In my mind, Burnet Road has always served as a centralized corridor for certain types of…read morebusinesses; used car dealerships, mattress shops, and, most recently, fried chicken joints. And while the strip has never had an outsized appetite for Italian cuisine, at least in comparison to downtown & the East Side, I'd posit that Burnet proffers a rather well-rounded pizza presence, especially as of late. In the past decade, Burnet's graduated from merely housing Austin institutions like progenitor Conan's and latecomer Pinthouse; local hotshot Bufalina, and the formidable out of towner DeSano have arrived in pursuit of a piece of the pie. And, while not technically being along Burnet, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Little Deli's slightly lateral location, off Woodrow. In short, if you want to eat good pizza in ATX, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Burnet.
Personally, I've never been a pizza guy. But having lived on Burnet for a decent amount of time, I'd been around the block before. And let me tell you, at least up until ~2017, my man Hooshang at the Sunrise Mini Mart was preparing the finest pies on the block. Hot, greasy, fresh, and totally unexpected. Yeah, Sunrise did house pizzas, and they were good as fuck. I don't know if they do anymore ever since Hooshang hung up the apron; I wonder how he's doing.
Anyway, now that Sunrise is out of the picture, the best pizza on Burnet is at the Burnet Express. As a licensed purveyor of Hunt Brothers® Pizza, they pump out squares upon squares of what are among some of the finest par-baked frozen pizza parcels ever hawked by a mini mart. Indeed, the Hunt Brothers branded pizza program not only makes foodservice easy to set up, easy to make, easy to sell, and easy to profit from; it's also exceedingly easy to enjoy. Reminiscent of a bastard child between french bread & cardboard, topped with the slightest slathering of ostensibly tomato based sauce, and with cheese that congeals to crispy-chewy perfection over the individualized portions' inevitably hourslong huddle under the heat lamp, I can honestly say that the closer it gets to the USDA's food safety temperature danger zone, the better it tastes. In the words of Bob Marley, don't fuck around and find out--head over to get yourself a chunk'a Hunt today!
