Zalat Pizza has never been shy about mashing up flavors that have no business working together until they do, and the newest one might be the boldest swing yet. Starting August 17, every Zalat Pizza location in Texas will start slinging a Butter Chicken Pizza, a limited-time pie that takes one of the tastiest dishes in Indian cooking and stretches it across a crust.
The building blocks are all there. A butter chicken sauce, rich with tomato, cream, and warm spice, goes down first, thick enough to hold its own against the toppings piling on top of it. Seasoned chicken and a generous blanket of mozzarella follow, and the whole thing gets finished with a signature drizzle and a scatter of fresh cilantro that cuts through the richness right before it hits the table. It’s the kind of pizza that reads strange on paper and makes complete sense the second the first bite lands, sauce clinging to cheese clinging to char at the crust’s edge.
Getting there wasn’t quick. Brandon Moon, who runs research and development for Zalat under the call sign Splinter, said the team’s process for any new specialty pie is the same every time: get a group in a room, make the pizza, eat it, argue about it, change it, and do the whole thing over again, sometimes a dozen times before anyone’s satisfied. Nothing goes on the menu, he said, until the entire team would order it themselves. That’s the stubbornness that produced the Pho Shizzle and the Pineapple Express, so there’s reason to trust the instinct here too.
The timing isn’t an accident. The Butter Chicken Pizza lands the same month Zalat opens its 31st Texas location, a new spot in McKinney’s Heritage Village at 1720 N. Central Expressway, Suite 210, expected to open later in August. Between the new store and the new pie, it’s a busy month for a company that started as a single Dallas storefront in 2015 and has since spread across North Texas, Austin, and greater Houston without losing the late-night, slightly unhinged energy that made people fall for it in the first place.
The Butter Chicken Pizza will be available for pickup, delivery, and through the usual third-party apps starting August 17, while supplies last. Given how fast Zalat’s limited runs tend to disappear, it’s worth getting to before it’s gone.
