Hey Luigi Will Open in Slabtown in Northwest Portland

A new restaurant from Gabriel Pascuzzi will open in Slabtown’s former Tip Top Burger Shop space. Called Hey Luigi, they’ll offer cocktails and food that goes well with cocktails (and beer, wine, and NA drinks). I spoke with Gabriel earlier this month and here is what I learned about him, and about Hey Luigi.

Tip Top Burger Shop To Hey Luigi

Their final day of service was last Friday, August 22. As they mentioned on Instagram, Tip Top was a COVID pilot that opened in late 2023 and was destined to end. They also had a location in Multnomah Village but that closed this past March.

Before this space was Tip Top’s, it was home to Stacked Sandwich Shop, which opened at this location in early 2023. Stacked originally opened in February 2017 in SE Portland, then closed in 2021. Tip Top had a menu of burgers (beef, oxtail), a spicy chicken sandwich, wedge and Cobb salad, vegetarian bowls, chicken tendies, tots and fries, and ice cream items—shakes, floats, soft serve, and sundaes.

Chewing the Fat With Gabriel Pascuzzi

I hadn’t spoken to Gabriel before this conversation, and he spent some time sharing details of his education, past achievements, and background tidbits on his various Portland restaurants. It was pretty interesting, so I’m including it here (or go straight to the Hey Luigi part, if you like).

Gabriel was born and raised in Portland. His grandfather was Italian, immigrating via boat to this country in the 1930s from Cosenza in southern Italy’s Calabria region. And while his grandparents died before he was born, Gabriel was raised in their home, which his dad bought from Gabriel’s aunts and uncles. His father still lives there today.

“My grandfather was a master machinist, as well as a master gardener,” said Gabriel. “He was known for growing tomatoes. And so we have a huge garden, probably like 100 x 100 in this yard in Southwest Portland.” Additionally on this 2-acre parcel are blueberry bushes, raspberries, grapes, Asian pears, figs, pears, apples, and plums. “Just all sorts of crazy stuff in the yard,” he remarked. They also have a heated greenhouse on the property.

His Cooking and Education Background

All of this to say, is that this is Gabriel’s early experience with food, which had an influence on his decision to get into cooking. He studied fine dining at Johnson Wales University. “I have a bachelor’s in culinary arts, a minor in applied science,” he explained.

He continued, “I went to Denver and I went to Providence. After that, I studied in Italy and then I went to New York and worked for Daniel Boulud and Tom Colicchio.” That would be DB Bistro Moderne and Colicchio & Sons, respectively.

Noma to Stacked

He also worked at Noma, a place known for many things, including being deemed the “Best Restaurant in the World” by Restaurant magazine. “Then I came back, and I was the executive chef at the Multnomah Whiskey Library for two and a half years,” said Gabriel. “And then I decided to open Stacked Sandwich Shop.” That puts us at 2017, when he was named Eater’s Chef of the Year.

Regarding Stacked Sandwich Shop: He told me that some folks have asked him if Hulu’s series “The Bear” was based on his life. He said no, it’s not, but the story is similar: A chef who went into the world of fine dining, came home, and opened up a sandwich shop.

COVID and Mama Bird

COVID hit them in 2020, like it did to so many, and Stacked closed in 2021. Along with re-opening Stacked in a new location in early 2023, he also opened Mama Bird that year. Gabriel closed it earlier this year and transitioned the space to Bistecca in February. Part of the reason he closed Mama Bird was that with all the myriad changes they had to make in seemingly quick succession, Mama Bird just didn’t fit anymore—they essentially were forced to adjust it out of existence. So it needed to retire and something new had to fill its place.

He told me the origin story of Mama Bird: “Mama Bird was a concept because my roommate and I at the time would make chicken and vegetables like once a week. There was nowhere to go get this. And I thought, ‘How do we make it so people don’t say, well, let’s go buy a Costco chicken?’ Oh … wood fire!” Thus, Mama Bird was born.

Bistecca

Toward the end of the Mama Bird run, he pondered what was next. “So I was trying to think, what can I do? And I thought, well, this place with its wood fire grill could be a steakhouse. It’s gotta be!”

Except that he felt that most steakhouses are boring and do the same thing everywhere you go, across every city you go to. So, he decided to do something different—he created the steakhouse he saw though his second-generation Italian American PNW lens. Bistecca is not a red sauce Italian joint; that’s not what he grew up with (“We didn’t have Sunday gravy.”) and he wasn’t interested in replicating that kind of Italian restaurant.

“That wasn’t my upbringing,” he explained. “Ours was more like just gardening and hunting and foraging and crabbing and fishing, and using all the stuff that’s around you, which is the Italian mindset. “Local and seasonal with an Italian filter—it’s southern Italian,” he remarked.

The Bistecca Logo: Tomatoes, The Mixer, and a Dotted Line To Hey Luigi

We chatted about the Bistecca logo, which includes a stand mixer and a tomato vine, and a substantial backstory. He says people think it’s a weird logo for a steakhouse. But it is representational: his grandmother is the mixer, and the tomato vine is his grandfather (they serve tomatoes from is dad’s/grandfather’s garden at the restaurant). More about the mixer:

“My grandfather, being a master machinist, pulled this mixer—a Hobart 15-quart mixer—off of a Navy ship,” he said. Gabriel describes it as three feet tall, made of steel, and a tank. “it’s still the ugly green that the Navy painted it,” he added.

It sat down in his dad’s basement for probably 50 years, unused. Eventually, Gabriel asked if he could use this mixer—after burning out multiple Kitchen-Aid mixers—to make a family bread recipe. That recipe was his grandmother’s.

It was a simple white bread that his dad, aunts, and uncles grew up eating. “Sure, you could go to the store and buy it, but that’s not what you did—you made it,” explained Gabriel. At one point made the bread and served it to his dad. “So my dad ate it for the first time, I think in over 45 or 50 years,” he said. “And you could see his face go somewhere. Some memory of eating that bread.”

“We make that same bread recipe at Bistecca,” he explained. “And we’ll be making that recipe at Hey Luigi, as well—that’s what we serve as our bread and olive oil. This bread is telling a story of my grandmother who used to make this bread for her husband.” You can read more about the Hobart on the Bistecca website.

Hey Luigi

Gabriel says that the name “Hey Luigi” is an homage to his dad—his middle name is Luigi. And as with Bistecca, it will be influenced by Italian food and its flavor profiles. It will not be a full-on Italian restaurant or any kind of traditional red sauce Italian-American spot. One way to look at it, is as a high-end Italian cocktail bar.

On the topic of cocktails, Natane Adams (Bistecca) and Kyle Sanders (Multnomah Whiskey Library) will be joining him there. It will be a small team but a “killer cocktail team,” in Gabriel’s words. They will be using various Italian spirits, too. And there will be NA options.

Hey Luigi’s Menu

As for the food menu, it won’t be a huge one. But you will see things at Hey Luigi that they can’t do at Bistecca (due to limitations on heat sources). “We’ll have some really small snacks, then we’ll have some large, more appetizer-sized things,” Gabriel explained.

Gabriel also loves pasta, so you’ll see a few pasta dishes on the menu, along with some seasonal sauces. Apropos to the above-mentioned detail on heat sources, they can’t do pasta over at Bistecca (which will continue to operate), as they don’t have burners because of their wood fired oven. So, Gabriel gets to do it here. At Hey Luigi they’ll have two big commercial fryers to work with, too.

They will prepare a few simple desserts to round things off.

The Hey Luigi Space and Opening

Gabriel considers Hey Luigi to be a small space at about 1,600 square feet (FYI, previous tenants include XLB and Sunshine Noodles). There will be 32 seats, including the bar. And in the summer there will be patio seating.

They look to open mid-September. “We’ll be catching my favorite time of year, which is the converging of summer and fall,” said Gabriel. “It’s the beginning of harvest season. You’re starting to get some mushrooms, you’re starting to get fall squash, and you can still work with berries. It’s like the best time of the year.”

Their current plan is to be open Tuesday through Saturday; closed Sunday and Monday. And they’re looking at opening around 3pm, closing around 10:30pm on weekdays and midnight on weekends. Happy hour is in the plans at some point. Minors will be allowed in until 8pm.

More will be revealed about Hey Luigi in the coming weeks. Keep an eye on their Instagram for that. Wishing Gabriel and his team all the best as they get ready to open Hey Luigi in Slabtown.

Hey Luigi [projected opening mid-September 2025]
2175 NW Raleigh Street, Suite 105, Portland
Instagram

Update August 25, 2025.