An upstart pizzeria food cart has been forced to close temporarily after an accidental fire in the middle of the night caused more than $10,000 worth of damage.
Pizzeria La Sorrentina, a 20-foot trailer selling Neapolitan pizza in Hazel Dell, received fire and smoke damage in the middle of the night Oct. 20. Co-owner Amy Matsumoto said two cherry wood planks were laid on a table away from the wood-fired oven, which was not in use, but smoke and heat conditions inside the trailer still ignited the planks.
Plastic water pipes and some equipment — speakers and iPads — melted. Parts of the trailer are singed and soot-covered. Matsumoto said the smoke odor lingers. She and her husband, chef Daisuke Matsumoto, will take the trailer to a repair company in Portland to bring everything back to standards.
“Being that it is a food establishment, we must be sure everything is up to health code and does not damage our product in any way and that is where the restoration company comes into play,” Matsumoto wrote in an email.
A GoFundMe page has been established to help the owners recoup about $5,000. The couple estimates replacing all the damaged equipment will cost between $7,000 and $8,000, with another $5,000 to be spent on cleaning.
Pizzeria La Sorrentina opened in December at 1015 N.E. 78th St. after raising $12,780 on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. Daisuke Matsumoto, an experienced pizzaiolo, hoped to start his own restaurant and thought to start small with the cart, his wife said. They opened at the food cart pod in Hazel Dell next to FruiTea Bubble, a bubble tea cart, and La Casa Con Sabor and Steakburger. They offered personal-sized pies with ingredients shipped from Italy.
It didn’t take long for word to spread about the pizzeria. Matsumoto said they turned down offers to take their cart across the river to Portland and the pizzeria was featured on BuzzFeed for being the top-rated pizza joint on Yelp.com in Washington.
“Everything was going great, so exciting, a lot more customers,” she said. “And then this happened.”
Amy Matsumoto said she got the call at about 2 a.m. from Clark County Fire District 6. Smoke had been reported by a passerby at 1:18 a.m. and the arriving firefighters punched out a window and forced open the door to fully extinguish the small fire. Investigators ruled the fire accidental, the result of the unseasoned wood set outside of the oven to dry, only to smolder and cause “smoke damage and minor heat damage to the interior of the food cart.”
As of Monday morning, the GoFundMe campaign was more than 80 percent of the way to its $5,000 goal. Portland-based trailer repair company Quality Trailers will fix the trailer and it should reopen by mid-November, Matsumoto said.
