It’s going to be a few more months until Hapa Pizza has a brick and mortar home in Beaverton but the good news is it’s coming. Aaron Truong, Happa Pizza along with wife Natalie, says they are still in the planning process with architects and hope to move to the permit process soon. “We hoped to be there this summer but now I think it will be this fall,” he says.
The couple are the latest culinary crowd pleasers to make Beaverton their home, beginning their business as they did at the Beaverton Farmers Market. And never fear, throughout the whole brick and mortar building process, Hapa Pizza will continue to appear at the Farmers
Market. “We will be at the Beaverton Farmers Market as long as they will let us” quips Aaron, “that’s where we got our start, that’s where we feel our community. That will always be a part of our DNA.”
Aaron is quick to point out that the city of Beaverton has helped place them in the pizza pantheon by allowing and even encouraging outdoor dining when other restaurants were having to close their door and send staff home, Happa Pizza and many other Beaverton establishments were able to keep making food and serving patrons. He says it really gave them an advantage that they needed.
The enormous success the couple have experienced with their Asian style pizzas has surprised even them. It started as a hobby. Aaron is fond of saying his wife was mad at him when he came home with a $500 pizza oven. He started making pizzas when they had friends over just for the fun of it. Then they made pizzas that resonated in their community with traditional Asian flavors and suddenly the world as they knew it began to spin on a new axis.
Aaron, who was a mental health therapist with a Beaverton practice, became Aaron with a pizza business who slapped Korean, Vietnamese and Thai ingredients and specially concocted sauces on a yeasty dough and baked up a brand new foodie delight.
The pandemic was a time for the Truongs when the voice of the outside world grew dimmer and the sound of their inner voices grew louder. “It gave us a chance to think about what was important to us and what we really wanted to do.,” he says.
He sees a future in which they continue to experiment and build on the pan-Asian flavor profiles they have developed. They want to start changing their menu to express seasonal differences and increase the vegan options beyond the vegan cheese that they currently use. Some of the larger changes are on hold until the new space is available. “Once we have a bigger oven and space where we can mix our dough more easily, I do want to do some interesting things with the crust like infused crust like pandan,” he says.
Meanwhile fans will continue to flock to the cart at the market where the Truongs hold court every Saturday through the season, stretching the dough until it tells the story of food, friendship and sharing the gift that comes from this special blend of cultures.