Lovely Fifty Fifty

We never buy pizza, let alone go to one of Portland's awesome pizza joints and actually pay for pizza. Why? Because I am married to hands down the best pizza maker around. Mike can look at the size of pepperoni or meats a pizza joint uses and decide whether or not to get that particular meat or not. Over the years he has perfected the topping ratio/combo and it would take a team of wild horses to convince him to hand over hard earned money for something he can do better than most. Well that day has finally arrived when Mike actually craved something warm like pizza for dinner. So on our bikes we were and headed down to the Lovely Fifty Fifty for a pizza dinner. 

The owners of the Lovely Fifty Fifty owned wonderful Lovely Hula Hands, which they closed and opened up Lovely Fifty Fifty Pizza up the street. While they remained true to their local farmers, seasonal ingredients theory and many of the appetizers looking like mini-recreations of their Lovely Hula Hand days, the Lovely Fifty Fifty also kept many of the cute kitchy things we loved about their first restaurant, such as the mismatched Goodwill plates and decor.

Their pizza only come in 12-inch pies or the size of a typical dinner plate, so we decided to order an appetizer and 2 pizzas.  The starter of fried eggplant salad was rich and we devoured it, probably more because we were starving, but it was a nice start before the heavy carb loading started. We never eat pizza with mozzarella and ordered two without. The chanterelle mushroom, sweet corn and tartufo and the new potatoes, roasted garlic and coppa. The two pizzas were over the top pungent due the freshness of the local ingredients and dynamo combos, nothing subtle about either of these pies. We quickly tired of the spongy wood oven baked pizza crust, although not a burnt edge in sight. We were just hoping for crisp, crunchy pizza and the Lovely Fifty Fifty's was spongy and we ended leaving the crusts on our plates. It was good pizza, just not as great as we had hoped from the long lines and great food from the previous restaurant. But that only gives us reason now to keep on searching for that great pizza restaurant, similar to our hunt for decent Thai food. And there's lots of options, this is Portland afterall.