Austin's Best New Pizza Places

We're really stepping on the third rail here, daring to engage in Pizza Discourse. For such a simple dish – baked dough topped with sauce, cheese, meat, and veggies – folks have strong and polarizing opinions about what makes great pie. The stasis point in the Great Pizza Debate, probably, is the style. There's New York style, New Jersey style, Chicago, Detroit, New Haven, Neapolitan, Sicilian … the list goes on. This cacophony of voices and accents in the pizza space, with a dipping cup of globalization on the side, means that new pizza places have popped up in recent years like fungi after a good spring rain.

Austin has plenty of well-loved pizza joints that we're hereby endowing with emeritus status: Home Slice, East Side Pies, Bufalina, Pinthouse Pizza, Via 313, Conans, Mangia, Little Deli. These folks have earned their stripes over the years by consistently serving high-quality pizza in their respective styles. But there are also lots of young up-and-comers on Austin's pizza scene, slinging dough from food trucks to suburban strip malls, that are definitely worth a look-see. We've rounded them up here as a guide, which you can use to educate yourself and expand your pizza horizons.

Baldinucci Pizza Romana

Baldinucci made the transition from ghost kitchen to West Lake brick-and-mortar in October 2022, and social media has been alight with rave reviews. The speciality of the house here is Roman pizza (the name of the restaurant may have tipped you off), with thick squares of buttery dough topped with a sweetish marinara and gooey cheese, and just about the most generous mounds of toppings I've seen on a pie. Here's a slab with a mound of quattro funghi; and my gods, would you look at the full serving of broccoli on that Bianco Florentine? The fam really loved the good old-fashioned pepperoni, which we ordered as a full tray. The pepperoni, cupped and crispy, is plentiful, the cheese is gooey and creamy, and the crust is buttery without being oily or greasy. Baldinucci also offers vegan Roman-style pizza with plant-based cheese and generous portions of veggies, and New York-style pizza in bold variants like lasagna and Buffalo chicken. Top it off with a cup of peanut butter and jelly gelato and you'll have the perfect Roman holiday without leaving the city limits.  – Melanie Haupt

Dovetail Pizza

We can hardly believe the star power behind this newest (2022) pizza place that's rockin' pies in the heart of the Bouldin Creek neighborhood. Working a hybrid of New York and Neapolitan styles, Dovetail Pizza is a culinary collab from the wizards of Present Tense Hospitality (Salt & Time, Rosen's Bagels), Todd Duplechan of Lenoir and Vixen's Wedding, and Swedish Hill's Alex Manley (who developed the place's signature slow-fermentation dough). The mighty maestri and their crew make all manner of meat and veggies sing hallelujah on generous pies and serve them (and a panoply of unique starters, salads, and pasta dishes) with condiment options of chili crisp and herbed vinegar instead of the same ol' same ol' red flakes and parm, bringing a family-friendly goodness that shades to more grownup pleasures when the night is deep and the full bar crescendos with cocktails for perfect pizza pairings. We tried the meatball pizza special on our visit, with Salt & Time-concocted meatballs dotted with smol rosettes of ricotta. Deliziosa!  – Wayne Alan Brenner

Sammataro Pizza

What started as a New York-style pizza pop-up in West Lake in late 2020 is now an Eastside food truck and a West End brick-and-mortar, having moved into the space vacated by another pizzeria, 40 North, in January 2023. Walk up to the truck at the Arbor Food Park on 12th and enjoy a few BYOBrewskis while waiting for a fresh, wood-fired pepperoni pizza with those tiny little cup 'n' char 'ronis. The cheese is tangy, the pepperoni spicy, and the crust is perfectly chewy. The restaurant offers an extended menu including pastas, meatballs, and daily pizza specials, along with beer and wine. This is truly excellent pizza, but the price tag is a little extra, clocking in at $30 for a 16-inch pie with one topping.  – M.H.

Pedroso's Pizza

Name a more hyped pizza place in this town than Pedroso's. You can't, because every foodfluencer in Austin is praising this li'l food truck outside the Night Owl bar on Burnet Road to the heavens. The main attraction here is the Grandma style, which is a rectangular pie with a thickish crust that's reminiscent of focaccia and the sauce atop the cheese. Here we like the Double Pepp N' Peppers, topped with a heaping helping of cup 'n' char pepperoni and a double whammy of serrano and banana peppers. Hurts so good! Others swear by the New York style, available by both the slice and the full pie. Do not, under any circumstances, skip the caprese salad. You simply must start your meal with this elegantly executed, flavorful salad of sliced mozzarella and tomatoes, with a deliciously umami balsamic reduction.  – M.H.

Love Supreme Pizza Bar

Ryan McElroy, who launched Thunderbird Coffee in 2006 and Bird Bird Biscuit (with Brian Batch) in 2018, decided to partner with his brother Wade and chef Russell Victorioso and open up a pizza joint on Manor Road in 2021. It's not just any pizza joint, though. It's a neighborhood place, ever-welcoming with sumptuous booths and covered patio and outdoor bar, that's so casually elegant it'd make Instagram weep. It's a destination that boasts New York/Neapolitan pizza – the dough flour here sourced from Barton Springs Mill – and several rich variations (along with salads, award-winning chicken wings, and omg those meatballs in marinara). We can recommend the margherita, which is somehow minimalist yet sumptuous at the same time, the exterior crust blistered yet concealing a soft and chewy interior. Among the beverage selection, an array of natural wines as curated by General Manager Paulina Cline.  –W.A.B.

Side Eye Pie

Longtime pizza explorer Tony Curet started out in Austin with the Neapolitan-flexing Dough Boys Pizza in June of 2020, eventually selling his wares (in partnership with Max Tilka) out of a dedicated food truck in the lot of Meanwhile Brewing Co. Now the talented chef Curet's gone solo with his newest business, Side Eye Pies, on that same brew-adjacent site, basing his beauties on cold-fermented, small-batch dough made fresh right there with Texas Red Wheat flour and native yeast from Barton Springs Mills. He loads those pies with handcrafted organic sauces, house-grated cheese, slow food-approved organic meats – sourcing the basics from Hi-Fi Mycology, Iron Ox Farms, and other local farms – and bakes 'em all in a wood-fired oven until they're properly hot and crispy and just what you're looking for in the way of classics, culinarily experimentals, and even a vegan pie. (Bonus: Their secret brunch weapon, a sweet dish – the Texas Skillet Pancake topped with homemade vanilla whipped cream, fresh fruit compote, and maple syrup – is not to be missed.)  – W.A.B.