Finally! A Portland-specific gluten-free food review: The Mississippi Pizza Pub in Portland Oregon is now making gluten-free pizza, and I’m going to say up front that both of us thought that their pizza was OK. They offer this pizza both at the restaurant and in a “take and bake” form. We opted for the take and bake. That’s because we are much too cool for the kind of speed-of-light gentrification and further boutique-izing that the Mississippi area has been going though (ha ha only joking – but really isn’t it an amazing change from just three years ago?)

On their website, the gluten-free page says that you need to call ahead the day before to order their special crust, but the person we talked to said that it was no longer necessary. If you go to their gluten-free page you will see that they are very serious about being gluten-free. For instance, they have put in a whole separate pizza oven just for the gluten-free pizzas. We think that’s awesome.

In addition to pizza, they also have gluten-free beer and other various alcoholic beverages, and live music almost every night of the week. There is, of course, a gotcha or two. Gotcha number 1 is that they only make the gluten-free crusts in 16 inch form, which we don’t think is a huge problem. Gotcha number two is that the gluten-free pizzas are two dollars more than the regular ones, which is a bummer, but more reasonable than we’re used to for gluten-free fare. But how about the pizza?

We got what we call the “Dave and Sienna special.” It has red pizza sauce AND pesto with extra garlic on the whole pizza and then half mushrooms (for Sienna) and half black olives (for me.) No cheese. Like I said, we did the “take and bake” option where you put the pizza in the oven following their directions. The pizza was awesome. They put the right amount of sauce on the pizza, and didn’t skimp on the ingredients. I know you’re all like: “Yeah OK but THE CRUST Dave, get on with THE CRUST!” So I will get on with the crust. The crust was good. It is definitely more like the kind of crust that is kind of short and a bit crumbly. It was also definitely crunchy. It was almost what I call a Long Island style crossed with a deep dish style. To say what it wasn’t: it wasn’t chewy or bready, which for us was just fine.

Being used to gluten-free pizza crusts that either have a texture like extruded foam, and/or come out of the oven rock hard, we were delighted. While they do make wheat pizza there, they also seem to take enough care to prevent cross-contamination that a person with gluten allergy should be OK (depending on how bad your allergy is, obviously.) We will definitely go back there sometime in the future to do a more complete review of the restaurant itself.

Times we have visited: 2 (So we feel pretty good about our rating.)
Overall rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Price compared to “regular”: Somewhere around 11% more expensive

The Mississippi Pizza Pub
3552 North Mississippi Ave Portland, Oregon
(503) 288-3231