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Sauce’d Pizza and Smashburgers started with brothers and co-owners Cale and Connor Gildenblatt working together to create the perfect pizza recipe in their backyard, Cale Gildenblatt said.
Four years after opening in 2019, the duo added smashburgers to their menu, which became more popular than their pizza, he said.
“We’re honestly more of a burger joint then we are pizza even though pizza is kind of our roots,” Cale Gildenblatt said.
What makes them special
Sauce’d smashburgers include a sauce made in-house, which the co-owners call their “Dad's Burger Sauce." The recipe was created by Connor Gildenblatt and has a Chipotle-base with a little spice to it, Cale Gildenblatt said.
“There's something about grilling burgers in the backyard with your family or your dad's grilling,” he said. “Even if it's the same ingredients everybody else uses, there's something special about your dad's burger. That’s kind of the feel we wanted to create with our sauce.”
Sauce’d serves its signature Texas-style pizza, which involves covering the dough to the ends with sauce and folding it over to create a sauce-filled crust, Cale Gildenblatt said. His dad came up with the idea two days before the pizza joint opened.
“We were like ‘what are you doing?’" Cale Gildenblatt said. "[My dad said] ‘I don’t know, but I’ve been thinking about something like this for 40 years.’”
The pizza dough is made fresh and topped with fresh veggies and meat cooked in-house, he said. Toppings tend to include Mike’s Hot Honey.
“I’ve had a lot of New Yorkers and upper East Coast people come down and say that [they] haven’t been able to find anything like home until [they] came here,” Cale Gildenblatt said. “There’s a certain level of pride if somebody from New York says my pizza is good, and I keep chasing that feeling.”
On the menu
The smashburgers use meat from Texas farms along with premium Texas Wagyu beef, which is shipped fresh weekly, Cale Gildenblatt said. The burgers all have different topping options, including grilled onions, different cheeses and freshly cooked bacon that is candied and topped with ground sugar and pepper. All burgers are served on a King's Hawaiian bun, freshly grilled with garlic butter.
The burgers can also come with bourbon jam, which is made in-house, he said.
“It's a bourbon onion bacon jam which people have gone absolutely crazy for,” Cale Gildenblatt said. “There was a time where we thought about getting rid of it because it takes two hours to cook ... and we had one day where we [took] it off the menu and I thought people were going to boycott us.”
Looking ahead
The goal for the co-owners has always been to expand and see how far they can take the business without losing the quality that makes Sauce’d special, Cale Gildenblatt said.
Sauce’d recently opened a food truck in a food truck park in Northlake to serve their burgers and pizzas in the Northlake and Argyle area, Cale Gildenblatt said.
“I think we're at our strongest in terms of menu, ingredients [and] personnel, [and] we're excited to see what we can do running multiple locations.”
