For many Oregon kids, pizza is less a dietary staple than a fact of life.
But that wasn’t always the case. Even after World War II, newspaper references to “pizza” were still put in quotations, with recipes typically calling for ”4 English muffins” or “2 cans Maine sardines.”
That was before 1949, the year Caro Amico opened on Southwest Barbur Boulevard. Though not the first Portland restaurant to serve these “open-faced cheese and tomato pies,“ as has previously been reported, it was the first to define itself by the dish, putting “pizza” front-and-center on its signage and advertisements. And at 75 years old this year, it remains Portland’s oldest Italian restaurant.
Along the way, Caro Amico blazed a trail that eventually led Portland reaching the top of the international pizza mountain. Today, the city’s pizzerias are featured on influential Netflix shows and ranked among the world’s top 50, while the local pizza scene is repeatedly hailed as America’s best. (And these days, those pizza pundits might actually be right.)
But unless you grew up in an Italian family, pizza was almost completely unknown in Portland 75 years ago. And no single family changed that more than McFarland’s.
Growing up on a hazelnut farm 30 miles south of Portland, Elsie McFarland had never heard of pizza.
“On the farm, dinner meant potatoes and gravy,” McFarland said. “My mom was a pretty good cook, but it was simple food. When we first tasted pizza, we were like, ‘Ooh, this is good.’ And you’re eating with your hands, which was not something that we were used to. You might pick up a muffin or a cupcake, but this was hot food.”
Her father, Fred Baker, worked a delivery route, selling fresh eggs from the farm to grocery stores and restaurants in Portland. Those included businesses in the city’s Little Italy, which once stretched from Lair Hill in what is now South Portland all the way downtown.
That’s where Baker met Joe Fracasso, a “250 percent” Italian immigrant from Naples, McFarland said. Four years after World War II, with the economy booming, the duo opened an Italian cafe in a tumbledown Victorian in Lair Hill, adding pizza only after the city turned down their plans to turn the downstairs into a speakeasy. Or so the family story goes.
(Contemporaneous reports in The Oregonian have Fracasso bringing a large pizza down to a suspicious liquor control board to prove the restaurant‘s foodie bonafides. And though Caro Amico calls itself the restaurant that “introduced pizza to Portland,” restaurants such as the Rome Cafe, Holiday Steak House and Fracasso’s own Prima Donna were advertising the dish in the newspaper as early as 1946.)
After a slow start, a story in The Oregonian about Caro Amico’s Neapolitan-style pizza eventually drew crowds to the restaurant, 3606 S.W. Barbur Blvd. Even the local Italians liked it, or at least they “liked the fact that you didn’t have to wait for mama to make it,” McFarland said.
A year or two in, Baker bought out Fracasso, and Caro Amico brought in New York City chef Nick Marino — “a very handsome, good looking, swashbuckling kind of guy who was 350% Italian” — McFarland recalls. Marino expanded the menu with oysters Rockefeller and lobster fra diavolo. He was eventually made a partner in the business. Though the menu has changed over the decades, its spirit remains under current chef Gabe Tapia.
Ten years after Caro Amico debuted, McFarland‘s brother and sister-in-law, Jack and Diane Baker, opened another of the city’s oldest Italian restaurants, Amalfi’s, on Northeast Fremont Avenue. Then, in 1985, Scott McFarland, Elsie McFarland’s son, co-founded one of Portland’s first pizza parlors, American Dream Pizza on Northeast Glisan Street. Two American Dream locations remain open in Corvallis, though the Portland original closed earlier this year.
In its 75 years, Caro Amico has been destroyed by two major fires. The first, in the 1960s, destroyed the restaurant’s original red house. The second took place in 2020, about six months after Oregon’s initial state-mandated COVID shutdown.
“The smoke damage was pervasive,” McFarland said. “The fire marshal looked us straight in the eye and said, ‘Everything has to go.’”
A lengthy reconstruction process preserved the restaurant’s old-school dumbwaiter and the unique, boat-inspired curved beams in the building’s ceiling. Caro Amico reopened last year, about a month after McFarland celebrated her 90th birthday.
These days, McFarland is assisted in day-to-day operations by her grandson, Sebastian Price.
Like many Portlanders, once McFarland tried pizza, she couldn’t get enough of it. But in those early days, other members of her household were more likely to reap the rewards of her family’s growing restaurant.
“My dad would work at night,” McFarland recalled. “We always had lab retrievers down on the farm, my mother and I would beg dad to bring home some pizza, and he would bring home a big #10 can stuffed with pizza that people had left on their plates. The dogs loved it. And of course it made them fat.”
McFarland isn‘t just the keeper of Caro Amico lore. If you visit on Friday or Saturday, she’s probably working the tables, checking in with regulars or making sure the two kids in the corner have Crayons and coloring sheets.
Tell her you love her restaurant, and she might respond, with a wink: “Why, do you want to buy it?”
Working the tables each weekend helps McFarland keep her mind sharp, and lets regulars feel at ease.
“Our demo is older,” McFarland said. “A lot of people that come in are in their late 70s and 80s. And they want to tell me about the time they came here for their high school prom. Or their first date. Or they brought their kids here for the first time when they were six years old. A lot of people tell me this was the first pizza they ever had. And they’re still coming.”
Caro Amico opens for dinner at 4 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday at 3606 S.W. Barbur Blvd., 503-223-6895, caroamicoitaliancafe.com
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