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.