Two Slices! Two Unrelated Portland Pizza Shops Named Slice Are Now Fighting

Adam Huskey has a pizza shop called Slice. It's tucked away at the northern edge of Irvington, on Northeast 7th Avenue and Knott Street.

Randy Swerdlick also has a pizza shop named Slice. It's at the Zipper food complex on Northeast 24th Avenue and Sandy Blvd.

The owner of each Slice will tell you that the other guy's a bully or a jerk. And each one will tell you that the name is rightfully theirs.

Huskey's Irvington pie spot Slice Pizzeria opened October 2014, serving up made-to-order slices and pies to its little residential neighborhood, topped with combinations like pickled peppers and chorizo or peaches and cabbage.

Huskey says when he opened, he started with nothing.

"I basically grass-rootsed this little pizza shop," says Huskey. "I spent all of my savings, I was living really meager."

Huskey says he hasn't been necessarily been raking in the money, but he's been surviving, and he pays extra to get good, local ingredients for his pizza—flour from grain company Shepherd's Grain, and meat from Northwest Portland's SP Provisions.

But Huskey says that starting in September 2015, his customers began to complain he'd started using cheaper ingredients at "his new place on Sandy."

Of course, it wasn't Huskey's pizza shop. It was Swerdlick's new, old-school, pizza-by-the-slice shop he'd just opened up at the Zipper.

Both Swerdlick and Huskey agree it's been a problem: Customers were ordering at one shop, then showing up at the other. "Delivery Dudes thought we were the same place," Huskey says.

He says he asked Swerdlick to stop using the name Slice, but that "he was a jerk about it… He knows I'm completely broke and I don't have the ability to throw a bunch of money at him. "

Swerdlick acknowledges he's been ignoring Huskey's continued demands to change his name.

"If he would have registered the name he wouldn't have this problem," says Swerdlick. "We didn't even know he existed."

Huskey's business was registered with the Secretary of State's office as "Homeslice LLC," not any variant of Slice. (He has since also registered the business name "Slice Pizzeria.")

However, Huskey believes that the fact he's been operating under the trade name of Slice takes precedence. Through a lawyer, he sent Swerdlick a cease-and-desist letter on the use of the name.

"I just kind of ignored it," says Swerdlick. "I'm not going to change my name. It's my name. He's upset, but he didn't play the game right. I registered it…. He's a young kid and he called me names, that I'm a scumbag. I physically pushed him out of the store twice now."

Swerdlick also owns The Jewelry Buyer pawn shop on Sandy, and ran a pizza shop called Manhattan Pizza in the '80s before selling his location to Pizza Hut.

"He said, 'We're going to sue,'" says Swerdlick. "I said fine, then sue."

"It's a stab to the heart," says Huskey. "I don't know what to do about it. I don't have the deep pockets to figure it out. And he does."

"Generally, in trademark law, the first one actually doing business has the prior right," says Anne Glazer, an attorney at Stoel Rives specializing in food and trademark law.

This would seem to favor Huskey's pizzeria. But Glazer also says that with a name as undistinctive as Slice, any lawsuit might be an uphill battle—even with the demonstrated customer confusion between the two shops.

"It's in both of their interests for one of them to pick a different name as quickly as possible," says Glazer. "They both share the need to get that done. When it gets personal, the only people who win are the lawyers."

Records show that Jennifer Cale and Kara Lammerman have filed a liquor license application to open a bar called Pocket Bar, in the current location of Huskey's Slice Pizzeria.

"Because of this problem," says Huskey, "I'm considering some negotiations about bringing on a different partner or going in a different direction. We were considering maybe opening a small bar here. But it hasn't happened because we've built up a little bit of a loyal customer base."

But Swerdlick says that Huskey was the aggressor—not him. The 63-year-old says the much-younger Huskey was a threatening physical presence at his pawn shop.

"I feel like he's been a bully about it," says Swerdlick. "I've been nice. I don't know how many times you can be called a scumbag before you say that's enough. I told him, 'I can afford to lose. Can you? Because you're going to lose.'"

Willamette Week