Austin Truck Patrizi’s Expands With a New Italian Restaurant

Essential Austin Italian food truck Patrizi’s is expanding with a new physical restaurant this May. The second Patrizi’s will be found in the Austin Lake Hills neighborhood at 1705 Cuernavaca Drive North starting on Thursday, May 12.

The new counter-service restaurant will add breakfast and lunch items — a first for Patrizi’s. Mornings will include panzerotti, which are essentially fried savory Southern Italian turnovers (co-owner Nic Patrizi is still toying with how to describe the item on the menu, describing them as “Hot Pockets, Italian breakfast tacos, or Italian kolaches,” to Eater). These will be stuffed with scrambled eggs and cheese, with a pancetta iteration, as well as a dessert one with Nutella.

Also new to the daytime menu will be the house-made focaccia, available as loaded toasts with potential ingredients like mushrooms, eggplant caponata, or tomato confit; and sandwiches such as tentatively the caprese, muffaletta, and the vegan eggplant sott’olio.

The dinner menu will be similar to the original truck, which means its core pastas, including the pomodoro, red sauce, cacio e pepe, and carbonara, plus add-ons such as those meatballs and garlic confit. There will be salads and bar snacks as well, like fried arancini and potato croquettes.

There will be a full bar with cocktails similar to Patrizi’s sibling spot, Cajun restaurant and bar Vic & Al’s, but with an Italian lean. There’s a paloma made with grapefruit juice and Aperol with its house-made orange cognac; an orange limoncello; a spritz; as well as beers and wines.

Patrizi’s

The Patrizi team decided to open up in the Austin Lake Hills because that’s where co-owner Matt Patrizi lives. As cousin and fellow co-owner Nic Patrizi explained, Matt would make the drive down to Cherrywood to work at the food truck. When the Cuernavaca Drive property became available, they nabbed it, and now Nic has to make that drive out there. The address had previously been home to Cuerny Icehouse, which had opened in May 2020 and closed up sometime in late 2021 or early 2022.

The second Patrizi’s — with indoor and outdoor areas — will be open for dine-in service only at first, from Wednesday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to either 10 or 11 p.m. Takeout and daily hours will come later.

The Patrizis opened the original food truck in 2013 on the patio of theater space the Vortex and Butterfly Bar. They expanded with Vic & Al’s in 2020.

Patrizi’s