For a couple of months, signs hung around the Corvallis Plaza saying things such as “Corvallis Kneaded This,” hinting that a new restaurant was coming into the space left open by Nouveau Poke. The Plaza threw a reveal party for it on Aug. 6, and I went.
A literal red carpet was rolled out of the entryway. Lee Eckroth, one of the Plaza’s owners, met me when I got there. He told me the new restaurant was a second location for an existing business, that the business was local, and that he is excited about it. I would have to wait an hour and 10 minutes for the official name to be revealed.
While we waited, he talked about how the Plaza operates. He described it less as a landlord and more as a partnership with whoever ends up in its spaces.
“Have fun and make friends,” he told me, “and if we do that, everything else works.”
I asked whether the new restaurant would compete with anything already downtown. Every restaurant in a small market is competing for the same discretionary dollars, he said, but the hope is that this one will bring something different enough to grow the market instead of splitting it further.
Nouveau Poke, the outgoing tenant, had posted its own reasons for moving on, and Eckroth said the Plaza still had a good relationship with them. Nobody expects a storefront to last forever, he said.
While I waited, a woman worked a lyra, the aerial hoop used in circuses, in the middle of the main floor, moving through it with the kind of ease that comes from years of practice. She’s half of Soil Circus, whose studio operates down in the Plaza’s basement and combines circus arts with agricultural science.
Charlie Barth is the agricultural half, consulting on gardens and farms and helping people look at the systems they already have and rebuild them in a way that works in harmony. His business partner teaches lyra and had been doing circus for about 10 years without a permanent place to practice. Moving into the Plaza, Barth told me, was “putting our roots down.”
A little further down the same open floor, in among the row of food counters, Bingo Guy (as Eckroth cheerfully calls him) played songs for music bingo. His name is Paul “Pash” Pashibin, and he owns PashCo Studio, a vinyl shop and rock-and-roll art gallery in the Plaza’s basement, full of vintage psychedelic posters and music memorabilia.
There was free popcorn. I played a round of bingo and didn’t win anything. A woman a few tables over got a bingo and won a vintage rock poster donated straight from PashCo, and the whole room cheered for her. A few counters down, the storefront that was about to be revealed sat dark and taped off behind a huge sheet of plastic, though I occasionally observed a cart being wheeled past it.
Eckroth found me again after bingo, and we sat in the Plaza community room, a freely reservable room for public use. An old jukebox sat in the corner. Lee told me the jukebox was from the 1950s, and it was his as a kid in North Dakota, where he used to roller skate to it in the basement. His dad bought it. It eventually went to his uncle Ray, and when the Plaza building went up, Eckroth got it back. It buzzes a little now and is waiting on a full restoration, which is complicated by the fact that there are apparently only two people on the entire West Coast who know how to do it. He wants to give it another hundred years.
Then someone pulled the huge sheet of plastic off a giant light-up sign on the wall. BIRDIE’S, it said. There were tons of people there by that point, all ages, more than I’ve ever seen in the Plaza at once. A handful of people appeared carrying 25 New York and Detroit-style pizzas they’d made at their Philomath location. The pepperoni was devoured almost instantly.
I selected a Margherita Detroit slice, and a vegetarian New York slice that looked like it had a cheesy white sauce base. The crust was the first thing I noticed in each, both ridiculously light and flaky, like a crispy cloud. The New York slice was the kind you fold in half, with exactly the floppiness you’d expect. It’s genuinely different from anything else downtown. The Detroit slice was thick but wonderfully airy, almost focaccia-like, topped with a brightly fresh-tasting tomato sauce. I learned the white pizza was called the Bianca, dolloped with attractive pearls of ricotta and carrying a strong scent of garlic.
Once the crowd around the sample trays thinned out, Lee introduced me to Scott Willcockson, one of Birdie’s three owners. He told me the connection to the Plaza came through a mail carrier, a friend of his who also delivers to the building and talks with Eckroth often. She mentioned Birdie’s to him, Eckroth tried it and loved it, and messaged Willcockson on Instagram. Things “flowed very quickly” after that, Willcockson said. Corvallis is a bigger market than Philomath, but he said the Plaza itself was part of the draw too, a community space he is glad to be part of.
The New York style pizza is Willcockson’s own invention, shaped by years making wood-fired pizza rather than a strict copy of tradition. The Detroit style comes from another of the three owners, who grew up there. Baked in a pan, it looks a bit like a Chicago deep dish, but Willcockson drew a clear line between the two: the dough is lighter, and it isn’t weighed down by heavy toppings.
The New York dough ferments in the fridge for three to four days, the Detroit for two to three, and Willcockson credits that slow fermentation for breaking the gluten down into something airier. From there it goes into a deck oven onto a hot stone, which he said makes a crispier crust.
Pricing at the Corvallis location is expected to land between $4.50 and $6 a slice, with two slices making a complete meal, so lunch runs about $9 to $12. Whole pizzas are $26 to $34, sized at 18 inches and meant to feed about three people, working out to $9 to $12 a person. There’s no student discount yet, though Willcockson didn’t rule one out.
When Birdie’s agreed to move in, the Plaza also brought in six new, oversized tables, because pizza is the kind of food you’re supposed to share.
I went back on Sept. 3, a day after Birdie’s officially opened, and ordered a plain cheese slice, on the theory that if you want to know what a pizza place is really doing, you start with the fundamentals. The quality, I’m happy to report, was consistent with what I experienced in the samples at the reveal party. The crust was thin, perfectly foldable, chewy, airy, and crispy all at once. The sauce wasn’t the common type of thick dark tomato paste, it was more like they’d taken a perfectly ripe summer tomato and rubbed it all over the pizza in a light, bright layer. The cheese layer was a base of mozzarella with a gentle scattering of pecorino, the crispy tendrils adding as much decoration as flavor.
The Plaza is built around people sitting together, eating together, doing something in the same room. Birdie’s just gives them one more reason to do it.
