Late-Night Pizza Mainstay Roppolo’s Opens in West Campus

Roppolo’s Pizza, the go-to Sixth Street late-night pizzeria, is opening a new restaurant in the West Campus area. It took over Drag sandwich shop Fat Sal’s on 2604 Guadalupe Street, opening as of yesterday, Wednesday, August 21, just in time for the start of the University of Texas Austin fall semester.

New for this location of Roppolo’s will be Italian burgers and chicken wings. The former is on a recipe from pizzeria founder/president/CEO Marc Roppolo’s mother Rosalie. She used to serve the burgers — which he described as thin oversized patties with Italian seasoning on regular-sized buns — and pasta at his grandfather’s grocery store in Waco and on the Baylor campus. The house-made chicken wings will range from mild to hot.

Otherwise, the restaurant will feature a similar menu of a variety of pizzas by the pie or slice, calzones, rolls, pastas (with a new alfredo option), and salads. For drinks, there’s beer and wine. A walk-up window will debut sometime after the restaurant’s opening.

The restaurant will be revamped with new paint and televisions. Roppolo plans on adding four 50-inch television screens, catering to UT students who want to watch sports.

Roppolo had always wanted to open a campus-area restaurant when he started in 1989. However, it was “very expensive,” and he opted instead to open on Spicewood Springs Road (which no longer exists) and “by sheer accident” lucked into the Sixth Street brick-and-mortar. He always had his eye on the area when the Fat Sal’s building became available.

Currently, Roppolo’s has two Sixth Street restaurants and one food truck on Red River. It shuttered its Warehouse District downtown food truck in early 2019 because the address is being turned into a hotel. Fat Sal’s closed the Austin restaurant, which had been its only non-Los Angeles location, in early 2019.