Khanh Nguyen started Zalat Pizza in Dallas back in 2015, and eleven years later the company is opening its 31st Texas location, this time in McKinney’s Heritage Village at 1720 N. Central Expressway, Suite 210, just south of Highway 380 on U.S. 75. For a brand that’s grown this far this fast, Zalat has held onto the same personality it launched with, which says something about how deliberately Nguyen has grown it.
That personality shows up in the details most pizza chains would have sanded off by now. Employees go by self-chosen “Call Signs” instead of their actual names, Nguyen himself goes by Morpheus, and the company motto, “Made with pride and Shared with joy,” gets repeated with a straight face rather than treated as corporate copy. The menu carries the same sense of humor: the Pho Shizzle, the Pineapple Express, and the Loaded Bacon Notato sit alongside Zalat’s signature SiRANCHa sauce and a standing commitment to 100% all-beef pepperoni, built around late-night hours that keep the ovens running long after most Dallas kitchens have closed.
McKinney’s new location keeps that same identity intact rather than diluting it for a new market. “McKinney is one of the most exciting communities in North Texas, with the growth, energy and food culture that make it a natural fit for Zalat,” Nguyen said in the announcement. “We’re not opening stores just to put more dots on a map.
Every new Zalat is a chance to prove that a growing pizza company can still make food with love, obsess over flavor and build teams that care about every detail.” Chief Operating Officer Song Smith-Moreno, who goes by Harley Quinn internally, framed the expansion the same way: growth measured by the strength of the team running each store, not just the sales numbers behind it.
Zalat’s roster now spans North Texas, Austin, and the greater Houston area, and the McKinney opening continues a growth pattern that’s stayed remarkably steady for a company that started as a single independent shop. It’s a genuinely rare thing in the restaurant business, a Dallas-born concept scaling to 31 locations without losing the eccentric personality that made it a cult favorite in the first place.
Zalat Pizza’s new McKinney location opens this summer at 1720 N. Central Expressway, Suite 210. Online ordering and the full menu are available at order.thanx.com/zalatpizza, and more on the company at zalatpizza.com.
