Portland has a lot of transplants, but for whatever reason there aren’t a ton of transplant communities. Big cities like New York, Chicago, and LA have dozens of ethnic and cultural enclaves, a Little Italy here, a Little Ethiopia there. Historically Portland did have a few of those kinds of neighborhoods in the early 1900s, but few examples remain in 2025. And despite the fact that almost half of all current Portland residents were born in another state, there’s no Little Burbank or Minneapolistown where recent arrivals can expect a warm welcome and easy access to regional delicacies. But over the last few years, a stretch of Lombard between St. Johns and Columbia Park has become something of an East Coast enclave, at least by Portland standards. Eagles games, tomato pie, Taylor ham; you can find some of the comforts of the Atlantic Seaboard in the heart of the Pacific Northwest.
“I think East Coasters cosplay like mean people,” Brian Koch tells me, “but we're actually pretty nice.” It’s a Friday afternoon and the first real sunny day of spring is slipping through the heavy blinds, painting his homey St. Johns beer bar with dramatic stripes of light. Koch owns and operates Lombard House, a low-slung bungalow that’s been Portland’s most fanatical Philly bar since it opened almost a decade ago. “When the Eagles won the Super Bowl, there was this kid who’d been here maybe three times, and he was FaceTiming his family,” he says, “and his mom was like, ‘I’m so happy you’re hanging out with Philadelphians’ with her Philly accent. And I was like… well, I was hammered. But I was very proud of that moment.”
Koch says it was initially difficult to find a community in Portland when he first moved here in the early aughts.
“Portland was intimidating to me as an East Coaster trying to meet people,” he admits. “I wasn't cool. Everyone was, like, fucking pretty and had cool tattoos.” He says one of his goals with Lombard House was to mix a bit of the social scene he was used to back east with the craft beers of the West Coast. “Philadelphians, historically, are dickheads,” he says. “But all you gotta do is walk through that door on Sunday and go ‘Go Birds’ and everyone's like, ‘my brother.’ No matter if you've never met, everyone's your friend.”
Ten blocks west is Lombardo’s Pizzeria, owned and operated by Bob Verderame, and the Chill N Fill food cart pod, which includes Picone’s Quality Deli. Both Verderame and Picone’s owner Vin Picone hail from north New Jersey, a sleepy network of suburban communities with a rich Italian American heritage. For Verderame, every small town Jersey pizzeria was a world unto itself.
“Each one has its own identity,” he says. “One pizza shop, their family came from the north of Italy, and they did it like this. These guys came from Sicily, those guys came from Naples. It was a lot of different styles.”
Verderame certainly looks the part of a Portland pizza guy, sporting chunky glasses and a sea of tattoos—and his shop has an airy minimalism that’s very contemporary Pacific Northwest. The pies, however, are all Jersey. Verderame moved to Portland after the pandemic shuttered his last pizzeria in Arizona, and despite the abundance of quality pizza joints in town he felt confident his approach filled a niche: “I tried a lot of pizza places, and I kept saying to myself, ‘I feel like my pizza is a little different.’” Lombardo’s only has eight options at any given time, and two of those are regional specialties: the wafer-thin bar pizza and a Trenton-style tomato pie, an inverted sauce-over-cheese style. The result is rich, slightly caramelized roasted tomato over a layer of molten mozzarella that is indeed unique among Portland’s pizza offerings, which tend to skew more in the direction of New York, Detroit, or wood-fired Neapolitan traditions.
Picone’s, meanwhile, has made a name for itself among Redditors and local food bloggers as one of the best sandwich carts in the city. Picone says it was never his goal to replicate that specific style of New York delicatessen, examples of which have been vanishing from Portland’s food landscape at an alarming rate.
“Those places have third generation [regulars] who go there every Easter,” he says. “You can’t just bring that to Portland.” Instead, he says, his goal is to mix a bit of that Old World tradition into the eclectic food culture that’s already here: “The Willamette Valley area has some of the best grains in the world. The wheat and the flour that comes from that wheat is exquisite. Everything grows in Oregon.”
The one exception is Taylor ham. “I can wax poetic about Taylor ham as long as you need me to,” Picone says. He describes the hyper-regional fermented pork product with intensity generally reserved for legacy sports teams or controversial political movements: “It's a little sweet, a little smoky, pretty salty, pretty tangy. It's the king of breakfast foods. It fries super well. It cures your hangover, gets you ready for the day, puts some pep in your step.” Picone is very clear that he does NOT acknowledge it as “pork roll,” which is how it’s known down in south Jersey. “The only way this interview keeps going is because you acknowledged it as Taylor ham,” he says.
“I accidentally ordered a pork roll egg and cheese, not knowing his stance on it,” Koch remembers. “I realized, ‘Oh, I just accidentally insulted my new friend.’ But it's fucking pork roll. It says so on the label.”
Indeed, the divisive delicacy brought the neighboring restaurateurs closer together.
“Once we started getting things in motion, Lombardo’s opens up.” Picone says, “and I’m like, ‘Fucking, great. There's an Italian American guy right across the street, he's gonna do the same thing I'm doing.’ I thought we were gonna bump heads.” Not only was that not the case, it wound up being pretty fortuitous: “Almost immediately, I started having issues getting Taylor ham from my sources. And Bob just stepped up and was, like, ‘Dude, I got you.’”
Both men speak highly of Koch, and the community that’s sprung up around Lombard House. “I think of him as the unofficial mayor,” says Verderame.
Despite the fact that none of it was planned, over the last couple of years the three businesses have formed a sort of improvised ecosystem. Lombard House is a beer-only hangout bar with a BYO food policy, Lombardo’s has extremely limited seating, and Picone’s is hyperfocused on sandwiches to the exclusion of everything else. Mix them together and you’ve got the distinctive flavors of three states on a one-mile stretch of Lombard. “North Portland has a lot of people from New York, Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware,” Verderame says, “They come here, and they let me know ‘Hey, this reminds me of home.’”
The three men have formed an easy friendship based on cooperation rather than competition.
“Vin and Bob and myself, we're probably ‘sensitive people’ on the East Coast,” Koch notes ruefully. But he says they haven’t softened all that much. “‘Fuck you’ is still our love language.” Koch says. “I can be like, “Fuck you, Bob,” or “Fuck you, Vin”, and they’ll be like “Fuck you, too, Brian.”
Lombard House, 7337 N Lombard; Lombardo’s Pizzeria, 5210 N Lombard; Picone’s Quality Deli, 5215 N Lombard
