The pick-up window for Peter Cho’s cottage pizzeria is halfway down the narrow side yard of an Oak Lawn multi-unit apartment building. His place is on the first floor, the one with a concrete patio and welcome mat-less door. It’s got a screen door and a small window, which, turns out, is just big enough to send through bubbling pizzas to waiting customers.
Cho opens the door and reveals his galley kitchen. Behind him, in his living room, is his pizza prep station: a metal table neatly arranged with containers of mozzarella, pepperoni, basil, fresh garlic, tomato sauce, bench flour, and a marble slab for coddling the dough. He fires the pies in a neat little Breville oven that looks like a droid from Star Wars. The oven also cooks one pizza at a time, but it does so, under Cho’s supervision at least, with moon-landing precision.
Meet Palace Pizza: It’s a 1-year-old pop-up with very few rules, no Yelp reviews, and one stunningly-great plain cheese pizza. Cho is dreaming it all up as he goes.
He’s got one shaker of red pepper flakes and a burgeoning collection of to-go pizza boxes. Cho is offering a limited run of pizzas, one day a week on Wednesdays. Message him on Instagram, and he’ll bake you up a pie. Where’s it going from there? He’s playing it by ear and he’s open to anything. The pizzas are donation-only, since Cho can’t actually sell hot food from home because of Texas Cottage Food Law.
As a high schooler in Texas, Cho worked at Papa John’s. He remembers the time fondly (so much so that he’s toying with the idea of making his own version of Papa John’s atomic-bomb-proof-garlic butter dipping sauce). From there a love of the by-the-slice grew, and while living in Portland, Ore., he gleaned inspiration from working at Bryan Spangler’s institution, Apizza Scholls. Cho settled into Dallas during the pandemic, when he spent time in the kitchens of Cane Rosso and Five Sixty by Wolfgang Puck.
As Cho preps a plain cheese pizza, he wears a big olive tee, athletic shorts, and socks snug fit into house slippers. He moves with a swiftness that belies the time dedicated to honing a craft. In one beat he’s whirling dough over his hands in the air, and the next he’s plinking thick slices of mozzarella down like a card dealer at a poker game. He sets a 10-minute timer as the pie goes into the Breville, and immediately the air swells with the aroma of garlic and crust.
Once the cheese pie is bubbling, he thunks down his pizza cutter. It’s a long rocker blade with a guard at one end, so he can smack it through the crust. Cho’s cloud-soft dough yields a sensational crust, just shy of dark and crackly, bulbous and airy at the end and egg-shell thin at the middle. It breaks easily under the cutter, a one-two motion that sounds like an old-timey stamp.
Cho’s one-topping pepperoni and plain cheese pizzas are simple yet extraordinary. The tomato sauce beams with flavors that can you picture as you take your first bite: rain-fresh tomatoes, char, garlic. He keeps the flavor of good tomatoes up front, clear as a bell, by using a mix of canned Stanislaus and Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes.
His pizza’s best devoured right out of the oven, while the cheese and sauce bubble noisily together. A scalded roof of the mouth is worth it for this bite. In fact, don’t waste time sitting or talking. Cho doesn’t burden his pizzas with excess cheese or toppings: Both pies had zero “tip sag,” where the pointy end of the slice flops from its own weight. Each slice stood straight and true as an arrowhead.
Cho is brainstorming ideas for the business. He’s done pop-ups at Double Wide and tattoo parlors around the city, and his endgame is to offer slices on the go for an affordable price — made somewhere that’s not his own apartment.
Listen, he’s not picky. He’s flexible, untethered to any restaurant’s typical grind. He’s starting small, the way most of us formed our love of pizza, with an order of a plain cheese.
To order, send Cho a message via Instagram at instagram.com/palacexpizza.
