifty Fifty always has some sentimental hits like malted milk ball and salted caramel or the fancier-sounding mint stracciatella (read: mint chip). But no Baskin-Robbins I know scoops orange agrumato (a type of citrus-infused olive oil), buckwheat honey with nut toffee, or fig leaf.

In St. Johns, Gracie’s Apizza keeps its cooler stocked with spruce tip nib chip or burnt honey or bay leaf. You may even spot the grown-up maple bacon variant, brown sugar prosciutto.

The whimsy of an ice cream and pizza combo is something of a no-brainer. But the two make sense from a nerdier perspective: To make either pizza or ice cream well, you need to be scrupulous about the ratios, geek out over dairy types (ice cream) or hydration (pizza dough). “When you make wood-fired pizza, there’s a 20-second window where it’s perfect. When you make ice cream, you have a 30-second window when it’s perfectly churned,” says Gracie’s Apizza owner Craig Melillo. “I like paying attention to minute details.”

And both serve as worthy canvases for a chef’s creative whims, a way to more cleanly express their ethos or values in the kitchen. “If it’s ice cream, or if it’s pizza, we’re looking for a place to plug in farm stuff,” Lovely’s owner Sarah Minnick says. “And in that way, it’s very, very versatile.”