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.