A popular Houston brewery will soon add pizza to its offerings. Pizza & Pints, a new restaurant from Karbach Brewing Co. will open in early 2024.
Located in a shopping center adjacent to the Karbach brewery, Pizza & Pints will, as its name implies, serve pizza and beer along with salads and appetizers. Its location will allow the restaurant to serve dine-in guests, offer delivery via third party apps, and service Karbach’s popular beer garden.
As Ted Rowell, Karbach’s general manager of retail operations, explains, pizza has always been a staple of Karbach’s brewpub, which was the first full service restaurant to open at a Texas brewery. Building on that success — and creating a venue that could service both the campus and its surrounding neighborhood — seemed like a logical next step.
“We’ve got this great backyard space. It’s our beer garden. It’s two-and-a-half acres,” Rowell tells CultureMap. Later, he adds, “Thinking about the masterplan for this property and thinking about pizza and beer, they’re two things that go hand-in-hand. We’ve got the right property. We’ve got the right team members. Let’s go knock this thing out of the park.
One of those right team members is chef Edward Hoyos, a trained baker with years of dough making experience. He’s developed a Neapolitan-style crust that’s fermented for 24 hours but is also sturdy enough to stand up to some robust toppings like a pastor pie with pork, roasted pineapple, red onion, cilantro, salsa verde and cotjia cheese. Pizza & Pints will utilize a massive Woodstone oven with 45-square-feet of cooking space and the ability to cook with both gas and wood to produce its pies.
“Our style of dough is a little different,” Hoyos says. “We do a poolish for it. That will allow us to mature the dough properly. Give it 24 hours to get that flavor, that aeration, the nice stretchiness, the beautiful bubbles that Neapolitan pizza deserves.”
Pies will be served in both a 10-inch personnel size and a family-sized 16-inch. The menu will also include salads as well as appetizers such as mozzarella sticks, pizza rolls, meatballs, and baked ricotta appetizer that received positive feedback during Houston Restaurant Weeks. A tap wall will pour all of Karbach’s most popular beers for on-premise consumption.
Karbach senior designer Greg Jackson took the lead on the restaurant’s interior. As illustrated in the renderings above, look for a large mural along the back wall that nods to Karbach-specific elements such as its tap handle design and the Hopadillo monster as well as Houston themes such as space.
Neon signs, Easter eggs, and other details have all been added to be eye-catching and social media friendly. TVs will hang from the ceiling, and a dedicated merch area will sell t-shirts, hats, and other swag.
“We want to have something that feels like Karbach and resonates with the neighborhood,” senior brand manager Emily Rodgers says. “We wanted to add some fun colors. We felt like the reds, the yellows, and the navies resonate with this space and could be a nice bridge between here and the beer garden with the blue and white.”
While Karbach visitors and nearby residents will appreciate the new offering, the Pizza & Pints team is already thinking about the future. The restaurant’s kitchen is oversized to allow it to support events at the brewery. Long term, kitchen could power a catering operation that would include both external events and a future banquet hall in the same shopping center.
Photo by Eric Sandler
General manager Ted Rowell, chef Edward Hoyos, and brand manager Emily Rodgers.
