Hapa Pizza (map it) started modestly with a booth at the Cedar Mill Farmers Market (map it). At the end of the summer season selling pizza at the market, they thought, “Okay, that’s that,” and then the pandemic started. This turned out to be another happy accident. The Beaverton Farmers Market (map it) – where they wanted to sell pizza, but couldn’t because the market already had a pizza cart – lost their long-term pizza vendor. This provided Aaron and Natalie the opportunity to have a booth at the market.
News of their pizzas, with their innovative flavors and fusions, caught wind and they were busy from the get-go. In the early days of having a presence at the Beaverton market, they would run out of ingredients because people were flocking to their booth.
“Once we got into the Beaverton Farmers Market, things just kind of took off,” Aaron said. “Because the Beaverton market is one of the larger ones in the area, we just got so much more traction and exposure there. And things really started blowing up. We sold out every week like from week one, and we just had to keep bringing more and more food in order to keep up.”
When some of their loyal customers kept on inquiring if they were going to open a brick and mortar, Aaron and Natalie thought about it. A few years later, they were blessed with a new opportunity–another happy accident–a space in downtown Beaverton, right behind Broadway Street, became available.
Not long after they opened the brick and mortar, something fantastic happened. The New York Times named Hapa Pizza as one of the best pizza spots in the United States (the only restaurant in Oregon to make the list)! This accolade really increased business for them. They were taking more orders than they could handle.
“It changed everything overnight,” Aaron said of the New York Times article. “Prior to that, I’d say we were comfortably busy, but as soon as that article dropped it basically doubled to tripled the amount of traffic that we would get at the restaurant.”
tt was overwhelming for Aaron and Natalie, but the staff really came through and really helped make Hapa Pizza what it was. Today, business is back to normal at this family-owned restaurant and the pizzas are still fantastic.
