Bufalina Pizza
Three or four handmade pastas run beside the Neapolitan pies here, and Raphael Brion rates the room 9.4.1 Steven Dilley traded in Manhattan for eight years and spent one month in Naples before he opened it in 2013, then worked the imported oven himself for eight months.5
Why go
Dilley grew up in Copperas Cove, double majored in computer science and American studies at UT, and took a brokerage job around the corner from the Austin Wine Merchant, which is where the wine started.5 He wanted a small room, and he said why: a simple concept and menu, which would give me the best odds of dialing in quality and consistency.
5 The first Bufalina went into a former engine shop on East Cesar Chavez under a white-tiled domed oven.5 That room closed in 2021 and the operation reopened late in 2022 a short way up the same street, and the pasta came with it.1 Food & Wine named Dilley a Sommelier of the Year in 2017, and he told Sprudge the room keeps about 350 bottles on hand at a time.6 The James Beard Foundation made the beverage program a semifinalist in 2024, the only Austin wine nomination that year.8
Order this / avoid
- Order: the pastas, all of them if the table is willing. Three to four run daily, sometimes with an off-menu one for people who ask.1
- And: the seasonally shifting stracciatella on crusty bread, which Brion says to order every time, plus a pie for the crust.1
- In white truffle season, Dilley has them flown in from Alba and shaved over a pie, up to six grams.5
- Finish: vanilla ice cream with sherry poured over it at the table. Get a glass of the sherry alongside.1
- Avoid: the pane rustico. It is half a loaf of very good country bread and it will cost you a pasta course.1
What locals & experts say
- The Infatuation Austin, Raphael Brion, 9.4:
There are also devastatingly excellent handmade pastas that transform Bufalina from a mere pizza joint into a fully functioning Italian restaurant.
He follows it with the line that the pasta here is not delicate, and means business.1 - The same page, on where the name has ended up:
It's a little weird that it's still called Bufalina Pizza, because really sometimes it feels like it should be called Bufalina Pasta.
1 - Zac Cadwalader, for Sprudge, on the drinking: there is
no greater place to be between 4:00 and 5:30pm Central Standard Time than at Bufalina in Austin, Texas, keepers of the best natural wine happy hour in all of America.
6 - Dilley on why he built the half-price hour:
We came up with the idea of half-off bottles under $100 as a way to focus on the highly-drinkable fun stuff. Some bottles end up being almost absurdly cheap, and at the higher end, people can try wines they perhaps wouldn't otherwise buy.
6 - The Austin Chronicle, Wayne Alan Brenner, July 2013, on the original room: the wood-fired Stefano Ferrara oven did to Dilley's dough what a tandoor does to naan, and the broccoli-rabe-and-sausage pie was the one he kept thinking about.3
- Matthew Odam and Alice Bazerghi, on the Statesman's 2025 guide:
Steven Dilley added force to a craft wave that pushed the Austin dining scene forward when he opened Bufalina in 2013.
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Good to know
- Which door: this is 2215 E Cesar Chavez in East Austin. Bufalina Due is the Brentwood sibling on Burnet Road, with its own permit, its own kitchen and its own review. Tribeza dates that opening to 2015 and the Statesman to 2016.57
- Come early or wait. The Infatuation's warning is plain: it gets loud, you may be put at a communal table, and there is a queue at peak dinner. Turn up at the start of the evening and you get the bar.1
- It is a small room, forty-five seats when Sprudge counted them.6
- Hygiene: Austin Public Health scored the kitchen 98 on 6 August 2025, and 99, 81 and 99 before that. Nothing there is a finding.4
Verdict
must-visit — Come at the start of the evening, take a bottle at half price and order every pasta on the board, because the pizza is what the room is named for and the pasta is what it does best now. Skip the bread. If the East Side room is full, Burnet Road is the same family and a shorter wait.