By Norah Dobrot
It’s a warm summer afternoon, and Dream Deli is bustling. Music is playing softly inside and, seated at the row of tomato-red outdoor tables, customers are enjoying a variety of sandwiches, salads and house-made sodas. The restaurant, which opened in late November of 2025, feels well-situated on the sunny corner of SE Division St. and 35th Pl.
For Jessie Levine, who co-owns Dream Deli with her husband, chef John Bissell, the restaurant’s sense of belonging is no surprise. “Ever since we got to Portland, it’s apparent it feels like home,” she says. “We knew we definitely wanted to open a restaurant in SE.”
Inspired by Bissell and Levine’s Jewish and Italian heritage, Dream Deli’s menu is also guided by “the North Star [of] sourcing and working with ingredients from the Pacific Northwest whenever possible,” explains Bissell.
For Bissell, who grew up going to all kinds of delis—“German, Italian, Jewish, Vietnamese,” he lists—Dream Deli pulls from both heritage and personal experience. Dream Deli’s corned beef sandwich, for example, is inspired by his “favorite sandwich from when we lived in Los Angeles: pastrami on untoasted rye with coleslaw and Swiss cheese.”
In taking elements from both Italian and Jewish deli traditions, “There’s some tension….You often won’t see pork in Jewish delis, but an Italian deli wouldn’t be that without cured pork products,” he explains. “Straddling that line is what we’re doing.” This concept is executed using locally-sourced and house-made ingredients.
“We’re trying to be more of a place for the immediate community than a perfect replica of somebody’s East Coast deli they grew up with, which we’ll just never be,” says Levine. The deli was named with this in mind: “We wanted the name to be a little weird to set people up with the right expectation.…There are definitely familiar flavors, if they’re looking for traditional Jewish or Italian deli things, but it’s in its own realm.”
In Dream Deli’s case, creating a unique restaurant included building the physical space. The location, previously a boutique, “was essentially just a concrete window box,” when the restaurant’s lease was signed, explains Levine. With the help of a contractor, Levine and Bissell took on, as Levine put it, “the wild process of DIY building a restaurant in a space that wasn’t one before.” Just as in creating their menu, Bissell and Levine looked for sources in the community, employing local carpenters and artists to help create the restaurant.
More recently, the springtime addition of outdoor seating greatly expanded the restaurant’s seating capacity. “It’s really nice to have a place for our guests and community to sit,” comments Levine.
Bissell has 19 years of professional cooking experience under his belt, which has taken him from Colorado to Los Angeles to Portland, where he ended up working at Italian restaurant Ava Gene’s—just a few blocks away from the deli—as executive chef. Bissell seems to enjoy the shift from fine dining to a more casual environment: “This is a place where family, community members, friends can pop in once, twice a week,” he says. “It allows me to feel more in touch with our clientele.”
Levine’s background is in public relations and marketing, which she continues with Dream Deli. “I’m here at the deli usually three days a week, but a lot of my work happens behind the scenes,” she says. Marketing, business administration, customer service and catering coordination all fall under her purview.
Many of Dream Deli’s ingredients are sourced locally, including bread from Good Dough, brisket from Carman Ranch and tomatoes from Eloisa Organic Farm. Some of these connections were made by Bissell back at Ava Gene’s, which has “a very farm-to-table concept,” explains Levine. “He had built really strong relationships with the farmers and the growers and the purveyors, so he knew exactly the map where we would source [from],” she adds.
Other ingredients are prepared in-house, including pickles, corned beef and turkey. “It’s a big math problem to figure out how to get everything ordered and brined and cooked on time. But it’s a very fun challenge,” says Bissell.
Levine describes Dream Deli as a place of “choose-your-own-adventures,” some patrons come alone to have a cup of coffee and a knish; others come in groups for celebratory lunches. One of the residential neighbors asked Bissell to make pretzel buns for backyard barbecues, and the deli has catered “everything from baby showers to celebrations of life,” says Levine. “We’re still pretty new and trying to feel out what this immediate community needs and how we can be part of that,” she explains.
Less than a year in, it’s clear there’s much in store for Dream Deli. In the immediate future, Bissell is looking forward to spicy peppers being in season. “We’ve been wanting to make our own hot sauce for as long as we’ve been open,” he says, “and hot peppers are right on the horizon.” Levine is excited “to plan and host one-off events or parties or pop-up dinners,” she says, an aspect of the restaurant she’s always been eyeing but that there has not been time for with “the day-to-day of running a restaurant within its first year.” There’s lots to enjoy in the present moment, too. As far as the fresh, local produce the deli incorporates goes, “We are in the throes of the best season,” says Bissell.
Dream Deli
3542 SE Division St.
Tuesday-Sunday, 11 am-3 pm
dreamdelipdx.com
