Eighteen years after Ken’s Artisan Pizza launched in Portland, Oregon, and became one of the most celebrated pizzerias in the world, it’s finally ready to be replicated. How else do you keep up with demand for a pie every minute during limited opening hours?

According to The Source Weekly, current owner Peter Kost has taken over a former nightclub space in Bend, Oregon, for the second location of Ken’s Artisan Pizza, a Neapolitan-style standout that keeps popping up on 50 Top Pizza’s lists of the finest pizza shops anywhere.

Ken Forkish, the pizzeria’s founder, is the original “Ken.” He’s also one of the most influential culinary artists in the pizza industry. His James Beard Award-winning book, Flour Water Salt Yeast, has inspired countless would-be pizzaioli and bakers to get into the business professionally.

Related: How 50 Top Pizza selects the best pizzerias in the world

Forkish sold Ken’s Artisan Pizza to Kost, an old friend, in 2022 and retired in Hawaii. Still, the accolades kept rolling in. 50 Top Pizza named Ken’s Artisan Pizza the No. 5 pizzeria in the U.S. this year and ranked it at No. 3 in 2023. 50 Top Pizza also ranked it as the 18th best pizzeria in the entire world last year.

For the U.S. 50 Top Pizza awards held in Manhattan in June 2023, Forkish flew from his Hawaiian home to join Kost and chef Vincent Krone at the ceremony. Forkish told Oregon Live that the 50 Top Pizza designation felt “like a lifetime achievement award, even though I’m not doing the work anymore. And these guys keep making the pizzeria better.”

Kost said there’s “a lot of history” behind the restaurant’s success. “Ken is a super guy, and I’m the lucky recipient of that relationship,” he told Oregon Live. “The team we’ve put together with Ken’s foundation and Vince’s kitchen team has just been fantastic. From hospitality to food, it’s really hitting its stride.”

In the interview with The Source Weekly, Kost said he hopes to have the new Ken’s Artisan Pizza store open by November.

The pizzeria’s slow-fermented dough recipe features a sourdough starter and has been perfected through considerable experimentation over the years. And proper dough handling makes a big difference, Kost said. “It’s more about the practice of how you manipulate the dough from beginning to end. In other words, it’s not just the recipe. A lot of people make [the recipe]—it’s probably pretty close [to others] in terms of proportions that are added to it. It’s more about the practice of how we manipulate the dough.”

But after recognition from 50 Top Pizza last year, demand for that dough soared to new heights, as Krone recently told Oregon Live. The kitchen team went from baking about 150 pies a day to 300. “Three hundred pizzas over five hours—that’s a pizza each minute,” he said. The solution, Kost and Krone decided, was to export the famous brand to another part of Oregon.

Kost chose Bend for his second location in part because he enjoys visiting Central Oregon and wanted to spend more time there rather than open a second store in Portland. The new location, he believes, needs to stand on its own.

“I didn’t want to diminish the quality and nature of the [original] space,” Kost told The Source Weekly. “I wanted to do another one because I feel like it should be shared. There have been a lot of offers to [open locations in Vancouver and Lake Oswego)….And I think that all diminishes the incredible space that’s already there. And [opening in Bend], in a way, doesn’t. It creates a new one on its own, but with a community that’s very similar.”

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