Show Me Pizza Is in Your Internets, Streaming Your Food on Twitch

(l-r) Co-owners Benjamin Demarchelier and Dimitri Voutsinas (Photo by John Anderson)

The questions drip thick like rivulets of extra sauce over the edge of a hot Neapolitan pie.

Why does Austin's Show Me Pizza stream video of the pizzas they cook – live on Twitch! – for all the world to see? Is this some attempt at distraction, just another tech gambit trying to compensate for mediocre cuisine? And what does local street art phenomenon TVHead have to do with all of it?

Let's take those three questions in order, one at a time.

First, let's sit down inside the cool, quirkily decorated interior of Show Me Pizza on South First and get some answers from the team behind this busy joint.

"We've been open for 16 months now," says Benjamin Demarchelier, co-owner and manager of Show Me. "So we were in the middle of the pandemic, and one of the things that were doing really well were pizza places. Pizzas are takeout-able and deliverable, so even if nobody can actually sit in your restaurant, you can still sell a whole ton of them and do really well. And that's also why we put everything on TV: We wanted to livestream the ovens so that people could at least peer through a window, a video window, and see what was going on. They can do it from their car, through their phone – wherever they are, they can watch their pizza being made."

But doesn't that seem kind of ... gimmicky? Doesn't it detract from the venerable traditions of piemaking and –

Demarchelier shakes his head. "I mean, gosh," he says, surprisingly passionate about this whole video flex, "with everything going bad in the world, it's great to be able to watch food being made. It's not political, it's not religious, it's just food being made – and what comes out at the end is delicious and ends up in someone's mouth."

Well, within reason, anyway: Sometimes sheer geography might get in the way. "The first week we were open," says Demarchelier, "someone was talking to us on Twitch, trying to order pizza. We'd never taken a Twitch order before, and we were like, 'Wait, what's your address?' The guy says, 'I'm in Beirut.' And we were like, 'Ahhhh, yeah, that's not gonna be possible.' And the guy was like, 'No, I'll send you my credit card number, I just wanna watch the pizza being made.'"

So let's grant this video streaming some legitimacy; people seem very into it, regardless of other factors. But of course there are other factors: the food, right? The biggest damn factor of all. Which, it turns out, is also surprising.

New York native Demarchelier grew up in a hospitality family, the son of successful restaurateurs who had him washing dishes at 12 years old at Sunset Beach in Shelter Island. He's a food service lifer – and a respected one. Demarchelier can cook, too, but he's not the chef here.

Domo Arrabbiata Mr. Roboto pizza (Photo by John Anderson)

Dimitri Voutsinas – another native New Yorker, another co-owner (his wife, Chrissy Argao-Voutsinas, is the third of the Show Me Pizza triumvirate) – is the chef. Voutsinas is why the live-video schtick, as engaging as it may be, is only extra sauce: He used to run the kitchens of New York's renowned Motorino Pizzeria Napoletana.

"I did the whole gamut in New York," says the thickly bearded culinary maestro, "from running a place in Queens to running a place in Times Square, to the Russian Tea Room, Bar Boulud, Red Rooster. And I ran Motorino for quite a few years, fixing the recipes, the recipe books, and managing the three locations in New York. I opened a bunch of restaurants for them in Asia, too. Motorino does the same style of Neapolitan pizza, but ours here is slightly different."

"Motorino's was the first Margherita pizza I ever had," says Demarchelier. "It was amazing, and it was Dimitri's recipe. And he brought that here, adjusted it for the water and the humidity, and we ended up with this really great pizza."

Voutsinas brought it here so he and his wife could open Show Me Pizza with Demarchelier. Argao-Voutsinas' family is in Houston, and the three friends had wearied of the New York food-service grind – and the weather. "In Austin, instead of nine months of winter," says Demarchelier, "we get nine months of nice weather. Three months of hotter-than-hell, too, but if my feet aren't in snowboarding boots, I don't wanna be anywhere near snow – and I'm getting kind of used to the 100-degree temps. Just gotta dip into Barton Springs Pool every once in a while."

Meanwhile, the food. Because one outstanding Margherita pie does not a pizzeria make: You need a variety, and each place has to have its own specialties of the house. So, what's unique to Show Me Pizza?

"The Cashville Hot Chicken," says Demarchelier. "That was Dimitri's idea, inspired by the Nashville hot chicken boom. Burrata's the base, and then fried chicken, and – we had to deconstruct it. Because, in the beginning, we tried the chicken, and –"

"It was basically fried to order," says Voutsinas, "and put on the pizza halfway through? And business was slow enough when we first opened that we could do it. But when business picked up, we were like, 'This is fucking impossible.' The way it was put together just threw a wrench in the works. So now we pre-smoke the chickens ourselves, pull it apart, it gets crunchies on top – it just makes a better pizza."

"The 50 First Dates is a traditional Hawaiian pizza," says Demarchelier, "but Dimitri puts onion bechamel on it, and mesquite-smoked pork, fresh-roasted pineapple, chili oil, and thyme."

"The Domo Arrabiatta is a play on a pasta dish I used to do at Motorina, actually," says Voutsinas. "It's the same ingredients, but I turned it into a pizza."

Demarchelier nods, grinning. "With the fermented chiles and the honey, gosh, it's – it's such a delightful pizza."

"We do as much as we can in-house," says Voutsinas. "We ferment the chiles, we smoke the meats, we do the desserts here – panna cotta, tiramisu – and the salads are put together by us, the meatballs are made here. Everything that obviously isn't bought somewhere. I mean, I'm not gonna sit here and make mozzarella cheese. I can, if I wanted to – but not for the amount that we put out."

Watch your orders being made on Show Me Pizza's live Twitch channel. Visit twitch.tv/showmepizza.

"Right now we've got a pizza called Peachy Keen, with Fredericksburg peaches," says Demarchelier. "It's so great that it'd be on the menu year-round, except those peaches are really hard to get in the winter."

"A lot of our weekly specials turned into permanent pizzas on the menu," notes Voutsinas. "The Four Cheese Apocalypse, the Domo Arrabbiata. The Meaty Boi. We haven't really changed the menu for a while, but the first six months we were open, we changed the menu like every two weeks. Now we've got a good mix of something for everybody on our menu – plus a special, plus you can make your own."

So. We've listened, we've sampled, we're sated. The question of culinary quality is answered: Show Me Pizza is, to cop a bilingual palindrome, muy yum. A peel-that-last-glop-of-mozz-off-the-cardboard-and-yearn-for-more-even-though-you're-already-happily-stuffed kind of yum. The crusts alone – "adjusted for the water and the humidity" – could make St. Anthony weep tears of joy.

Now what about this TVHead guy and those bold images stamped by hand onto every pizza box flying from the store? How does Austin's notorious wheat-paste provocateur, whose posters and stickers either glorify (or maybe desecrate) so much local infrastructure, get involved in what amounts to, ultimately, pizzadvertising?

"I was working with Natassia Wilde," the anonymous artist currently known as TVHead tells me from his base of operations at Bender Bar & Grill. "She runs Wilde Art Curation and she's been repping my gallery work. And somehow she knew or crossed paths with Ben at Show Me Pizza, and together they came up with this idea for the box – this is my version of the story – to have a monthly artist and put their work on the box."

(Note: The Pizza Box Art project was initially pitched by Samantha Alcantara of Luxe Art Agency, nomming pies and brainstorming in Show Me Pizza with associates Wilde and Demarchelier.)

"At first I was like, 'Ehhhh,'" says TVHead, shrugging over his beer. "But, see, I'm a designer. Since I was a kid, I've always been into making my own products and, like, ads and stuff. So, later, I took whatever I was doing for clients and started doing it through TVHead – and I'm still doing that. And I'm proud of this project, too – proud to work with Show Me Pizza, and to have Natassia represent me. When I was asked if I'd do this, I said, 'Lemme go try the pizza.' So I went there anonymously and tried it. And I've been in Austin since '98, and I think it's the best pizza in town right now."

OK, but doesn't it seem like there's a weird disconnect here? That the anticonsumerist TVHead message is – c'mon, now – it's being used to sell a consumable product?

The artist chuckles in the shadows. "Oh, well, yeah, of course – that's the greatest thing ever. That's the joke of the joke. Even though the art's on a pizza box for a business, I'm telling you exactly to consume it. It's satire, as far as I'm concerned. It's almost like that movie, you know, where they had the glasses, and, uh –"

They Live by John Carpenter?

"Yeah, it's like that. But I just make my shit so you don't have to wear the glasses."

Ah, we love that quote. And we have more to report about TVHead and his beyond-pizza doings, but for now, dear reader, we've answered the three questions that incited our foodie quest.

And so, noting that the Pizza Box Art project of hand-stamped originals will continue at Show Me with a new artist every few months – the prolific Savannalore's work is up next, debuting at a launch party this Sunday, Aug. 14 – we order ourselves one of those sausagey John Kelso pies and, while tracking its creation on Twitch, type a heartfelt "Bon Appétit!" into the chatscreen's illuminated scroll, our mouth anticipating the Neapolitan pleasure our eyes can already see.

Show Me Pizza