On August 24th, Dante's Woodfire will celebrate its fifth birthday. The pizza truck has developed a cult following for its charred crust and out-there pies. We sat down with owner and founder Beau Ballard to ask him how he did it.
Z.B. Reeves: How did Dante’s begin?
Beau Ballard: Jake [Miller], the owner of Heirloom, had borrowed an Ooni Oven from James Shrader [formerly of Palace Cafe]. July 4th was coming up, and he wanted to do a little event: pizza, beer, whatever. I had been in the food industry for like 10 years at that point, and was like, Jake, let me do it. I got local basil from down the street, figured out tomato sauce. I think Jake brought the dough. The first pizza went out, dude came back, got another one instantly, and I just thought: okay, I think there's something here.
People saw him eating it, and then I probably did 30 pies that day. Then I slowly started doing little pop-ups like that. I started making my own dough. It started to get going.
Then Covid happened, and it gave [me] time to just be like, okay, come and order a pizza, order it off Instagram, come pick it up from my house. And since we were doing home pizza, we were able to get weirder and weirder. Like, we did a Big Mac pizza.
And in the middle of all that, my mom died. My dad was losing his mind, so I had to go take care of him. But I was also running this pizza spot with these other people, and I couldn’t just drop it. I put myself into pizza because it was the only thing that would keep me moving.
Maybe a month after, I said I wouldn’t do any more pizza pop-ups. And a friend texts me, “Hey man, my five-year-old is having a birthday party and we want to have a pizza oven out there.” So I quote him a crazy number and he says yes.
Within the first 20 minutes, somebody walks in who looks exactly like my mom. So I’m bawling my eyes out, sticking my head in the oven to hide. I’m lying, like, “Sorry guys, it’s the smoke.” Of course, they’re five-year-olds; they couldn’t care less.
But I got through it. And it was a really big moment. I started thinking, well, if you can do this, then maybe you should do this.
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My dad invested in us by getting us a really nice oven, and a really cheap trailer. After two or three months of trying to drag the operation around in that thing, we realized how bad we did on getting the trailer, so I just parked it back there. Now we don’t have to move it, and the oven can stay nice and cohesive.
Plus, now we can piggyback off of Heirloom; I use a ton of their refrigeration space. Obviously, in a trailer with a thousand degree oven, keeping things cool is tough. You can see the big mini split air conditioners up there; they blast around 70. Maybe. 73ish on one end, and then a thousand degree oven on the other. So on a really hot day, we stay like 90 in here. It used to be so much worse. I used to go into the Heirloom walk-in fridge after everything was done and just lay my back on the cement. It kept me alive.
ZBR: That’s a great image.
BB: Yeah. I was getting really into [hydration] IVs. But they’re expensive. Now I do the liquid IVs. I’m always learning. I don’t think I’ll ever be done learning.
ZBR: How will you celebrate five years?
BB: I’ve got a mime coming. I’ve got a fake Elvis coming. I’ve got a lady painting faces and doing Tarot. And a pizza eating contest. People love a good pizza eating contest. My friend Mike Gilliland will be playing as Big Mogus, and we’ll have JD McPherson doing a DJ set. Should be a pretty good party.
ZBR: Pizza eating contest … is that the most pizza? Or an amount of pizza in the fastest time?
BB: A single pie, as fast as you can eat it. But we’re thinking about doing it bracket style this year to draw it out.
ZBR: So one person might have to speed eat multiple pies.
BB: Yeah. And it would make it harder, you know, the farther you get into it. They shouldn’t have to eat more than three pies, though.
ZBR: Have people historically been able to eat that many pies?
BB: We don’t know! We’ve never done it this way. Here’s a great story. We’ve had two babies attributed to Dante’s. On our first birthday, we had a pizza eating contest, and nobody showed up to do it. So I had to call my buddy James. And he’s like, oh, me and my buddy Zay are just hanging out down the street; we’ll come by.
Meanwhile, there’s these two people at the birthday party who are on their first date. And she’s looking at the sign-up sheet and tells her date that he should do it. He says no way. Then she looks over at Zay, who just won the pizza eating contest, and she’s like, damn, that guy’s kind of got it going on. And she reached out to him and now they have a baby together.
The second baby was from an employee, Parker. I kept telling Parker, you need somebody to slow you down, bud. You need a good woman in your life. Thirty, forty minutes later, [my friend] Katy comes walking up to the truck to get a pizza, and I’m like, hey, what are you up to? Oh, you’re going to Saturn Room? You hear that, Parker? She’s going to Saturn Room. So now they’ve got a little baby too.
ZBR: Did you grow up a pizza guy?
BB: I have this whole theory. I grew up in the ‘90s, and there was this subculture of, like, oh, the Ninja Turtles love pizza! And there was pizza on Nickelodeon, and pizza on Disney. There was so much pizza everywhere in the media that we were just sort of embedded with pizza.
So when you ask, “Are you a pizza guy?” I don’t think I had a choice. It was all like, let’s get some Mazzio’s, let’s pile up a bunch of blankets and sit in front of the TV for six hours. If you look back at that Ninja Turtles stuff it’s like, no wonder we’re all pizza guys.
ZBR: Your online brand is super unique. Does that come right out of your personality?
BB: So, okay. You have to be online nowadays. And I hate posting. If you go to my actual personal Instagram, I post like twice a year maybe. But if you’re a business open every week, you gotta post multiple times a week.
I’m really dumb, and I’m horrible at punctuation and all that stuff. So I try to make it really easy on myself. So I just don’t use any of it. It’s all caps locked, no punctuation to slow me down. Then I can get into, like, a flow state, and maybe I can say something that makes somebody giggle.
And I don’t really care. I want the pizza to be the thing. The main thing is whether or not I can get people to come out.
People will be like, what’s on that pizza? And I’m like, come and look, dude. Come and see!
A lot of it is just perception, too. People say to me, oh, you guys sell out all the time, you must be making so much money. It’s like, no! It’s 100 degrees in here; I have three employees; I’m burning wood. There are all these elements.
So if we make 80 or 90 pies? Sick. But that’s us not stopping for like, three and a half hours. It’s literally go, go, go.
But lately, we’ve been really, really good. Especially with this current crew. We’re not fucking up a single order throughout the entire night. And that attention to detail, the quality checks, the expediting, making sure everything is how it should be, that stuff’s really fucking hard.
So when we sell out, it’s like, hell yeah, dude! Let’s go take a little break! Because now we gotta clean. We’ll have about an hour and a half, two hours of cleaning after getting our asses kicked. And then I gotta do dough, and then I gotta do it tomorrow.
I just want to make things as easy as possible while having the best quality and attention to detail. Does this have enough flavor? Does this pop? Why would people come here as opposed to Andolini’s, as opposed to Bohemian?
ZBR: What does make your pizza different?
BB: It’s just been kind of an avalanche of things happening. I’ve just changed styles over time. I’m not good at math; I’m not really good at anything except tasting things and cooking.
Baking is such a science. I remember the first week we were open, a dude came through and was asking stuff like, what are your dough’s hydration levels? What are you sitting at? And I just said, bro, I don’t know. I just make it, and if it sucks, I throw it away. If it doesn’t suck, I keep it. It’s just experience.
I don’t really fuck with the dough recipe anymore. It’s more about fine-tuning the oven and the placement of the pizza in the oven. People ask me stuff like, what kind of pizza is this? I don’t know, man; it’s your pizza. I have a culinary background, but I’m not like, writing out percentages. I’m just like, well, let’s make this specific pizza.
I’d love to be a nerd, because I feel like that would be very helpful. I guess my best pizza-nerd interpretation is that Dante’s pizza is Neo-Neapolitan meets New Haven. New Haven is very flat and there’s a burnt end from the high heat. If our pizzas are done perfect, they should have a slight char on one end and a lighter char on the other end; the cheese should be done all the way through. I try to stand the pizza up in the oven, and if it doesn’t flop, then we’re good. I lift it up in the air so that the hot air runs through the pie, which sets it up and gets it nice and crispy, then I get it out as soon as possible.
It’ll be the best it can be like, five minutes out of the oven. But some people DoorDash it, and they say it’s amazing. I always think, you ate that 30 minutes out of the oven; there’s no way that was good, dude. But thank you for ordering it!
ZBR: What do the next five years look like for Dante’s?
BB: I’ve thought about it. Five years is a good long time, man. I could just say “I did that shit,” and go work in a mailroom or something and not have any responsibilities. It sounds really dope, actually. But at the end of the day, [it’s] the community part of it, seeing the regulars who are like, I had a really bad day, and the one thing I needed to feel better was some Dante’s.
People know that I care; I know that they care. It’s one thing to buy one thing from somebody one time, but to come back week after week—it’s a pretty sweet thing.
ZBR: And when is your birthday party?
BB: August 24th. We’re gonna start around 11ish. Pizza eating contest, fake Elvis, Big Mogus, DJ JD McPherson, new birthday Dante’s merch. We ripped off Butthole Surfers’ Locust Abortion Technician for the shirts. My wife painted us as clowns and I’m holding my dog. Come on out.
