After Two Decades Of Slinging Greasy Pizza Late At Night To Deep Ellum Drunks, Zini’s Pizzeria Will Serve Its Last Slice This Weekend.

Even with pizza that is objectively not all that great and absolutely nowhere near Deep Ellum’s best, Zini’s Pizzeria has for 20 years been Deep Ellum’s go-to spot for post-concert eats.

But that run will come to an end this weekend, according to an update shared to the pizza parlor’s Facebook page last night by its founder Tim Franzin.

Ostensibly, Franzin writes, Zini’s is going out of business because it couldn’t come to terms with its landlord on a  new lease, and not because its staff always looked surprised when customers came in or because its operators weren’t too keen on maintaining any sort of standard hours of operation in the daytime.

Zini’s wasn’t all bad. For one, its by-the-slice offerings for just a couple bucks has always been among Deep Ellum’s more affordable quick bite options. Secondly, waiting in long lines to order there hasn’t been a concern in years what with all the dining competition that exists around Deep Ellum these days. Third, we can guarantee that, over the years, its greasy menu surely helped countless drunken revelers sober up before making the trek home.

This closure represents the third — and possibly last — goodbye for Zini’s, which once operated long-gone sister spots along Lower Greenville and in Oak Lawn. Regardless of your thoughts on Zini’s pizzas, this closure undoubtedly represents the end of at least some sort of era.

If the loss of Zini’s has you feeling nostalgic, you can get yourself a keepsake in the form of a Zini’s hat, which, per a follow-up post to the closing announcement, the pizzeria says it will be handing out for free all weekend long until supplies are gone to any customers who ask for one.

We’ve reached out to Zini’s multiple times today for more information on the closing and to see if the staff could maybe tip us off to any information about the closing post’s hint about a new location for the pizzeria. Perhaps fittingly, no one answered the phone, not even almost two hours after the shop’s stated 11 a.m. opening today, according to its Google listing. (The pizzeria’s own website is no longer working.)

Anyway, Zini’s will be missed, we guess?

No more articles