If you’re a regular watcher of Food Network shows, you might catch a glimpse of a San Antonio restaurant Friday night.
Dough Pizzeria Napoletana will be featured on Guy Fieri’s “Triple D Nation” show on Friday. The show takes previously visited “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” eateries and focuses on how those restaurants have changed since Fieri first stopped by.
Dough was first featured on “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” in 2011. Fieri learned how to make the restaurant’s Pork Love Pizza, sampling the fresh mozzarella and helping co-owner Doug Horn with the toppings. The segment ends with Fieri taking a bite and rolling his eyes back into his head. “Mega-awesome,” he said.
Dough opened its second location at Hemisfair last year, and co-owner Lori Horn – married to Doug Horn – said the downtown location gets to star on the Food Network this time around.
“Because if the show is about where we’ve gone since then … [after “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives”] aired the first time, business just boomed,” Horn said. “It allowed us to save money to open this new location.”
Dough uses a wood-burning oven to create its pies in traditional Neapolitan fashion. Each pizza gets 90 seconds in an 800-degree oven and cooks quickly. The restaurant is even certified by the Associazione Pizzaioli Napoletani, the organization that ensures pizzerias follow Naples-style pizza rules.
Dough sources most of its ingredients from Italy, Horn said, as well as from local vendors. The restaurant buys certain kinds of flour and tomatoes and makes its mozzarella in-house. Even the wine list is all-Italian.
“A lot of pizza places have wood-burning ovens, but they choose to do more artisan pizzas so they don’t have to follow any guidelines and can put whatever they want on the pizza,” Horn explained. “We’re trying to stay very true to the roots of pizza, which is Naples.”
Though Fieri didn’t visit Dough again for the retrospective episode, Horn said she was still able to catch up with old friends. The “Triple D Nation” film crew was different, but the people who first worked with them in 2010 were in San Antonio at the same time to film new locations, Horn said. They relayed Fieri’s greetings and compliments, she added.
“They all came to the restaurant, and we had a nice dinner, and it was so cool to see the guys that filmed us back in 2010 again,” she said. “They’re great people.”
Because the show is airing on a Friday night, restaurant staff will all be working, Horn said.
“At the Castle Hills location, we have TVs, so they’ll have it on in the wine bar area,” she said. “But downtown we don’t even have a TV, so they’ll have to catch it later. When we saw they were going to air it Friday night we said, ‘Well I guess we’re not watching it right away!’”
Dough’s episode of “Triple D Nation” airs Friday evening at 8 p.m. on the Food Network.
