- [Medha] "Everything's bigger in Texas"
rings true at this pizza spot in Dallas.
Serious Pizza, located in the lively entertainment
district of Deep Ellum,
is known for serving one of the largest
pizza slices in Dallas.
The signature huge slices come together to make
18-inch to 30-inch round,
New York-style thin-crust pies.
- When I'm in the Deep Ellum neighborhood,
we're going out for drinks at the different bars,
and Serious Pizza is kinda like the way to end the night.
Serious Pizza is just like major comfort food in Dallas.
That's the place where you wanna just go hang out
with your friends and sit around with a big slice of pizza.
- I love Serious Pizza 'cause it's an all-around
great place to go with friends, family, whatever,
and it has amazing pizza,
which is a plus, of course.
- [Medha] This is Mike Turley.
He and his college buddy
turned business partner, Andrew Phillips,
left their day jobs in 2011 to open Serious Pizza.
- I always worked at pizza places,
growing up in upstate New York,
and then, in college, learned how to throw the giant pizzas.
And me and my best friend always talked about,
you know, we should do that one day.
Just open up a pizza spot.
From the moment we opened the door,
there's been a line.
We didn't even have to market or anything.
That's the best part about Dallas is
people come out and try it.
If they like it, they'll come back,
and we've been busy ever since we've opened.
- [Medha] Customers love catching a glimpse
of bakers making and tossing blankets of dough
in their open-air kitchen.
- You can come and see them make the pizza yourself,
and see them making the dough and stuff,
and the ovens are out in the open
so you can see them as well.
So it's really cool to see the whole process
of how the amazing pizza is made.
- We make everything from scratch.
So we're not ordering dough balls,
we're making 'em.
- Today, I did 11 batches.
I'm on my 11th batch of dough today.
One whole batch of dough is 90 pounds
with everything put together.
- The guys makin' the dough,
they come in at 5 in the morning.
On the weekdays, they're outta here before we show up.
On the weekends, they're preparing for craziness.
- But the dough is, I don't know.
It's like zen, really.
It's like throwin' pizza.
You just don't realize how much time's goin' by and...
- The hand-tossing is something
you almost never see with that size.
It's a skill that not everybody has,
and it's a draw, you know?
You see it in the window,
and people are like, "Ooh, what's that?"
And then you could feed 10 people off of it.
- It's huge,
you get a 30-inch pizza. - Yeah.
- We're like, all right, 30 inches, bet.
We're 11 people.
So let's pull up.
- [Medha] Turley and Phillips learned a secret to flinging
3 pounds of dough in the air
while at college
when they worked at Momo's Pizza,
a campus favorite.
- When we opened, we had to teach every single person.
Now it's got to the point
we've taught so many people
that they can teach 'em.
- I'd made 22, 24-inch pizzas before.
Thirty wasn't that much harder,
but I did have to learn to fling it up in the air like that.
- [Medha] That's Ben Thompson.
He throws dough at Serious Pizza, and he's seriously good.
- But it is hard.
You gotta have coordination, a little bit.
Athletic ability to slap it out
and to kinda throw it like a pizza shop.
- Yeah, I'm working on it, a little bit.
Mike's been trying to get me
to do a little bit more practice.
So he taught me a technique. How he started off learning is
just getting a wet towel.
What you're doin' is
you're tryin' to pull it across your arm,
go back and forth,
and it kinda changes shapes when you throw it
and goes up.
It's been probably a couple months for me now.
I still obviously don't have it down completely,
but it's a work in progress.
- [Medha] Seeing the 30-inch pizzas being made
got us pretty hungry.
So we decided to try
one of the extra-large pizzas ourselves.
- This is New York-style thin-crust pizza,
and we found it in Dallas, Texas.
Dallas of all places.
And of course, guess what?
It's 30 inches 'cause everything's bigger in Texas.
This is my arm, and this is the pizza.
It's that big.
The pizza here at Serious Pizza
does remind me of New York-style pizza
because I'm originally from Chicago, and we got deep dish,
but this literally rings very similarly
to the ones
in New York.
- [Medha] Open daily and until 3 a.m.
Thursdays through Saturdays,
Serious Pizza upholds a culture
of the city that never sleeps,
and has become a Dallas favorite.
- And that's honestly been our best marketing.
It's just being here at times that other places aren't open.
- If you're out late at night on Fridays,
this is a really nice place to come
because I feel like
you can just share an entire box of pizza
with everyone you're hanging out with,
and you're in Deep Ellum, Texas, which is pretty hip itself.