Editor’s note: This week, we continue our countdown of Portland’s best new restaurants of 2022, leading to our Restaurant of the Year announcement on Friday. At No. 2: Cafe Olli, Portland’s best new bakery and pizzeria.
The doors don’t open until 9 a.m., but Cafe Olli is already abuzz behind its big windows set back from Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Inside, employees are chopping vegetables, stoking fires, baking bread and arranging wine bottles. A glass case up front holds glistening danishes topped with poached pear and pistachio, airy morning buns coated in fine sugar and flaky pasteis de nata — the famed Portuguese egg custard tarts.
Lots of new Portland restaurants have opened as “all-day cafes,” a trendy turn of phrase hinting at an ambitious aim: to revive restaurants’ role as an essential third place. Few have realized that goal as completely as Cafe Olli, which opens six days a week, including 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday, plus brunch on weekends.
HERE IS OREGON: HereisOregon.com | Instagram | YouTube | Facebook | Twitter | TikTok
No, you don’t get an award just for staying open. But Cafe Olli isn’t just a place to gather, it’s Portland’s best new bakery by day, and the city’s best new pizzeria at night. That means you can arrive early for coffee and a pastel de nata; drop by at lunchtime for a roast kohlrabi sandwich on a seeded baguette; or make a date night of the restaurant’s good pastas, great pizza or polenta topped with sizzling pork roasted to tenderness in the big brick oven once belonging to Ned Ludd.
If you remember that restaurant, walking into Cafe Olli will be a shock. Gone are the luddite tchotchkes and old pots and pans. In their place, plain white walls, a perfect canvas for the pizza, a standout even in this pizza-mad town. These super-thin, super-crisp pies are topped with Italian sausage, ricotta and wild mushrooms or the one every table around you seems to be ordering — a pomodoro smeared with bright tomato sauce and razor-thin garlic, to which you are practically required to add the house-made stracciatella.
In February, we called that pomodoro pie “the single most impressive pizza in Portland right now.” I’ll go a step further here. If Cafe Olli isn’t a top five Portland pizzeria already, it will be soon.
I’ve been to Cafe Olli on busy nights, when the dining room is lit by candles and soft lights wrapped in white paper globes, people huddle outside to wait for a table and the oven gets backs up with orders for pizza and pork. But it can be quiet in the morning, with people working on lap tops or reading Elena Ferrante novels as chef and co-owner Taylor Manning (Ava Gene’s) tells a customer about the bagel pop-up that takes over the back space on Mondays, and his plans to buy 50 bagels for a Tuesday sandwich special. And take note: Pizza service starts at noon, meaning you can drop by for a late lunch or early dinner at 1 or 4 p.m. and avoid the crowds entirely.
On a recent visit, the morning was slow, but the pace began picking up around 11 a.m., as tidy little sandwiches emerged from the back on boards. OK Omens sommelier Brent Braun stopped by to pour wines from his Post Familiar wine label. David Sigal, co-owner of Gabbiano’s — another of our favorite new restaurants of 2022 — walked in to pick up bread for his restaurant’s antipasto bruschetta. “I dream about this place more than I actually eat here,” a gray-haired woman next to me told her friend.
After spending five hours — not even half of the all-day cafe’s day, but long enough to read two chapters in an overdue library book, I left to go pick up my kids from school, taking home a loaf of bread, a farro salad and an oven-blistered pizza topped with wild mushrooms, ricotta and a hint of taleggio cheese funk for dinner.
There might be as many things to love at Cafe Olli as there are hours in the day. The pastries, from co-owner Siobhan Speirits and former Coquine pastry chef Liz Clements; the breakfast sandwich, with its outrageously good sausage patty and green sambal-esque hot sauce; the bread (the bread!); the sugar-dusted bomboloni that my friend Lyndsay was disappointed to learn is only served at weekend brunch; the salads and roast vegetable sandwiches; the pizzas with their tangy sourdough; the blood orange spritzes; the chocolate cake.
Did we mention the peppermint-chocolate cookies?
No?
Good.
Best to keep some things to ourselves.
What to order: A pastel de nata in the morning and a pomodoro pie (with stracciatella) at night.
Details: Cafe Olli is open for lunch Tuesday to Friday, dinner Tuesday to Saturday and brunch on weekends at 3925 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 503-206-8604 cafeolli.com
Read more: Portland’s best new restaurants of 2022
— Michael Russell; mrussell@oregonian.com
Our journalism needs your support. Please become a subscriber today at OregonLive.com/subscribe