By Tracy Morin
Photos by Summer Miles
Darius T. Aram, owner and founder of Slice Street Pizza in Dripping Springs, Texas, admits he “didn’t come up through pizza. I came up in the mortgage industry.” In fact, he’s (slowly) writing a memoir about that pivot, with the working title Trust the Crust: Trading Commissions for Crust.
After 15-plus years in real estate finance, “living and dying by commissions,” Aram decided he wanted to sell a different kind of product: something people could actually taste. “People ask me all the time, why pizza?” he says. “My answer is, who doesn’t love pizza? In real estate finance, not everyone is in the market for a home, and not everyone can afford one. In pizza, everyone’s in the market.”
In 2023, he founded GLD Hospitality with partners, and Slice Street opened December 29 of that year. “We opened as a takeout and delivery pizzeria with a drive-thru window we always planned to open later, serving New York- and Detroit-style pizza and pizza by the slice,” he says. “Since then, I’ve bought out my partners, and we’ve grown to about 20 employees, a 4.8 star rating across 600-plus Google reviews, and a local following that makes us blush. I launched Slice&Co, a wholesale line of par-baked pizzas, NY crust blanks, flatbreads and focaccia that we supply to local restaurants, wineries and resorts. And this fall, that drive-thru window finally opens as the Slice-Thru!”
With that much growth in less than three years, Aram is clearly doing a lot of things right—and PMQ wanted to hear more about the strategies behind this success story. In this exclusive Q&A, Aram shares how to turn challenges into viral social media opportunities, and how savvy marketing efforts like the 3-Bite Challenge and local collabs earn Slice Street widespread attention in-store and online.
PMQ: How do you orchestrate a fun, lively social media presence, with you as the frontman?
Aram: Honestly, when I started, I hated social media. For business, it’s great, though. You have to make it relatable, fun, engaging and memorable—all easier said than done.
For me, it started in our early days with raw videos from busy, hectic nights where we messed up orders, ran out of dough or burned too many pizzas. I’d jump online and post a hat-in-hand apology, thank the community for their patience and promise to do better. Those videos turned into more community engagement and local updates, and eventually into hiring a team to help me stay consistent. That was the game changer. Now we batch our content, schedule it out, and showcase the product without advertising it too hard. For us, it works.
The clearest proof of what that approach can do came when construction shut off access to our shop. I pulled up one day to find the road and sidewalk work had basically cut us off, with almost no warning and no real information about how long it would last. It lasted a few weeks and knocked 25% to 30% off our sales. Instead of posting in frustration, I leaned into humor and humility. I filmed in the middle of the construction site, I filmed at town hall, and I let people see the whole thing. Those videos took off, I became a bit of an internet meme around here, and the community showed up for us. It also opened honest, direct conversations with town officials that helped speed the project along. A situation that could have closed us ended up bringing people in.
PMQ: How do you create engaging content? What works best to grab attention online?
Aram: Here are some of my tips:
- Show the process. Our whole brand is about transparency, so we show the dough, the flour, the 48-hour ferment. People trust what they can see.
- Be the face. Guests want to know who’s making their food. A real person beats a polished graphic every time.
- Collab local. When we team up with Pig Pen BBQ, Natkhat Flavors, KG BBQ or the Dripping Springs Cookoff Club, we get introduced to each other’s audiences.
- Answer everybody. I personally respond to our reviews and surveys. That conversation can be content, too.
- Show your community involvement. Post about lunches for teachers, donations, random acts of pizza.
- Don’t take yourself too seriously. Have fun, don’t be afraid of the camera, and find your voice and your style. Make it yours.
- DM your followers and comment on other pages. Be genuine and invite folks in to try your pizza. It doesn’t just work—I’ve booked caterings that way.
- No AI images. Be authentic. Don’t post AI images of your pizzas or your specials. Everyone knows it’s AI, and it doesn’t send the real message we’re all going for.
PMQ: How does social media marketing help your business? Do you do any other types of marketing?
Aram: Social is how most people find us. The 3-Bite Challenge alone has walked new faces in the door, I’ve booked caterings straight out of my DMs, and when construction cut us off, social is what kept the town coming. It’s also how we’ve earned a 4.8 star rating across more than 600 Google reviews, because the people who watch us are the same people who show up and tell us what they think.
Social is the major piece, but it’s not the only one. We run a text and email club tied to every Slice of the Month drop, a rewards app with automated winback campaigns for guests we haven’t seen in a while, and targeted digital advertising around Dripping Springs. I handle reputation management myself, with every review answered personally. Catering and wholesale grow as their own channels, and we stay involved in the community every chance we get.
PMQ: How does the 3-Bite Challenge work, and how does it contribute to your social media presence and in-store experience?
Aram: It’s exactly what it sounds like. One slice, three bites, three minutes. And not a small slice, either. Our by-the-slice pies are 18” XLs cut into six slices, so each one is a serious piece of pizza. Take it down and you win $20.
It started because I thought it was a fun way to engage with our followers, plus who doesn’t love a challenge? Like any good challenge, the rules got tightened once people started finding loopholes, so we filmed a proper rulebook: Rule No. 1, a bite is a bite. Where your teeth first sink into the slice, that’s one bite. No crawling your way in. Rule No. 2, it has to be hot. You start no more than two minutes after that slice comes out of the oven. Rule No. 3, three bites, three minutes. No more.
We didn’t take anything away from the folks who’d already won under the old rules, but that’s the standard now. So far, we’ve had about 10 attempts and four wins. For the record, I did it in two bites. That video hasn’t gone up yet.
The challenge does two jobs at once. Online, every attempt is a video, and every video ends the same way we ended the rules post: tag your friends, tell us who needs to try it, DM us and we’ll get you on the next one. People nominate each other in the comments, and that’s a pipeline of new faces walking in the door. In the store, the second someone goes for it, the whole room stops to watch. Staff are cheering, other guests are filming, and a Tuesday lunch turns into an event.
PMQ: Let’s talk about your menu. Why did you choose to offer those two pizza styles, Detroit and New York, and what’s your dough process?
Aram: New York is the OG, the classic everyone thinks of when they hear the word pizza. It’s my personal favorite, and I couldn’t imagine opening a pizzeria and not serving a NY-style slice. Ours is super thin, with a slightly larger cornicione that shows off the crust as a really delicious piece of bread—your reward at the end of the slice.
Detroit is where we get to have fun. We lean into the focaccia tie-in with a very thick, airy crust that’s crispy on the outside and chewy and fluffy on the inside. Then we go crazy with the cheese and that frico edge, because crispy cheese is such a great texture add. Both styles showcase the crust in their own way, and that’s the whole point.
It all starts with our clean-ingredient flour blend, built around Barton Springs Mill flour, a non-GMO, stone milled flour made just a couple of miles from the shop. They mill it, and it’s in our shop within a day. [Our dough has] five ingredients, nothing you can’t pronounce, and a minimum 48-hour cold ferment. That long ferment is where the flavor and the digestibility come from, and it’s the heart of our tagline: Trust the Crust! From there, it’s about how you handle it.
The same thinking runs through the rest of the ingredient list. Olive oil, housemade dressings, no MSG, and we do our best to avoid seed oils. What we’re after is a pizza with the right amount of chew and crunch.
PMQ: What are some best sellers on the menu?
Aram: We’re no different from anybody else—pepperoni is king. But our OMGosh It’s Good is a true winner. It’s named after my reaction to tasting it during recipe development. Two kinds of pepperoni and ricotta. You’ll have to come try it.
For a seasonal item, The Briezza is built around a whole brie wheel and Bee Dolce hot honey. It’s basically what would happen if pull-apart bread and brie en croûte came together as one, and people rave about it every year when it comes back for the holidays.
PMQ: Tell us about your Slice of the Month offering.
Aram: When we started the pizzeria, we sat around talking about our non-negotiables. No pineapple, no ranch. Then our mentality shifted, and we basically threw the rule book out. Now we make pizza that sounds awesome, fun, sometimes insane, and other times just the classics. The only rule is, let’s make great pizza.
That’s what the Slice of the Month is for. On the first of every month, we drop a new one. It’s my creative outlet—with some restraint on it, since we used to run a slice of the day. We make crazy culinary concoctions like The Butter Chicken Pizza, The Duck Hunt, The Birria, The Pulled Pork Demi and The Blueberry Pie, to name just a few.
The Blueberry Pie is the one folks want on the menu all year. It’s a white pie with fresh blueberries, brie and fire-roasted Hatch chilies. It’s sweet, savory and spicy, without any one of them overpowering the others, and the exploding blueberries paint a purple hue across the whole pie. It’s a real treat when we bring it out in August.
I also really enjoy our collaborations. In June, we did the South African “Crease Crust” with Vicky Crease, a South African caterer and TV personality: Durban curry sauce and boerewors sausage, served during the World Cup. We’ve also done a brisket pizza with KG BBQ, named one of Texas’ top 50 BBQ joints by Texas Monthly: their brisket and our crust.
The reasoning is simple. It gives regulars a reason to come back every month, it gives our social media a built-in content calendar and it’s our R&D lab. But, really, it’s just too much fun. I get to work with some very accomplished [culinary masters] and craft some really delicious pizza with them.
PMQ: What are some of your challenges right now as a pizzeria owner, and how do you overcome them?
Aram: Staffing is always No. 1. Hiring and keeping great people is the hardest part of this business, and the way we counter it is by continually building out our training modules and checklists. We can’t expect greatness if we can’t articulate how we expect it done, so we’ve moved from old-school tribal knowledge to actual written procedures. It helps.
Cost control is next. Every pizza is built to a standard, so food cost stays consistent no matter who’s on the line.
Then there’s tech sprawl. Restaurant software bills add up fast. We audited our entire stack, cut the redundant tools and built some of what we needed ourselves instead of renting it.
PMQ: What are some of your most memorable successes or favorite moments from the pizzeria?
Aram: Surviving the construction shutdown is at the top of the list. Watching this town rally around a pizza shop they’d known for only a little while told me we’d built the right thing.
The one I’m most proud of started as a disaster. We had the opportunity to do a large catering event—35 pizzas. The event went off perfectly, everyone loved it, and we’ve picked up more orders from that same event since. But here’s what made it interesting: That same night, despite the copious notes I’d left, my staff made the entire order two hours early. Every pizza. I was far from pleased, and as much as I didn’t want to lose the money, I wasn’t going to hand my customers old pizza. So I made the simple but difficult decision to remake the entire order, every last pie, a duplicate.
I ran the delivery myself, racking my brain the whole way about what to do with 35 extra pizzas. It was late, no nonprofits were open, and my kids already get way too much pizza. I handed 13 to my neighbors in the strip mall, as many as they could take, then messaged Michael Kastel, a friend who owns Waypoint Roofing here in town. He sprang into action, jumped into his neighborhood Facebook group and became my fixer, offering 22 pizzas to the first 22 neighbors in his subdivision. Within minutes, every one was spoken for. We joked that we were running a pizza rescue, a pizza adoption program.
Then he sent me the list, routed it with a little help from AI, and handed me 22 stops in order on Google Maps. The Waypoint Roofing guy gave me my waypoints. He was my North Star navigator that night, and I’m proud to say every pizza found a home. Existing customers were thrilled, new customers were created, and a good situation gone bad turned out even better. That’s the community I’m a part of, and that’s what I’m most proud of.
PMQ: What’s new or next for your pizzeria?
Aram: The big one is the Slice-Thru, our drive-thru window for slices, opening this fall, with more to come through that window. We’re also looking to expand into new locations and beginning the process to franchise. On the wholesale side, Slice&Co keeps growing its par-baked pizza, crust, flatbread and focaccia line with more hotels, wineries, restaurants and bars.
Earlier this year, we started consulting for pizzerias and restaurants. Surviving and growing over the last three years has been a master class in opening a restaurant, managing one and everything in between—and everything we’ve built here, from the dough to the systems to the social, is what we now help fellow restaurant owners and friends build for themselves. If you’re opening, struggling or just want another set of eyes on your operation, visit GLDhospitality.com to learn more and get in touch, or DM us on Instagram at @slicestreetpizza.
Tracy Morin is PMQ’s associate editor.
