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Since opening in 2011, the Southeast Stark Street bar and takeout spot Baby Doll Pizza has earned itself a loyal following for one of Portland’s better interpretations of thin-crusted New York-style pie. Now it’s finally getting a second location as it takes over the kitchen at Old Town Brewing on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard at Sumner Street.
Baby Doll has also been an important part of Portland’s recent pizza renaissance both for its consistent quality and for the fact that it’s accessible, especially compared with its lauded neighbor Ken’s Artisan Pizza around the corner. Lines and long waits are a rarity, and you can order slices and hang out with a cheap Rainier—a big draw in a city where fancy, high-priced pizza has become the norm.
“I just think that there is such a huge following for Baby Doll, and it’s only been at that one location. We get a lot of requests for people wanting it all around Portland, and we just never expanded,” says Adam Milne, who owns both Old Town and Baby Doll. “Frankly, some breweries approached me about trying to put Baby Doll in their brewery.”
Milne acquired Baby Doll in 2021, taking an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it approach to the Stark location beyond keeping it stocked with Old Town’s beer. Even though both of Old Town’s brewpubs also serve pizza—a doughier style than Baby Doll’s—the idea to cross-pollinate didn’t start fermenting until they collaborated in 2023 to make Old Baby, a crushable low-ABV lager modeled on the mass-produced cheap beer favored by many of Baby Doll’s patrons. The beer and its can art featuring a bearded hipster baby proved a hit, and over time the idea of a more collaborative restaurant space caught on.
“I just started asking the crew and, like a lot of people, were like, we love this idea, we really want to do it, but if we’re going to do it, we have to do it right,” Milne says.
The neighborhood dive bar atmosphere at Baby Doll is a big draw that can’t be replicated in the brewpub setting of Old Town, but Milne’s focus at the second location is getting the pizza quality right. To do this successfully and win over the Baby Doll die-hards, Milne, Baby Doll general manager Jon Sallas, and the rest of his team brought in the exact same oven to Old Town despite the fact that the brewery already had its own pizza oven. The team has been testing to get it consistent, and they are confident they have nailed it, from the dough itself to homemade ingredients like mozzarella and sausage made in the commissary kitchen.
Milne says people can expect the same menu at both locations: “They didn’t want to half-ass it and just have certain items.”
For the Baby Doll team, the expansion is as much a response to years of Portlanders begging for another location as it is a logical marketing move at a time when the brewpubs and taprooms around town are facing headwinds amid a sagging beer market. The arrangement is aimed to preserve the best parts of each business while hopefully giving Old Town’s Northeast location a little boost in traffic. It also follows a trend of breweries teaming up with food carts, restaurants and pop-ups for cross-promotional appeal: Matt’s BBQ and Pizza Thief with Great Notion, Astral and Duality, and Von Ebert and HarBQ, to name a few.
Milne has followed this trend but insists this is something different. Customers can expect the ambience of Old Town to stay the same along with its brewing operations, and as of now, there are no plans to switch Old Town’s namesake restaurant in downtown Portland to a third Baby Doll location.
“People were concerned that [we would give] the impression it’s a pop-up,” he says. “It’s not a pop-up. I would almost call it a kitchen takeover. I think it’s just making sure that it’s natural and not trying too hard.”
TRY IT: Baby Doll Pizza at Old Town Brewing, 5201 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 503-200-5988, otbrewing.com. 4–9 pm Sunday–Thursday, 3–9 pm Friday–Saturday.