One of Raleigh’s favorite pizza spots is joining one of Durham’s most popular breweries
Pizza and beer, a tale as old as time.
This love story will soon get a new chapter as two Triangle favorites join forces on a new pizzeria taproom.
Raleigh’s Oakwood Pizza Box and Durham’s Ponysaurus Brewery announced Thursday that the popular pizza shop will open up a second location within the brewery, slated to open this spring.
Oakwood Pizza Box, owned by Anthony Guerra, opened up on Person Street in Raleigh in 2017 and immediately started slinging some of the Triangle’s top pizzas. News & Observer restaurant critic Greg Cox awarded the pizzeria “four pepperonis” in a 2018 review.
Ponysaurus is one of Durham’s most popular breweries, best known for its wide outdoor beer garden and rooftop. It opened its taproom in 2015, just off of Fayetteville Street, and has been steadily growing ever since.
In a release, Ponysaurus and Oakwood said pizzas will be cooked and served at the taproom. To be slightly less weather-dependent, the brewery’s rooftop section will be covered.
The pizzas coming out of the Ponysaurus Oakwood will be somewhat different than those in Raleigh, Guerra said in a phone interview. The pizzas themselves will be a bit smaller than the one-size-fits-all 18 inch pies in Raleigh, and by-the-slice likely won’t make the trip to Durham. Instead, the Durham pizzas will be geared more towards sharing, Guerra said. The pizza operation in Durham will be led by Oakwood’s Eddie Sautro.
“It’ll be Little Oakwood Pizza Box,” Guerra said. “It won’t be the same exact pizza, we’ll change it up a little bit.....I don’t want to make a carbon copy of what we’re doing in Raleigh.”
Guerra said he’s excited about joining Durham’s food and pizza scene, calling local favorite Pizzeria Toro among the best pizzas anywhere.
“The Durham food scene is phenomenal,” Guerra said. “The opportunity to be around greatness is always exciting to me.”
This stuffed crust collaboration started as a joke, Guerra and Ponysaurus co-owner Nick Hawthorne-Johnson said, escalating into an expansion when neither could find a reason to say “no.”
“Everyone loves pizza and beer and they fit together like perfection,” Hawthorne. “We’ve talked for a while about introducing food at the brewery and felt this was a good way to do that and have our continued focus on making really good beer.”
With Oakwood Pizza Box moving in, that means the end of food trucks at Ponysaurus. For years, numerous food trucks set up on weeknights and weekends at the brewery, but Hawthorne-Johnson said that couldn’t continue while also running a restaurant. He said the food trucks regularly stopping by Ponysaurus were told about the Oakwood addition earlier.
“We love the food trucks and we’ll miss them,” Hawthorne-Johnson said. “By adding food we’ll have more of a brewpub experience.”
A large covering will be added to Ponysaurus’ second-story, stretching out six feet beyond the rooftop seating. Similar to the ground floor patio, heaters will be installed in the roof for drinking in the cooler months.
The expansion is expected to be completed by April or May.
This story was originally published February 18, 2021 at 10:12 AM.
