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Anyone in Dallas who has ordered pizza in the last millennium has likely received this box: It’s emblazoned with “Hot & Delicious,” with a Super Mario Bros.-looking pizzaiolo on the front. A mediocre cheese pizza is inside, right? Nope, this pizza is dashed with green garlic and wine-bathed mushrooms.
The restaurant makes just 50 pizzas; that’s all it can handle.
On Sundays only, Homewood pretends it’s a pizza shop during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Homewood’s chefs had considered selling pizzas in the past. Executive chef and co-founder Matt McCallister grew up cooking in pizza joints. And in the lovely days of Not Pandemic, McCallister and pastry chef Maggie Huff flung around the idea of opening their own pizzeria. Today, it’s a real way to keep operations going during a crisis.
“We have been playing with creative ways to hustle food,” McCallister says. “With the pandemic, I have looked at business models. Pizza hasn’t skipped a beat.”
One Homewood pizza beams: The fermented green garlic is like a flashlight in the dark. Handfuls of sliced mushrooms, on an undisturbed spa day in wine, are scattered over bubbling cheese. The crust, a collaboration between Huff and McCallister, is thin and light, sporting just enough salt. It crackle-breaks when you fold the slice. Inside, it’s chewy and soft. There’s a tang from sourdough, too.
Another pie has charred broccoli rabe and sausage-like fennel clouds.
Homewood looks and sounds different in pandemic days. Negative space surrounds the tables. The bar seats have blinked out of existence. Fire leaps into the air from the kitchen, illuminating staff profiles hidden behind masks and aprons. The clamor, the kind you’d typically see and hear at Dallas’ best restaurants, just doesn’t exist.
But at least there’s pizza.
Ghost kitchens. Flying pizzas. Take and bake.
In late July, Frank Underground chef-creator Jennie Kelley tried selling savory tarts that look like summer pizzas. She loaded flat rectangles of puff pastry up with goat cheese, sliced summer squash, cherry tomatoes, green olives and thyme and sold them out of her space. Frank Underground is now officially closed, so Kelley has joined with Ocean Prime executive chef Brandon Moore (he also pickles things on the side) and musician Madison King in a new venture.
Keep an eye out: Their Better Half Pop-Up is now experimenting with Detroit-style and New York-style pizzas.
Detroit style has a thick crust but is light and bouncy, like focaccia, and has crunchy edges. New York style is thin and foldable.
Kelley is buying cardboard pizza boxes as we speak.
Another Detroit-style pop-up, 8 Mile Pies, is selling crunchy-edged pizzas out of restaurant kitchens around Dallas. It’s available for pickup only.
At Zoli’s, the pizza company with restaurants in Addison and Fort Worth, executive chef Jeff Bekavac is hunting for new ideas that will keep money coming in. They’ve already added family-style meals and take-and-bake pizzas. With catering opportunities nearly nonexistent, he’s imagining what they could do with ghost kitchens, too.
Their latest new venture is Thunderbird Pies, a Detroit-style pizza delivery company.
Zoli’s — alongside its sibling restaurant Cane Rosso — also just started shipping frozen pizzas across the country, via the food shipping service Goldbelly.
“Take-and-bakes really have just become part of the DNA. Just like any other ticket that comes in,” Bekavac says. “Goldbelly is a whole different ballgame. Shipping across the country, packaging, cooking instructions, labels, ice packs ... Day One has been a learning experience.”
At the end of March, one of Dallas’ best Italian restaurants, Sprezza, lopped a bunch of entrees off its menu. Chef Ryan Ferguson kept pizza and pasta and a few snacks, then began delivery service through Caviar. The margherita pizza from the Sprezza chef is a humble gem — hand-stretched crust charred at the edges, thin as a postcard, with a few islands of mozzarella.
“Pizza is still doing great to go,” he says. “It’s a big-time moneymaker.”
But even pizza isn’t a guarantee
Here’s how tough it is out there: Even pizzerias aren’t universally successful right now.
Chef Dino Santonicola opened Partenope in downtown Dallas in September 2019. The native Italian had been cooking since he was 14 and, after moving to the U.S. in 2014, became the pizzaiolo at Cane Rosso restaurants in North Texas. Santonicola met his wife, Megan Santonicola, at the Deep Ellum location.
As their restaurant Partenope approaches its first anniversary, the focus is on survival.
“We are in trouble,” Santonicola says. “We are a small restaurant, and we are in trouble.”
Sales crashed overnight. When the restaurant reopened on May 15, business picked up. But then it closed again during Black Lives Matter protests in downtown Dallas. The pandemic had already emptied the central business district of the usual conventions, 9-to-5′ers and post-concert crowds.
“We put a lot of savings into this restaurant,” he says. You don’t have a Plan B. There’s just only so much you can cut.”
The Santonicolas are pushing long hours while teaching classes on how to make pizza and selling pies via curbside takeout and delivery. His pizzas are as magnificent as they’ve ever been, made with simple ingredients that boast enormous flavor. He proofs the dough for three days, then spreads electric red sauce made of simmered-down San Marzano tomatoes.
The way to keep his neighborhood joint afloat, he says, is for consumers to order online directly. He assures downtown skeptics that there’s a space to park in front of the restaurant. Then, customers get a text and the pizza is delivered right to the passenger seat.
“If you order in, you should do it from the little guy,” he says. “Chick-fil-A will always be there. The little guy is not going to make it.”