Dick’s Pizza

The Corner Slice and What It Means in Portland

There is a particular ritual to the New York-style pizza counter that has little to do with occasion and everything to do with repetition. You show up, you order by the slice or you order a whole pie, and the transaction is governed by a logic that predates tasting menus and chef bios. Dick's Pizza, on SE 13th Avenue in Portland's Sellwood-Moreland neighborhood, operates inside that tradition. The address is residential in character, the kind of block where a pizza spot becomes a neighborhood fixture by virtue of consistency rather than spectacle.

Portland's pizza conversation has historically centered on the wood-fired, Neapolitan-adjacent work being done by places like Nostrana and the long-fermented, high-heat approach championed at Ken's Artisan Pizza. Both represent a school of serious pizza-making that draws on Italian regional tradition. New York-style sits in a different register: the crust is thinner and more pliable, the cheese pull is a feature rather than a detail, and the measure of success is whether the slice holds its shape when folded lengthwise on the walk out the door. Dick's operates in that tradition, in a city that has largely oriented its pizza identity around the wood-fire camp.

The Ritual of the Slice

The dining ritual around New York-style pizza is one of the most democratized in American food culture. It does not ask much of the diner in terms of pacing or protocol, but it rewards those who understand what they are eating. A properly made New York slice has a specific structural logic: a thin, slightly chewy crust that crisps at the edge, a sauce that reads as tomato rather than sweetness, and a cheese layer that stretches rather than tears. The fold test is not theater; it is a functional indicator of whether the dough hydration and bake temperature have been calibrated correctly.

At Dick's, the address on SE 13th puts it in a part of Portland that functions differently from the dense inner eastside blocks where lines form for ticketed dinners at places like Langbaan or where the broader ambitions of Portland's dining scene, represented by kitchens such as Berlu and Kann, play out across multi-course formats. Sellwood is quieter, more residential, and the pizza counter there fills a role that those restaurants do not: the uncomplicated regular meal, eaten in the neighborhood rather than traveled to.

That geographic and conceptual positioning matters. In cities with serious pizza cultures, the neighborhood slice shop and the destination pizzeria occupy separate categories and are evaluated differently. The former is judged on consistency, value, and proximity. The latter is judged on technique, sourcing, and the degree to which it advances or honors a tradition. Dick's is in the first category, which is not a lesser designation; it is simply a different one, with different success criteria.

Where New York-Style Sits in the Portland Pizza Spectrum

Portland has produced credible entries in several pizza styles. The Neapolitan-influenced tier is the most developed, with wood-fired ovens and carefully sourced flour and tomatoes defining the category. New York-style occupies a smaller niche in the local conversation, partly because the format is so associated with its origin city that transplanting it always invites comparison to the source. The style depends on high-gluten flour, long fermentation, and a deck oven that can sustain consistent high heat across a full service; those technical requirements are less forgiving than they appear.

For context on how specialized pizza-making reads at the highest register, consider the distance between a neighborhood slice counter and what is happening at Michelin-starred or James Beard-recognized kitchens. The French Laundry in Napa (see our guide), Alinea in Chicago, or Le Bernardin in New York City occupy a tier defined by a different set of ambitions entirely. That gap is not a criticism of the neighborhood slice counter, it simply clarifies what the format is and what it is not. Pizza at this level is a craft exercise in consistency, not an evolving tasting menu.

The same principle applies internationally. The distance from a Sellwood pizza counter to the dining room at Alain Ducasse at Louis XV in Monte Carlo or 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana in Hong Kong is not just geographic; it maps onto entirely different frameworks for what a meal is expected to deliver. Holding both in mind is useful for any serious eater trying to calibrate their expectations across categories.

Planning Your Visit

Dick's Pizza sits at 7738 SE 13th Avenue, in the Sellwood-Moreland neighborhood on Portland's southeast side. The area is accessible by car and by Portland's transit network, though Sellwood is among the less transit-dense parts of the inner southeast. For visitors building a broader Portland itinerary, it makes sense to pair a trip here with time in the surrounding neighborhood rather than treating it as a standalone destination from the central city. Walk-in is the standard format for New York-style pizza counters of this type, though it is worth confirming current operating policy. For broader West Coast comparison across formats, Lazy Bear in San Francisco and Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg represent the tasting-menu end of the Pacific Coast dining spectrum, a useful counterpoint when mapping what different meal formats ask of the diner.