Why Allday Pizza Picked Northwest Hills for Its Biggest Bet Yet

For years, the building at 3720 FM 2222 near Dry Creek Drive was Reid's Dry Cleaners and Laundry, the kind of practical, unglamorous storefront every neighborhood has and nobody thinks twice about. That changes this year. The space is being gutted and rebuilt into the largest dining room Allday Pizza has ever attempted, with a full bar, indoor and outdoor seating, and a menu built around the same 16-inch New York-style pies that made the pizzeria's name.

If you've lived in Northwest Hills for any length of time, you already know why this matters more here than it would almost anywhere else in Austin. This is a neighborhood defined by quiet, tree-lined streets and easy access to Mopac, not by restaurant rows. Good food exists here, but it tends to arrive one counter-service spot at a time. Allday's owners are making a different kind of bet, and the reasoning behind it says something about how this pocket of the city is starting to look to people who build restaurants for a living.

A Pizza Truck's Long Way to Far West Boulevard

Daniel Sorg and Townsend Smith did not start out planning to anchor a Northwest Hills corner. Their partnership began in the Sammataro pizza-truck scene, the kind of scrappy, mobile operation that either fizzles out or becomes something bigger. Theirs became bigger. In 2023, the pair took over the kitchen window at Flo's Wine Bar & Bottle Shop in the northern part of Tarrytown, and the pies they turned out there, thin-crust with the rounded edges and char of a Neapolitan or New Haven bake, earned Allday a spot on the Austin American-Statesman's Best New Restaurant list that year. From there they expanded into a counter-service shop in Hyde Park, next door to Tiny Grocer and First Light Books, building a following one neighborhood at a time.

Northwest Hills is the next step, and it's a bigger one. Every previous Allday location has been an add-on to something else: a wine bar's kitchen, a counter tucked into a shopping strip. The Far West project is the first time Sorg and Smith are designing the entire experience themselves, from the bar program down to the dining room layout. Permit filings tracked by local outlets show construction beginning last October and wrapping in early June 2026, with the team targeting a summer 2026 opening. As of this writing in mid-September, that summer window is closing fast, which means residents driving past 3720 FM 2222 should expect an opening announcement any week now rather than months from now.

Sorg described the move to the Statesman in terms that read less like a business decision and more like an acknowledgment of what the neighborhood has been missing:

"We've always tried to build something that feels like it's been there all along. This is the first time we really get to fully realize that. It's a neighborhood without many options, so there's a real responsibility to get it right."

That line does a lot of work. Sorg isn't describing Northwest Hills as underserved in the abstract. He's describing it as a place worth the extra investment precisely because there isn't already a dominant restaurant pulling foot traffic. When an operator chooses to plant its flagship somewhere quiet rather than somewhere already saturated, that's a signal about where they think attention is heading next.

The Bench Allday Is Joining, Not Replacing

None of this means Northwest Hills has been going hungry. The neighborhood's dining strength has always been real, just spread out and easy to underrate if you're comparing it to a strip like South Congress or Burnet Road. Along Mesa Drive and Far West Boulevard, residents already have a rotation that covers most cravings:

• El Dorado Cafe for Mexican food and a loyal weekday lunch crowd
• Siena Ristorante near the 2222 and 360 intersection for a Tuscan-leaning date night
• Galaxy Cafe for the kind of brunch that fills a table on a Sunday
• Saffron for Indian and Nepalese cooking, including a lunch buffet regulars return to
• Kesos Tacos on Spicewood Springs for breakfast tacos before the workday starts
• Troy ATX and Mama Betty's for the kind of neighborhood dinner spot that doesn't need a special occasion

That list is the reason Allday's arrival reads as an addition rather than a rescue. This isn't a food desert getting its first real restaurant. It's a neighborhood with a solid, if scattered, dining bench that's about to get its first large-format, full-bar destination built specifically for it. The distinction matters if you're trying to understand what's actually changing here. Northwest Hills was never lacking places to eat. It was lacking a reason for someone outside the neighborhood to drive in specifically for dinner.

What a Hybrid Model Actually Changes for a Tuesday Night

The detail that separates this project from a typical restaurant opening is the hybrid model Allday is planning. Reporting on the buildout describes a setup that keeps the familiar walk-up counter Allday regulars know from Tarrytown and Hyde Park while adding full table service on top of it, along with a complete bar program. Owners have also said they hope to operate more days of the week than some of their earlier, more part-time locations allowed.

For someone who already lives within a few minutes of Far West Boulevard, that combination solves a specific, small friction that repeat customers of the earlier locations know well: sometimes you want to grab a slice and go, and sometimes you want to sit down with a cocktail and stay a while. Most pizza spots pick one mode and stick with it. Allday's Northwest Hills location is being built to do both, which is part of why the owners are treating it as their most ambitious project rather than a straightforward third location.

The menu itself isn't reinventing anything, and that's the point. Expect the same soft serve, the Italian grinder, and the Caesar salad that built Allday's reputation, just in a room built to hold more people for longer. The soft serve window alone has become enough of a fixture at the earlier locations that regulars from Tarrytown and Hyde Park have mentioned it as a reason busy nights get crowded, which is part of why a bigger dining room in Northwest Hills is expected to ease some of that pressure rather than just relocate it.

What This Signals Beyond One Pizza Restaurant

It's worth sitting with why an operator who could have opened a third counter-service location anywhere in Austin chose instead to build a full restaurant on a stretch of road better known for dry cleaners and strip retail than destination dining. Restaurants that already have a proven concept and a following don't usually take their biggest swing in a neighborhood without an existing restaurant scene to plug into. They take it where they think the surrounding population is ready to support something bigger than what's currently there.

Northwest Hills residents don't need a restaurant opening to tell them their neighborhood is a good place to live. What this opening does tell you is that the people who study where to place a restaurant, people whose entire business depends on getting that call right, are starting to treat the Far West corridor as a destination worth building for, not just a neighborhood worth passing through.

Whether that reads as validation or just as one very good pizza night depends on how you already feel about the neighborhood. Either way, when the doors on FM 2222 finally open, it will be worth the walk, or the short drive, to see what a restaurant built specifically for this stretch of Austin actually looks like.

If you want more of what's changing street by street in Northwest Hills, Ellevé Property Group keeps a running local guide to the neighborhood, from dining to daily life, at our Northwest Hills community page.