A New York Pizza Star Will Open Her Own Portland Pizzeria

On Friday nights, Level Beer’s Multnomah Village brewpub, Level 2, feels less like a taproom than a pizza parlor. Big kids slap buttons on pinball machines while the under-4 crowd plays with blocks at communal tables. They sip apple juice while their parents nurse the Portland brewery’s sours and hazy IPAs. At the center of almost every table is a row of pizzas with crusts charred like a Kusama painting—golden butternut squash with crisp pancetta and burrata, pesto-coated rounds with dollops of lemon ricotta, plain and simple pepperoni and cheese. 

The pies in question come from two portable pizza ovens, temporarily parked in the window of the beer bar. Miriam Weiskind, the pizzaiola in charge, sprinkles cheese over a dappled margherita; a 2-year-old in camo pants waddles up to watch. Weiskind greets regulars as they walk in by name—she has regulars, and this isn’t even her joint. But she has a way of charming most of the people she meets. 

Weiskind is the pizzaiola behind Yum’s, the pop-up currently taking over Level 2 on Fridays. People may know her from an earlier iteration of her pop-up, the Za Report, which made its Portland debut in late 2023. At locales like Dame Collective and events across Portland and McMinnville, the pizza slinger has been baking pillowy Sicilian squares and char-speckled Neo Neapolitans ranging from the ultra-traditional to the Nutella-slathered. But before she settled in the Pacific Northwest, Weiskind was making pizzas for her neighbors in her Brooklyn, New York, apartment as an early pandemic passion-project-turned-pop-up. Those pizzas earned her spots on talk shows and cooking shows; they brought her to the pages of The New York Times. 

Soon, she’ll be making them in her own Southeast Portland shop, taking over the former Sparky’s Pizza space near Grand Central Bowling. There, she’ll pull “Italian Big Macs” and jalapeño-topped rounds from a wood-fired oven, paired with cocktails from the minds behind Italian American cult fave Gabbiano’s; they’ll serve as precursors to rainbow cookie cannolis and black-and-whites. When it opens next spring, the pizzeria should feel like a restaurantification of Weiskind, a New York pizza nerd and goofball from Dayton, Ohio. Despite her pseudo-celebrity pizzaiola status, she’s going for a Pacific Northwestern twist on the hometown pizza parlor, complete with dad jokes and Luxardo cherry Shirley Temples.

Fifteen years ago, Weiskind wasn’t spending her time making pizza; she was, however, eating it—between sprints. She used to compete in the New York City Pizza Run, a 5k that includes slice-eating checkpoints for racers. It was there that she learned about Scott’s Pizza Tours, a company that took tourists and pizza geeks to legendary slice shops and Italian restaurants across the boroughs. Founder Scott Wiener was looking for tour guides, and Weiskind was looking for a little dough. “I sat down with him over meatballs and coal-fired pizza at John’s, and he was like, ‘You know what? You know what good pizza is, but you don’t know why,” Weiskind says. “I’m going to teach you that why.’”

For 10 years, while making her living as a graphic designer, Weiskind led pizza tours, learning about the history of, and science behind, good pizza. It wasn’t until 2019, however, that she baked her own. She decided to transition her career away from graphic design and into the world of pizza: corporate pizza tours, pop-ups, and maybe, one day, a restaurant. She started to apply for jobs at a handful of pizzerias, and was able to get an apprenticeship at Paulie Gee’s, a renowned slice shop in Brooklyn that now operates outposts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Ohio. Getting the job at Paulie Gee’s was a big deal to Weiskind, but it was even more exciting for her mother, a colossal fan of owner Paul Giannone, the eponymous Paulie Gee. “When she turned 70, that was the one place she wanted to go eat pizza,” Weiskind says. “So we flew her to New York, and she met him. She thought he was as much of a celebrity as Barbra Streisand.” 

Just as she was getting a handle of the peel, the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York, and Weiskind began to shelter in place. Instead of getting into sourdough starters, she was firing pies “out of just a dingy little oven in my 350-square-foot apartment,” she says. “My mom was like, ‘You know, you’re baking too many. Give them out to people who need a meal.’” So, she did: 20 pies each night, which she passed along to her neighbors for free. Word got out, and she gave away a few more to first responders and unemployed New Yorkers. Soon, it became the Za Report, an Instagram pop-up with a substantial waitlist. Pizzas were donation based; people donated anywhere from $1 to $50. When restaurants could operate again, Weiskind would run to her shift at Paulie Gee’s, run home, and make pizzas. 

Back in Ohio, where Weiskind’s parents still lived, her mother, Hyla, developed COVID. She was put in an induced coma, and Weiskind would spend her breaks at Paulie Gee’s on FaceTime, watching her sleeping mother as a nurse held an iPad in front of her hospital bed. That’s how she said her final goodbye—before returning to her kitchen for another round of pies. “I still had a pop-up out of my apartment, and I still served all 20 customers their pizza,” she says, “because that’s what my mom would want me to do.”

By 2023, Weiskind’s apartment pizza pop-ups had grown far beyond her apartment. The New York Times wrote about her pizza multiple times, including a positive nod from former restaurant critic Pete Wells, who described her Sicilian as “graceful” and “light-footed.” Good Morning America played a segment about her, she appeared on Kelly Clarkson’s NBC talk show, and she competed on the Food Network show Chopped. She funneled the momentum into a cross-country pizza tour, one last educational sabbatical before setting up her own shop. She studied under famed pizzaiolos like Jonathan Goldsmith of Chicago’s Spacca Napoli; John Arena, Chris Decker, and Michael Vakneen of Las Vegas pizzerias Metro Pizza, Truly Pizza, and Double Zero Pie, respectively; and Nino Coniglio of New Jersey’s Coniglio’s. Before the trip, Weiskind says she had the know-how to make great pizza, but studying with the best across the country taught her the true, hands-on craft—particularly how to master a compelling crust. “My mom used to eat all the toppings off her pizza and toss the crust,” she says. “So she inspired me to create the best tasting crust I could.”

That cold-fermented crust relies on a poolish, a sort of quick-and-dirty sourdough starter that ferments ahead of time, before it’s mixed into the dough. The poolish provides the bread-like flavor and structure of a sourdough, without the tang or unwieldiness. The dough takes four days to complete before it hits the oven. When she has her own space, she’ll use a combination gas and wood-fire oven, burning a duo of oak for consistent heat and alder for a faster burn. 

The resulting pizza is somewhat soft, char-speckled by a woodfire, but the toppings are a little avant-garde. Her Italian Big Mac comes with mozzarella, pickles, Provolone, crumbled Italian sausage, sesame seeds; another standby pairs smoked fresh mozzarella and guanciale with dried cherries and Luxardo cherry ricotta. “I celebrate the beauty of pizza that comes from Napoli, but then I’ll do things like the Italian Big Mac, or a s’mores pizza that comes to the table and the marshmallows are on fire,” she says. At the Portland women’s food festival Roux, she served an improvised pistachio spread–Nutella pie topped with raspberries, strawberries, and Pecorino Romano. 

Once Weiskind finished her pizza tour, it was a different pizzaiolo who convinced her to move out to Portland: Bryan Spangler, of Southeast Portland pie destination Apizza Scholls. Her sister already lived here, and other pizza-making mentors urged her to head west. “In New York City, it’s about survival. It’s about baking as many pies as you can,” she says. “In Portland, I have the opportunity to focus on the quality of my product and to grow.”

Weiskind knows she’s entering an already-crowded pizza market, but she’s not concerned; in fact, she’s excited to be a part of Portland’s broader pizza scene. “One of the beautiful things about the pizza community here is that there’s such a wealth of artistry pizza,” she says. “So it’s not about trying to be better than somebody, but rather complementing the community that you’re in. Those differences are what make it so beautiful.”

While she worked on nabbing and fleshing out a space, she began hosting Portland pop-ups as a part of Dame Collective, serving warm, complimentary slices of focaccia ahead of a rotating cast of pies. She eventually moved over to Level Beer, working events at Pizza Capo in McMinnville between pop-ups. 

At her restaurant, set to open at 830 SE Eighth in March or April, she’ll serve a handful of these Neo Neapolitan pies, as well as a limited number of Sicilian squares. She’ll have a few homages to her mother on the menu—mom’s meatballs, all beef because her mother didn’t eat pork—as well as a dessert menu, including a trio of cannolis inspired by Italian rainbow cookies (lemon pistachio, raspberry chocolate chip, and Madagascar vanilla chocolate chip). Rotating desserts will include things like black-and-white cookies, olive oil cakes, and tiramisu. And the restaurant will always have some sort of ice cream, in affogato or ice cream sandwich form. When it comes to drinks (beyond a set of Roy Rogers and Shirley Temples with Luxardo cherries), the team behind Gabbiano’s will handle the cocktail menu. “They’re working with me to put together a program that really celebrates the pizzas on my menu, my personality, the spirit of Ohio and New York combined,” Weiskind says. 

Though she’s 3,000 miles from where she started, Weiskind’s ambitions haven’t stretched so far past slinging pizzas out of her apartment. “I’m a Midwestern girl at heart,” she says. Despite her media buzz, Weiskind says Yum’s (her mom called her “Mary yum-yum”) is meant to be a neighborhood haunt—kids playing with toys while their parents sip cocktails and they all eat off kilter pizzas. And she wants to know those regulars, the same way she knew her initial pizza-testing neighbors back in Brooklyn, the same way she knows the Friday night crowd at Level Beer. “I remember their names,” Weiskind says. “I just want them to feel at home when they walk in.”