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Customers in the window at Lardo's downtown Portland location. The sandwich shop already acts as a pre-match staging area for some Portland Timbers fans, but owner Rick Gencarelli says he has no plans to open a location in Providence Park.

(The Oregonian)

It sounds like a great fit.

Lardo, one of Portland's premier sandwich shops, whose downtown location already serves as a pre-match staging area for many Portland Timbers fans, was coming to the Providence Park, the Portland Timbers stadium.

At least that's what Timbers owner Merritt Paulson indicated in a tweet last week ...

... which, in turn, led to a post on the Timbers Reddit page headlined, "We're getting Lardo in Section 107."

The only problem? Paulson's tweet was the first time Lardo's principal owners say they'd heard of the deal.

"It was news to me," owner Rick Gencarelli said. "On any given day, I get a bunch of Lardo tweets. On this particular day it was a pretty high volume. The whole Timbers Army was chiming in. By the end of the day, we were getting tweets like, 'This better not be a joke!' Typical Portland, they're already angry."

Gencarelli said he's "super-stoked" to talk to someone with the Timbers, but has "no idea what it's like to be a vendor at the stadium.

"I'm definitely open to talking about it, but I've got a lot of questions."

Kurt Huffman, whose ChefStable restaurant group backs Lardo, confirmed that the news took him by surprise.

"We heard about it from Merritt Paulson's tweets," Huffman said Wednesday evening. "We're really excited to talk to somebody at the Timbers. We're huge Timbers fans and we'd love to talk to somebody about doing this.

"Tell Merritt to give me a call."

-- Michael Russell