New Pizzeria With Chile Crisp-Drizzled Pies Opens on South First

A new pizzeria is opening in South Austin this fall. Dovetail Pizza will open at 1816 South First Street in the Bouldin Creek neighborhood starting on Wednesday, November 30. This also means that the address’s current restaurant, Indian spot Mumtaz Market, is closed.

Leading Dovetail is newer Austin restaurant company Present Tense Hospitality, which includes Salt & Time’s Ben Runkle and Natalie Davis, along with Rosen’s Bagel’s Joe Ritchie. Rounding out the team are Lenior’s Todd Duplechan, G’Raj Mahal/Mumtaz’s Sidney Roberts (which makes sense, given that this new pizzeria is taking over Mumtaz’s vacant space), and Swedish Hill partner Alex Manley.

Dovetail will serve pizza, salads, and pasta. The first will include pies like the spicy Italian with Italian sausage, mozzarella, and chilis; meat (a mess of pepperoni, sausages, mortadella, and coppa); crab (which will be paired with roasted corn, cherry tomatoes, and chili crisp condiment); and the BitterSweet (with smoked eggplant, ricotta, sweet and hot peppers, and arugula). The pizzeria notes that it won’t offer the pizza staples of pepper flakes and parmesan; rather, it’ll have chile crisp and herby-vinegar oil for additional flavor drizzles. Manley, who is also McGuire Moorman Lambert’s corporate director of baking, developed the pizza dough. There will be a gluten-free option too.

The rest of the menu includes appetizers and sides like fry bread (a Native American food) paired with smoked eggplant, calamari fried in corn, and grilled ricotta with butternut squash chutney. Then there are salads, pastas (spaghetti and meatballs, rigatoni ala vodka, etc.), and desserts like soft serve and fried ice cream sundaes. Drinks include spritzes by the glass or pitcher, natural wines, and draft beers. The name of the restaurant is a carpentry term where two pieces of wood are joined together.

Present Tense is also involved with bringing back Roberts’s shuttered Indian restaurant G’Raj Mahal in East Austin later this year (the restaurant closed on Rainey in 2021). The company is also behind Rosen’s Bagel’s downtown location in Republic Square Park (which took over what had been Salt & Time’s secondary cafe space).

The South First address has been home to many an Austin restaurant in the years past. Recently, it had been Roberts’s Indian-Texas restaurant Mumtaz Market, which opened in October 2020 and closed in late August. The address has gone through many restaurants in the years before that, including Tex-Mex barbecue restaurant N’Esperado, Mexican seafood restaurant Alcomar, Tex-Mex restaurnt El Chile, and Tex-Mex restaurant La Reyna.

Dovetail’s hours will be from 4 p.m. to midnight Wednesday through Sunday for dine-in indoor and patio services only (read: no takeout available).

Update, November 17, 3:28 p.m.: This article, originally published on October 26, has been updated to reflect Dovetail’s opening date.