Drive down FM 2222 near Dry Creek Drive and you will see a building that used to smell like starch and dry-cleaning solvent now wrapped in plywood and permit stickers. Most people who pass it assume the same thing: another Austin restaurant group is opening a satellite location, the kind of expansion that shows up in a press release and quietly blends into the corridor within a year.
That is not what is happening at 3720 FM 2222. Allday Pizza, the slice shop that started as a wine-bar pickup window in Tarrytown, is turning the old Reid's Dry Cleaners & Laundry building into something the founders have never built before: a full restaurant with a complete bar program, indoor and outdoor seating, and hybrid counter-and-table service. Owners Daniel Sorg and Townsend Smith have described it as the first time they get to fully control the whole experience from the ground up, rather than working inside someone else's leftover footprint.
What Was Actually a Dry Cleaner
The building at 3720 FM 2222 spent years as a dry cleaner and laundry business, not a restaurant space. That matters more than it sounds. Most restaurant openings on Austin's older commercial corridors are adaptive reuse: a new kitchen slides into a space that already had a hood vent, a grease trap, and a walk-in cooler because a different restaurant closed there first. Allday's team is instead converting a service business into a full food-and-beverage build, plumbing, ventilation, bar infrastructure and all, which is a heavier and slower lift than swapping a sign out front.
Permit filings tracked by local business coverage show construction on the site began in October 2025 and was scheduled to wrap by early June 2026, with the team aiming for a summer 2026 opening. As of the most recent construction updates published this spring, Sorg and Smith had not locked in an exact date. Summer has now come and gone without a public announcement, which tells you something useful if you live nearby: this build is bigger, and slower, than the quick pop-up openings Allday has done before.
Two Small Starts, One Real Restaurant
To understand why the Northwest Hills location is different, it helps to see where Allday has actually operated until now.
| Location | Format | Bar | Seating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flo's Wine Bar, Tarrytown (2023) | Pickup window inside an existing wine shop | Wine only | None, walk-up and carry-out |
| Hyde Park counter spot (opened December 2024) | Counter service next to Tiny Grocer and First Light Books | Beer and wine | Limited counter seating |
| Northwest Hills (in progress) | Hybrid counter and table service | Full bar | Largest dining room yet, indoor and outdoor |
Neither of Allday's first two spots was ever meant to be a full restaurant. Flo's was a wine bar that happened to sell exceptional pizza out of a side window. Hyde Park added counter service next to Tiny Grocer and First Light Books, expanding the format but keeping the same walk-up model. Northwest Hills is the first location built as a restaurant from the start, with a full bar and a dining room designed to hold a crowd instead of a line, though the team itself has said it will likely open several days a week at first and grow into daily service over time.
That is the detail most coverage of this opening has missed. The story has been framed as a neighborhood favorite expanding into a new zip code, as if Northwest Hills is inheriting a smaller copy of what already exists in Tarrytown or Hyde Park. The opposite is closer to true. The version of Allday that opens on FM 2222 will be more complete than either of the locations that made the brand's name.
Sorg put it this way to the Austin American-Statesman:
"This is the first time we really get to stand on our own and shape the whole experience."
That is not marketing language about a new location. It is an admission that the first two Allday spots were built around someone else's walls, someone else's hours, and someone else's constraints. Northwest Hills is where the constraints come off.
Why This Corner, and Why It Took a Year
I have watched plenty of small commercial buildings on the northwest side sit vacant for a stretch before something moves in, and the pattern is usually the same: a business closes, the space sits, and eventually a similar concept takes over the existing buildout because it is cheaper than starting over. Allday's decision to gut a dry cleaner instead of waiting for a restaurant space to open up on this stretch of FM 2222 says something about how they see the corridor. They were not looking for the easiest available box. They picked the location and then did the harder work of making it a restaurant.
The menu is expected to carry over Allday's core lineup rather than reinvent itself: thin-crust, 16-inch New York-style pies, a Caesar salad, an Italian grinder, and the soft serve that regulars from Tarrytown and Hyde Park already show up for. What changes is the format around that food. A full bar means cocktails alongside the wine and beer the earlier locations offered. Hybrid service means you can walk up to the counter the way you always could, or sit down and have someone bring your order to the table, which the smaller locations were never built to do.
For anyone who already lives in Northwest Hills, here is the practical version of all this: if you drive past 3720 FM 2222 this month and the building looks finished but dark, that does not necessarily mean something has gone wrong. As of the most recent reporting on the project, Sorg and Smith had committed only to the summer 2026 construction window, not a fixed opening date. Watch the restaurant's own social channels for a soft-open signal rather than expecting an advance press release.
What This Says About the Corridor
FM 2222 in Northwest Hills has functioned for years as a drive-through corridor: a way to get from the neighborhood to MoPac or Loop 360, dotted with practical businesses like dry cleaners and strip-mall retail rather than destinations people plan an evening around. A restaurant group choosing to build its most ambitious location yet on this stretch, rather than in a denser, higher-foot-traffic part of Austin, is a small but real vote of confidence in the corridor's ability to hold a full-service crowd on a Tuesday night, not just pass-through traffic.
Whether that bet pays off is still an open question as of this writing. But the scale of what is going into the old dry cleaner, full bar, expanded seating, a kitchen built for more than a counter menu, suggests Allday's team believes Northwest Hills residents will treat this as a destination rather than a convenience stop. That is a different kind of confidence than what a satellite location usually represents.
I grew up in Austin and have spent years watching which businesses treat Northwest Hills as an afterthought and which ones actually invest in it. This is the second kind. Keep an eye on FM 2222 near Dry Creek Drive over the next few weeks. When the lights go on, it will be worth the walk over.
If you are thinking further down the road, whether that means a bigger kitchen of your own or a different pocket of Northwest Hills to call home, Living Well in Austin is where I keep track of what is actually changing in this neighborhood, block by block. Schedule a discovery call and get private access to Austin listings before they hit the wider market.
