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There is no shortage of good pizza in this city. You’ve got paper-thin Neapolitan pies with bubbling, soft crusts, deep dish cornmeal-based comfort, and late-night gooey, delightful slices. But the best thing about pizza is, there’s never enough of it. All this to say, the new cart Belle Époque Pies on Northeast Alberta Street is a welcome addition to the cheese-and-sauce party.
The pizzeria on wheels serves a limited menu of whole pies and slices that fuse Sicilian and Detroit styles. The Broken Margherita slice ($7) is dense and doughy with crisp edges and a thin bit of cheesy crust, delicate as lace, crisped to reveal that umami taste that’s on the edge of sour in the most intoxicating way. The pesto doesn’t take up too much flavor space, and the mozzarella is creamy, not overly salted.
Belle Époque Pies quietly opened last month, but the idea’s been in motion for years—one could even argue since Belle Époque Pies owner Andrés Mungarrieta’s earliest days. “Pizza is my favorite food since I was a kid,” he says.
Mungarrieta grew up in Valencia, Venezuela, surrounded by a large Italian community, and was making his own marinara by age 9. “I was exposed to incredible Italian food that I kind of took for granted until I moved to the States and was like, oh my God, why are the cheeses dead here?” he laughs.
Mungarrieta, now 40, has spent the past 15 years in the U.S., eight of them in Portland, but none of them as a chef. For a decade he worked in tech, primarily user experience and marketing, slowly tinkering with his love of cooking. When the pandemic hit, he took up the trending hobby of baking bread, making a sourdough starter, Norma (“she’s still alive,” he says), eventually expanding to pizza, trying different styles—Neapolitan, New York—and feeding his friends. Though the reviews were rave, the one that really stuck was a fusion of Sicilian- and Detroit-style pizzas: a soft, highly hydrated dough with a crisp cheesy crust. “I feel like Detroit pizza is kind of neo-Sicilian to an extent, the same way New York pizza is Neapolitan in its own way, but that’s kind of what the mix represents,” he says.
The encouragement from friends collided with losing his job in tech, pushing Mungarrieta to try hosting a pop-up at Coq au Vin earlier this year. The event sold out in two hours. “It was like, maybe there’s a path here for me,” he says.
There was. Belle Époque Pies opened with the help of Micro Enterprise Services of Oregon to buy the cart, and Hacienda CDC’s Empresarios program, which “was really critical for me to really understand how to start a food business,” he says. Mungarrieta’s 10-year-old daughter helps with the cart too. He is also part of Latinos en Pizza, a global group dedicated to sharing recipes and sources. (“It’s the most Latino thing, it’s a WhatsApp group—that’s how you know it’s real Latinos,” he says.)
There’s a whiff of Mungarrieta’s tech background at the cart—a sleek design, no paper menu posted beyond the QR code, buzzers to collect your order, branded parchment paper on the to-go plates. But the pizza feels like a homemade, uniquely human effort. Hours are somewhat in flux, currently hovering around 4–8 pm for most of the week. The cart was broken into the weekend of Aug. 17, also putting a bit of a dent in hours. (Mungarrieta is working on launching a GoFundMe to raise money for additional security.)
Bottom line—get over and support a new effort, and get the slices while they’re hot.
EAT: Belle Époque Pies, 2231 NE Alberta St., 786-397-1976, belleepoquepies.pizza. 4–8 pm Wednesday–Thursday, 4–9 pm Friday–Saturday, noon–7 pm Sunday.