Sauce Pizza + Wine opens in Las Colinas, with Walnut Hill Lane store on deck

Though they’re already established in the town of Prosper, Sauce Pizza + Wine last week inched closer to a store in Dallas proper.

Founded by restaurateur Sam Fox (Flower Child, North Italia), Sauce Pizza is a from-scratch, fast-casual pizza joint that fires its hand-stretched dough in a hot, gas-fired ceramic oven that looks like every VPN oven you’ve ever seen but contains no wood.

That’s okay, because these $10-ish pizzas hit all the right marks.

The dough is made fresh daily, the veggies are chopped fresh, and the ingredients are top quality. The 600 degree oven turns out chewy pies, cracker-crust thin pizzas and cauliflower-based gluten free options in about 5 minutes.

The pasta options are good, too – three plump meatballs atop corkscrew pasta tossed in red wine-spiked marinara, a terrific mac and cheese made with heavy cream and four cheeses – and so are the salads, like this number with baby spinach, walnuts, apples, bleu cheese.

Nothing here will break the bank, whether you opt for a pie, a salad or a glass of $8 wine.

The space is done up in candy apple reds, bright whites and dark blacks, with windows along the front and a wide-brimmed covered patio (sheltered by roll-up garage doors) for days like these.

“We focus on freshness here,” manager Matt Sturza, a four-year Sauce veteran, told me during a recent preview visit. “Fresh ingredients, everything freshly prepared. Even our dough is made fresh daily.”

Kitchen manager Luis Levario says he left a fine dining background to join Sauce “because I saw the quality of the ingredients they were using and the company takes good care of its people.”

QSR pizzas is a tough space to enter, but there’s a good chance Sauce Pizza + Wine can succeed. The staff were well-trained – incredibly friendly and helpful – and the food is better than it has to be. A third area Sauce Pizza is slated to open soon at The Hill off Walnut Hill Lane and Central Expressway.