#96 Zoli’s NY Pizza

December 1, 2018

Addison, TX

Back at the end of October, I traveled to Atlanta, GA for a work trip. If you remember, I took a late-night ride up north of the city to go to a pizza place on the list, O4W.  It was only fair that when Eric went to Austin, TX for a work trip, he traveled up to try one of the pizza places on the list, too. The only difference was that his trip was a bit of a longer drive – a couple of hours.

Zoli’s NY Pizza is a new addition to the 2018 list, but I talked about it in this post. It wasn’t a huge surprise for us to see it on the list, as we had already heard good things about it. Whereas Cane Rosso is entirely authentic Neapolitan, Zoli’s is everything but. It sells square pies and round pies, as well as sandwiches, salads, and pastas.

We understood a few of the references on the pizza menu and thought they were very clever. For example, there is the “Pizza Loves Emily”, which is topped with honey and roasted mushrooms. There’s Bovino’s buffalo chicken, a nod to Arthur Bovino and his love of the city of Buffalo (and their pizza). Eric ended up ordering the “Lil Troy”, which was topped with mozzarella, vodka sauce, mini meatballs, straciatella, cherry peppers, and garlic breadcrumbs. He also ordered a “Spangler”, or a plain classic cheese round pie to bring home for me!

These pies were great, even when reheated the next day after a flight across the country. The square pie was thicker than a grandma slice, but thinner than a Sicilian. If you order this specific pie, be warned that the cherry peppers are HOT.

The cheese pizza also was good, topped with a sprinkling of fresh basil that would definitely have tasted better fresh, but wasn’t bad reheated.

Speaking of pizza reheating, we finally have come around to the fact that the best way to reheat pizza is on the stove. It definitely takes a little more time, but when your husband carries pizza in his carry on halfway across the US, it’s worth the extra few minutes.

To visit:

Zoli’s NY Pizza
14910 Midway Rd
Addison, TX 75001

#65 Home Slice Pizza

August 14th, 2016

Austin, TX

When we finished our dinner at the Backspace, we still had one more pizza place to try in Austin. Since our flight back to NJ was early in the morning, we had our second dinner at Home Slice Pizza.

Home Slice serves New York style pizza, which was a nice change up from the Neapolitan pies that we’d been having around Texas. They serve pizza by the pie or by the slice, and since this was our second dinner, we opted for the latter. We ended up with three slices for a variety: a regular cheese, a spinach and ricotta, and a pepperoni with mushroom.

The slices were definitely NY-style and were just like any slice that we would have gotten walking around Manhattan. Our favorite was probably the spinach and ricotta. Just look at the globs of ricotta on that slice! We usually prefer fresh spinach on our pizzas, but ricotta makes even blanched spinach taste amazing.

Home Slice recently opened a second bigger location in Austin. The original location, on South Congress, is pretty tiny and gets pretty busy. We just grabbed our slices and sat outside at the counter, but we were lucky to even get a spot there. Apparently the new location in the North Loop also serves Sicilian slices. It also has a full bar.

Overall, we were really impressed by the pizza in Texas. We wouldn’t have thought that we could get such good Neapolitan pizza, let alone New York-style and more recently, Detroit-style, pizza so far away from New York or Detroit. It was a really nice surprise!

Also, don’t think that we just came down to Texas and only ate pizza. We also stopped at had donuts (we got the massive Texas-sized donut on our way up to Dallas) and some BBQ before we left. Breakfast tacos were also enjoyed. We were lucky that Austin has such a nice running path along the river. Otherwise, I think we both would have gained a few pounds.

To visit:

Home Slice Pizza
1415 S Congress Ave
Austin, TX 78704

#93 The Backspace

August 14th, 2016

Austin, TX

After our quick drive up to Dallas, we drove back down to Austin to try another pizza place on the list. The Backspace was listed on the 2015 list one spot after Cane Rosso, at #93, so we were excited to directly compare the two pizzas.

The Backspace is Austin’s first Neapolitan-style pizzeria. It opened in 2010, and it also adheres to the VPN guidelines for Neapolitan pizzas with imported “OO” flour and San Marzano tomatoes. Even with all the similarities to Cane Rosso, the two pizzas tasted very different to us.  The difference was mostly in the crust. The crust at the Backspace was more charred from the wood-fired oven, and if you’ve been reading our blog for any length of time, you know that we like a good char on our crust. It was also a little bit less doughy. Both restaurants served pizzas with really unique and fresh toppings, although the selection is more expansive at Cane Rosso.

We ordered one of the roasted mushroom pizzas here, which was topped with ricotta, capers, and thyme. We loved the generous gobs of ricotta, which paired so nicely with the roasted mushrooms. While we generally aren’t huge fans of salty capers, they complemented the pizza well. We wished that we had room to try more of the pizzas here – the white pizza Bianca looked especially good and also got rave reviews online.

We also noticed (after the fact) that the Backspace was rated on the Daily Meal’s “10 Best Pepperoni Pies in America” list, at #7. So we’ll have to try one of those as well.

The Backspace is a really small, rustic, restaurant. It only seats 30 people and can get pretty crowded on the weekends. We got there early on Sunday when they opened for dinner service, so we didn’t have any issues, but they recommend making a reservation. They also have daily happy hours on the weeknights, which would be good to make note of if you’re in the area. It would be a great place to take a date because it is nice and cozy, with a good wine list. It is also right around the corner from 6th Street, where all the happenings are.

To visit:

The Backspace
507 San Jacinto Blvd
Austin, TX 78701

#92 Cane Rosso

August 14th, 2016

Dallas, TX

I was lucky enough to be invited to a bachelorette party down in Austin, TX, for a long weekend in August. Since there were a few pizza places in Texas on the 101, Eric decided to fly down on Sunday and meet me, after we were all partied-out. We rented a car and drove up to Dallas for lunch to the first place on the list, Cane Rosso.

Cane Rosso has a few locations around Texas. They actually have one in Austin, also, but the one on the list said Dallas, so that’s where we went. It started out as a mobile pizza truck and it claims to be the most authentic wood-fired Neapolitan pizza in Texas. The owner and founder decided to change the mobile catering oven into a full-time pizzeria in 2011.

Like all true Neapolitan pizzas, Cane Rosso uses the “OO” flour imported from Italy and makes its dough fresh daily. They use the San Marzano tomatoes and also make their own in-house mozzarella, adhering to all of the VPN guidelines.

We ordered the burrata appetizer to start, and then two pizzas: the Margherita and the Cane Rosso, which was topped with sausage, roasted onions & peppers, san marzanos, homemade mozzarella and parmigiano cheese. We figured that the signature named pizza had to be pretty good.

These were definitely true Neapolitan pizzas. We really liked the variety of pizzas that they served as well. Pizza Today named the restaurant the 2017 Independent Pizzeria of the year, and I found the article about the restaurant’s expansion and development really interesting. Particularly, the fact that they import the ovens to each location from Italy and no two ovens are exactly the same. Also, they say that their dough is notoriously difficult to work with because they don’t refrigerate it and so it stays very sticky and soft.

Also interesting is that the founder of Cane Rosso recently opened another pizzeria in Dallas that makes NY-style pizzas, Zoli’s. They serve round and square pies in different styles, for the people who don’t like Neapolitan pizzas. He seems determined to take over the Texas pizza scene!

Zoli’s wasn’t on any of our lists, but the pizza there looks good too and would probably be worth checking out if we are back in the area.

To visit:

Cane Rosso
2612 Commerce St
Dallas, TX 75226

#100 Il Forno

November 4th, 2017

San Antonio, TX

We managed to get a bit of sleep after our first late-night pizza stop in Texas, but we couldn’t sleep too late because we had to make a detour to San Antonio before heading a bit further upstate to the wedding. It took us a little over an hour to drive to San Antonio from Austin and we showed up at Il Forno just after noon.

This restaurant is a newcomer to the 2017 list, and it has only been open for about a year and a half. We were a little skeptical that it would live up to the others (especially since Via 313 was taken off of the list in 2017), but we were really surprised here.

Il Forno is located in a quiet part of San Antonio, a little bit south of downtown and away from the crowds visiting the Alamo. From the outside, you couldn’t tell it was a pizza place because it is painted lime green and has an overgrown looking garden out front. As soon as we walked in, though, we saw the massive wood burning oven and we knew we were in the right place.

Although it has only been open a little over a year, Il Forno already produces their own sage and basil, and will expand the garden as the years go on. They have kumquat trees planted out front that will take a couple more years to produce fruit! All of their ingredients come from local Texas farms, and even more impressively, they cure all of their own meats in-house.

When we heard that, we had to order the Entero, which came with a “chef’s selection” of three meats. There was a spicy sausage, a spicier pepperoni, and a third pepperoni-ish meat as well. Sorry that I am not very good at meat identification – whatever it was, it was tasty! We also ordered a butternut squash salad that was topped with pistachios and goat cheese. We had to balance out that meat with some vegetable!

The crust on this pizza was awesome. Eric commented that it rivals some of the best Neapolitan crusts that we’ve had in NYC or San Fran. The cheese wasn’t loaded on too heavily, so all the flavors really shone through. We really approve of this addition to the 2017 list!

And since we ordered only one pizza here, we still had plenty of stomach space to enjoy an evening full of delicious wedding food 🙂

To visit:

Il Forno
122 Nogalitos St
San Antonio, TX 78204

#74 Via 313

November 4th, 2017

Austin, TX

This past weekend, we took a break from the NYC scene here to spend the weekend down in Texas. Texas has a few pizza places that have made the lists the past three years, and while we had hit a handful of them last August, there were two more additions in 2016 and 2017 that we still hadn’t made it to. Luckily, my cousin was getting married not too far outside of Austin, so we had a good excuse to fly down for the weekend!

We had a late flight into Austin, and landed around midnight. We really wanted to try Via 313, but of course their main restaurants close at 10pm. Lucky for us, they also have food trucks (trailers)! We drove straight to one from the airport.

Usually when a pizza place has more than one location, we try to go to the original one. We happened to be on a tight time frame this weekend, so we were willing to make an exception. Then we found out that the original Via 313 was opened in 2011 in a trailer! So we essentially WERE going to the original. This made us very happy.

The pizza here is Detroit-style inspired. If you read my previous post from our pizza road trip, Detroit style pizza is really unique. The brothers who started Via 313 grew up around Detroit, so they based the pizza here off of the style they were most familiar with. At the main locations, you can get pizzas in 4-slice or 8-slice sizes, just like Buddy’s, but the trailers only serve slices in 4’s. After having been to Buddy’s, we can say that this is pretty close to authentic Detroit-style pizza, even down to the crispy cheese edging.

Four slices was plenty for us, since we had eaten a small dinner before getting on the plane, and one slice was plenty to keep me full. That left three slices for Eric. We ended up ordering the Four Cheese Blend, and it had more cheese on it than almost any other pizza that we’ve had, so it was super filling. The sauce that was globbed on top was delicious. We waited 40 minutes for this pizza to come out of the oven, but we thought it was worth it.

The lines stayed constantly long here the whole time that we were waiting, since the truck is parked right out front of a bar. This was pretty smart planning by the Via 313 folks! It was also highly entertaining for us, as sober people-watchers.

To visit:

Via 313
1111B E 6th St
Austin, TX 78702