Tale of Us Pizza opens at Prost! Portland from 2 craft beer veterans
Brewer and brewery founders Darren Provenzano and his wife and veteran beer industry pro Ny Lee are turning their sporadic Tale of Us Pizza pop-up series into a permanent custom built food truck at the popular N. Portland German beer bar and food truck pod Prost!
The Provenzanos first met in Vietnam where Darren won multiple accolades while brewing for Heart of Darkness Brewing and Ny worked at local craft breweries. They moved to Portland, Oregon in 2020 when the pandemic scuttled plans for a new brewery they were planning to open in Saigon. Together they developed the concept for Fracture Brewing as a merger between Vietnamese and West Coast cultures. What started as collaborations and one-off beers brewed at Culmination Brewing morphed into a partnership with restaurateur and investor Kurt Huffman and his Chefstable Group. Fracture Brewing officially launched as a standalone new concept and brand in 2022 with Provenzano at the helm of brewing operations and Lee as a creative force. A year later Fracture Brewing won a silver medal at the Oregon Beer Awards, but Darren and Ny ended up leaving the business shortly thereafter.
In the past few years, Darren has explored winemaking, and was the head Brewer for ForeLand Beer, while Ny is a bartender and manager at Loyal Legion’s beer Hall in Beaverton. Since leaving ForeLand in early 2025, Darren was ready for a new challenge.
“Fermentation naturally led me toward dough,” says Darren. “Honestly, pizza was always kind of there. I grew up around cooking and spent a lot of time with my grandmother, who cooked constantly, especially for big family gatherings on weekends. She’d make Sicilian style pizza at home, and I think without realizing it at the time, that became part of the foundation for everything I’m doing now.”
Ny, a native of Vietnam, balances out Darren’s “back of house” presence in baking and fermentation with a hospitality forward friendly face to the business paired with a love of food and culture.
“Growing up in Saigon there honestly wasn’t a huge pizza culture, although there’s definitely a cool younger generation there now doing really thoughtful Neapolitan style pizza,” adds Ny.
Tale of Us Pizza started as a pop-up in August 2025 and has appeared at numerous breweries and taprooms since their initial debut at a winery, and including stops at The Beermongers, Threshold Brewing, Everywhere Beer Co., and Von Ebert Brewing to name a few.
“What started very casually eventually became something we felt had a real identity behind it. At that point, we realized it had the potential to grow into a brand of its own,” says Darren about their big upcoming move from sporadic pop-ups and private events and into a full-time job with their upcoming food truck opening at Prost!. “We’re excited to be joining something that already feels like a real institution in Portland and to be alongside such a talented group of operators there.”
Beer, and Darren and Ny’s background in service and fermentation still plays very heavily into Tale of Us Pizza’s business model and creativity.
“I think in both beer and pizza there’s a tendency for people to jump straight into complicated hybrid fermentations or highly technical processes without first understanding the foundation underneath them,” says Darren on his brewing based approach to pizza. “Brewing also taught me the importance of taking detailed notes, staying observant, and trusting the process. There are endless theories, trends, and dogmas floating around in both fields, but at the end of the day you still have to develop your own understanding through repetition, adjustment, and experience.”
Their pizza is a mish mash of Neapolitan and Sicilian, with a swerve into Trenton and a spin around party cut Tavern-style pizza. On their website Tale of Us Pizza describes their pies as having their heart in Italy but but with a wandering soul that takes them to Tunisia, toward Morocco—in search of warmth, spice, and balance. The Sicilian influence comes more Darren’s heritage and the ingredients he grew up with like anchovies, breadcrumbs, olive oil, and various Sicilian slices and baked dishes always being on the family table.
“We’re not necessarily trying to chase one particular pizza style. Through the process, we naturally ended up with something closer to a thin and crispy Trenton-style bar pie more than anything else,” says Darren.
Trenton-style pizza is a much much lesser known regional style of pie that emerged from New Jersey’s Trenton neighborhood of Chambersburg that historically had a large population of Italian-Americans. Trenton style has thin crust like a Chicago Tavern-style pie, and is brushed with olive oil which helps with crunchiness and creating a char along the edges. Like a traditional Detroit-style, crushed tomatoes are layered on top of the cheese instead of under it. The tomatoes take center stage unlike the cheese on a Detroit, fresh and mildly salted or seasoned helps them shine. By layering the cheese first, the Trenton-style retains a cracker like chrunchiness by preventing the juices from the tomatoes from softening it or making it soggy.
Tale of Us Pizza often has creative, unusual, and enlightening ingredient and flavor combinations in addition to classics like Margherita and Pepperoni. The “Costa Bebop" pie combines classic California plum tomatoes with classic Caciocavallo Italian semi-hard cheese with mozzarella from small PNW artisan creamery Ferndale Farmstead, then adds onion-anchovy conserva, sardines, parsley and high quality olive oil. The “Maruzza” is a savory veggie pie with a tamarind-beet reduction over bufala fresca, mushrooms, chives, smoked mozzarella, and a drizzle of olive oil.
“Brewing also taught me the importance of taking detailed notes, staying observant, and trusting the process,” says Darren on developing their pizza’s through trial and error and many nights making pies for friends. “There are endless theories, trends, and dogmas floating around in both fields, but at the end of the day you still have to develop your own understanding through repetition, adjustment, and experience.”
With the success of Tale of Us Pizza pop-ups, Darren and Ny had been keeping their eyes and ears open for a permanent location before they saw Prost! German beer bar’s social media posting about an opening for a food truck in their surrounding cart pod. “We already frequented Prost quite a bit and felt it would be a really natural fit for us,” says Darren.
They’ll be moving into an 8x16 pizza trailer built specifically around the workflow of the business. During the pop-ups they have been using Gozney Arc XL ovens which under the hood are Neapolitan-style ovens designed for shorter, high-heat bakes. They worked well, but required a constant watchful eye to manage the flame. In the new food truck, they have worked the design around a centerpiece double deck Moretti Forni P110 GA gas oven, which will help handling volume with consistency and maintaining and even perfecting the style of pizza they want to continue making.
Tale or Us Pizza recently pulled up their new food truck in the Prost! Marketplace lot and passed their final inspection, which means an opening day is just around the corner. For now just Darren and Ny will be running things day to day, so its a great time to stop in and grab a beer at Prost! or Bloodbuzz and meet the people behind the operation before they get too busy to run it all themselves.
“The timing feels great. The weather is turning, the city starts coming alive this time of year, and with the World Cup around the corner and all the events Prost has planned, it’s going to be mental in the best possible way,” adds Darren.
Tale of Us Pizza is soft open for evenings Wednesday through Sunday from 4-9pm (or until sold out) until they get comfortable with the flow and then will expand hours and days in June and begin opening for Sundays and lunch service as well. Find them at the Prost! Marketplace beer garden and food trucks at 4237 N Mississippi Ave, Portland, OR 97217
