The Only Store in Barton Hills Also Makes Its Best Pizza

You walk into Barton Hills Market for a six-pack and a bag of ice. You leave with a slice of Sicilian pizza wrapped in foil, because the guy behind the counter just pulled a tray out of the oven and you'd be a fool to say no. This isn't a plan. It's just what happens when a neighborhood decides it doesn't need a commercial district, and one store at 1220 Barton Hills Drive ends up doing the job of six.

That's not an exaggeration about convenience. It's a fact about how this neighborhood was built, and it explains why the pizza counter that opened inside a convenience store last year has quietly become one of the more talked-about slices in central Austin.

A Neighborhood Built Without a Downtown

Barton Hills went up in the 1940s and grew through the 1950s as straight residential subdivision, marketed at the 1956 Parade of Homes as the world's largest air-conditioned subdivision. The boundaries have stayed almost exactly what they were then: South Lamar and Zilker to the east, Barton Springs Road and Zilker Park to the north, Barton Creek and the Spyglass-Barton's Bluff neighborhood to the west, Capital of Texas Highway to the south. Ranch houses, hills, trees, and almost nothing zoned for commerce.

Meanwhile, the corridor two blocks over on South Lamar has turned into one of the fastest-moving strips in the city. The Code, a residential-and-hotel development at 2323 South Lamar, opened in February 2026 and has spent the year adding tenants: a wellness studio, a fitness concept, a fashion boutique from a Texas-born designer who trained in Paris and Florence, and a Cuvée Coffee space that flips from coffee bar to cocktail bar at night. Life Time South Lamar opened its doors at The Bouldin development on New Year's Eve 2025, a 57,000-square-foot club with a shared wet suite and enough amenities to anchor its own zip code. Oria, a Mediterranean restaurant built around wood and charcoal cooking, took over the old Zoé Tong space on Barton Springs Road in February 2026. A Greek yogurt concept called Agapi filed paperwork for a spot on South Lamar in the middle of this year.

None of that is inside Barton Hills. All of it is close enough to see from the neighborhood's edge, which is exactly the point. Barton Hills residents watch a restaurant boom happen next door every year and go home to a neighborhood that still has, functionally, one commercial address.

One Address, Every Errand

Barton Hills Market has held that ground for years, and the Austin Chronicle's description of it hasn't needed updating: a full-service deli with pizza, fine wine, imported cheese. Walk the aisles and you'll find what that sentence is shorthand for:

• A deli counter that takes orders in advance for sandwiches and platters
• A wine and craft beer selection that outperforms what you'd expect from a corner store
• Breakfast tacos and coffee for the early crowd, since the store opens before most people leave for work
• Dog treats and supplies, because half the neighborhood walks here with a leash in hand
• Pantry basics, batteries, ice, the stuff that turns a quick stop into a full errand list

How many households actually depend on this one building is harder to pin down than you'd think, and that's its own small piece of neighborhood trivia. Different sources put Barton Hills anywhere from just under 3,500 residents to over 9,000, depending on which boundary lines they're using and how old the count is. Nobody entirely agrees on where the neighborhood ends. Everybody agrees on where the market is.

The Pizza Counter That Out-Punches Dedicated Pizzerias

The newest tenant inside that one building is Joe's Slice of Sicily, and it's the reason people who don't live in Barton Hills have started making the drive. Owner Giuseppe Croce grew up in Capaci, a town outside Palermo, and learned the trade the way you'd hope: in family kitchens, at neighborhood ovens, from recipes that predate him. Community Impact covered the counter's opening inside Barton Hills Market last year, and since then it's built the kind of reputation that shows up unprompted in delivery-app reviews. One DoorDash customer put it bluntly, writing that it blows Home Slice out of the water, which in a city with Home Slice's following is not a small claim. Another reviewer, on Apple Maps, called it simply the best NY pizza in central Austin.

Earlier this year, Joe's started serving breakfast sandwiches on fresh-baked bread, and the reviews shifted to cover mornings too. One customer wrote it was hands down the best breakfast sandwich they'd had in Austin. Another admitted upfront what a lot of first-timers discover the hard way: this is a takeout-only pizza counter inside a convenience store, no dining room, no pretense, just a counter and an oven wedged between the wine shelf and the register.

That combination, a genuine Sicilian pizza operation with nowhere to sit down, tucked inside the neighborhood's only retail address, is the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a restaurant list. It shows up when you actually live here and notice that the best slice in the area comes from a gas-station-adjacent counter you'd otherwise drive past.

Why the Scarcity Works in Barton Hills' Favor

A neighborhood with a dozen restaurants absorbs a bad one without much notice. A neighborhood with exactly one commercial address can't afford a bad tenant, and for years Barton Hills Market has managed to avoid that problem by staying useful in a dozen small ways rather than trying to be anything glamorous. One reviewer on Menupix described the place as a treasure hunt every time, and mentioned a cashier by name the way you'd talk about someone from your own block, not a store employee.

That's the actual shape of daily life here. It isn't a strip of restaurants to choose between. It's one building that has to be the deli, the wine shop, the dog-supplies aisle, and now, thanks to a Sicilian pizza counter that outperforms dedicated pizzerias across the review sites, the neighborhood's best kitchen too. The scarcity that would frustrate residents somewhere else is exactly what makes this one address matter as much as it does.

Next time you're walking back from Barton Creek Greenbelt or killing time before ACL weekend hits full swing, that's where you'll end up. Everyone in Barton Hills already knows this. Now you know why.

If you're a longtime Barton Hills resident thinking about what your home is worth in a neighborhood this specific, or you're weighing a move here and want someone who actually knows which corner store carries the whole block, Kevin Haines has been walking these same streets since 1992. Schedule your free consultation and get a read on the market from someone who lives it, not just covers it.