Review: Slice of Austin Pizza Kitchen - Lakeway, TX

After five years in Texas, it's no longer surprising but still a delight for this Jersey boy to find great pizza here, because I had arrived in Central Texas with modest expectations. I had already known about and experienced most of the bigger names in the region, such as Via 313, Salvation Pizza, Home Slice, and Pieous. But in the western suburbs (Bee Cave, Lakeway, Spicewood) I expected to seek out BBQ and Mexican food as surrogates for the great pizza I could easily find in the Philadelphia region, my home for decades.

In late 2020, a small take-out only shop popped up on Route 620, north of Lakeway. In that small red building the owners were making some phemonenal pizza. At the time I wrote this about Lake Travis Pizza:

The cheese was very well balanced to the rest of the pizza, but it was a role player here. The sauce, however, was remarkable. Dark, thick, rich, and bursting with flavor. I would have liked more of it on this pie. And of course, the spicy cup pepperoni was about a perfect accent, adding yet one more layer of umami... Lake Travis pizza is superb stuff, and more proof that "it's the water" is a silly myth about great NYC pizza. Water has almost nothing to do with it; it's about quality ingredients and pizzamaking skills. Lake Travis pizza has that in spades.

It was easily the top NY style pizza in Austin's western suburbs. After a brief expansion that included a sit-down location in Four Points, Lake Travis Pizza returned to a one-location pizza place there on 620. A few years ago, it closed, much to my dismay.

The next proprietors of that site painted the red building robin's egg blue and opened up "Hella Bad" Pizza there. I never got a chance to try it before it closed, and it sat vacant for a while until the very recent opening of Slice of Austin Pizza Kitchen, keeping the blue color of the shop.

I was intrigued by some of the online chatter around Slice of Austin Pizza Kitchen; the pics and description made me hopeful for another great pizza in the region. One thing that I particularly loved about Lake Travis Pizza was that they offered legit NYC pizza that was truly superior to 95% of the pizza actually sold in New York. 

While I appreciate the American embrace of Neapolitan pizza, my heart belongs to New York (style). And these pies at Slice of Austin Pizza Kitchen looked like old-school thin crust pizza; their website claims 48-hour dough proofing to craft "hand-tossed New York-style pizzas featuring a delightful thin, chewy crust."

Nice color underneath

You can get a 12" or 18" pie; we did a "Build Your Own" 18" pizza with mushrooms and sausage. A pizza is always best when eaten on premises, but this is a takeout-only business. The pizza did suffer sweating in a cardboard box for the half-hour drive home, then a few hours at room temp before we re-heated it (on a perforated pan) in the oven for dinner.

Mushroom quality varies widely from pizzeria to pizzeria; these looked conventional but had a nice, deep, earthy flavor.  The sausage was done in the only proper way -- applied in raw chunks so that it cooks on the pie. The cheese was exactly what you want on a New York style pizza; generous but not overwhelming, creamy and salty, a high-end role player to the crust, sauce, and toppings. The sauce had a nice tang, and we all wished there had been more of it on the pizza.

The crust - the key to any pizza - was as advertised. It served as an excellent anchor for the combination of complex flavors we got from the mushrooms, sausage, and cheese. It was thin, but generally sturdy enough to support the toppings. It had wonderful flavor of its own, but using a bread analogy, more akin to soft rolls than to a crusty loaf.

If I were crafting this pizza to my own personal preferences, I'd have more tomato sauce and a crisper crust. But this combination of flavors and a softer chewy crust has a ton of appeal. Really well-crafted pizza, and our service was exceedingly polite and thoughtful. Slice of Austin Pizza Kitchen may have the best New York style pizza in the Lakeway area.