"It's a neighborhood without many options, so there's a real responsibility to get it right."
That's Dan Sorg, co-owner of Allday Pizza, talking to the Austin American-Statesman about the corner his pizza operation just took over on FM 2222 near Dry Creek Drive. The building used to be Reid's Dry Cleaners & Laundry, one stop in a chain that still runs locations from Georgetown to Lakeway. For years it did what a neighborhood dry cleaner does: pressed shirts, held them behind a counter, closed on Sundays. Now it's being gutted into Allday's first ground-up restaurant, with a real bar, a bigger dining room, and Sorg's name on the permits instead of a landlord's.
If you've driven that stretch of 2222 this year and wondered why the old cleaners suddenly had contractors in and out of it, this is the answer. And the more interesting question isn't what's going in. It's why a pizza operation that's had three years and two other locations to build something of its own finally chose to do it here.
A Pizza Operation That Kept Renting Someone Else's Address
Allday didn't start with a building. It started with Sammataro, the food truck where Sorg and his partner Townsend Smith first worked together, and where they picked up the wood-fired instincts that still show up in the char on their crust. When they were ready to sell pizza under their own name, they didn't lease a storefront. They set up a walk-up window on the patio of Flo's Wine Bar & Bottle Shop, tucked at the northern edge of Tarrytown on West 35th Street, directly across from the Camp Mabry gate. That was 2023. The pies were good enough to land Allday on the Statesman's Best New Restaurant list that same year, which is a real accomplishment for an operation that, at the time, didn't have its own front door.
From there they expanded to a counter-service spot in Hyde Park, next to Tiny Grocer and First Light Books, a location built for quick service and quicker turnover, not for lingering. Two locations in, Allday had built a following on 16-inch New York-style pies, a well-regarded Italian grinder, and soft serve that regulars in both Tarrytown and Hyde Park talk about as much as the pizza itself. What they hadn't built, in either spot, was a restaurant that was fully theirs from the studs out.
Northwest Hills changes that. It's the first site where Allday controls the whole build, down to the bar program.
Why Northwest Hills, and Why Now
FM 2222 near Dry Creek Drive isn't a corridor most people would flag as Austin's next dining destination. It's the kind of stretch that accumulates dry cleaners, banks, and drive-throughs precisely because it sits inside a dense, established residential area that generates steady daily traffic without much reason for anyone to build a sit-down restaurant there. Northwest Hills has been full of exactly that kind of quiet, reliable demand for decades. What it hasn't had, at least not on this particular block, is somewhere to sit down with a glass of wine and a pizza that wasn't fast casual.
That's the gap Sorg is describing when he calls it a neighborhood without many options. It's not a knock on the area. It's an observation about the specific mismatch between how many people live within a few minutes of this corner and how few of them have had a reason to stop here on the way home instead of driving further in toward Mesa Drive or Far West Boulevard. A dry cleaner doesn't need much of that impulse business. A restaurant with a bar does, and Allday is betting that the neighborhood can support one now in a way it might not have a few years ago.
There's also something worth noticing in the building itself. A storefront built to press shirts and hold hangers doesn't obviously suggest a restaurant with expanded indoor and outdoor seating. Getting there means reworking plumbing, ventilation, and structure that were never designed for a working kitchen, let alone a full bar. That kind of conversion is slower and more expensive than building from scratch, which makes the choice to do it here, on this unglamorous block, look less like convenience and more like intent.
What the Permit Actually Promises
Coverage of the buildout, along with Allday's own menu carryover from Flo's and Hyde Park, points to a few concrete changes from what regulars already know:
- A hybrid model that keeps the walk-up counter Allday built its name on, while adding proper table service for the first time
- A full bar stocked for wine and cocktails, a step up from the beer and wine pours available at the earlier locations
- Meaningfully more seating, both indoor and outdoor, than either the Flo's window or the Hyde Park counter spot could offer
- The same core menu residents already associate with Allday: thin-crust 16-inch New York-style pies, the Italian grinder, a well-regarded Caesar, and the soft serve
- Plans to operate more days and longer hours than the part-time rhythm of the earlier spots, with hopes of eventually running lunch and dinner service daily
None of that is a radical reinvention of what Allday does. It's the same pizza operation, given enough physical space and financial commitment to stop operating like a pop-up.
The Timeline Has Already Slipped Once
Permit records show construction on the Northwest Hills building began last October and was originally expected to wrap by early June 2026, with an opening targeted for sometime in summer 2026. As of the most recent reporting on the project, in July, that timeline had already loosened. The owners had not locked in an official opening date, and coverage described the completion window as an estimate built from permit filings rather than a confirmed plan from Sorg and Smith themselves.
We're now at the tail end of September. If you've been watching that corner and the doors still aren't open, that's consistent with what the owners themselves signaled months ago rather than a sign anything has gone wrong. Restaurant buildouts inside converted commercial space routinely run past their first projected date, especially when the project includes a full bar installation and a shift from counter-only to hybrid table service, both of which add inspection and permitting steps that a simple counter spot wouldn't need.
What to Watch For
For now, the practical move is the same one longtime Austin diners already know: keep an eye on the building at 3720 FM 2222 and on Allday's own channels for a real opening date, rather than assuming a season on a permit filing is a promise. When it does open, it will be worth noticing what a full bar and a proper dining room do to a pizza operation that built its reputation on a walk-up window and a folding table. Some of what makes Allday's pies distinctive comes from the loose, low-overhead conditions they were made under. Whether that holds up inside a converted dry cleaner with a real kitchen and a bar program is the thing regulars from Tarrytown and Hyde Park will be checking on first.
Either way, a stretch of 2222 that's spent years defined by errands is about to have one more reason to slow down for.
Have a question about what's changing in Northwest Hills, or curious how a shift like this tends to ripple through a neighborhood over time? Lee Bullock has been paying attention to this corner of Austin for a long time. Let's Connect.
