Mobile wood-fired pizza vendor Timber Pizza Co. will open its first brick-and-mortar spot in Petworth in late March or early April. In the meantime, owners Andrew Dana and Chris Brady recently started operating Fridays through Sundays in the former Blind Dog Cafe space, which will now be used to host a rotating cast of Union Kitchen vendors.

Dana and Brady, who tow their equipment to farmers markets and private events, have set up the pizza oven in the building’s back courtyard. The menu is more or less what you can expect to find when Timber opens in Petworth (809 Upshur St. NW), including pizzas topped with local ingredients plus a couple salads and sides. “We can sort of test out what people like, what works, what doesn’t work,” Dana says. 

One of Timber’s most popular pies is the Green Monster with pesto, feta, mozzarella, kale, and zucchini. But Dana says the pop-up’s favorite from its opening weekend last week were a breakfast pizza (scrambled and over-easy eggs, cheddar, potatoes, spicy honey, hot capicola) and The Munday (a white pizza with provolone, mozzarella, maple ricotta, roasted butternut squash, garlic chips, kale). Prices range from $10 to $13.

“When we first started, we thought we would never do crazy pizzas. We thought we would keep it super simple and be these pizza purists,” Dana says. But having the mobile business, they’d go to festivals and markets where they’d meet other food trucks and vendors. “We’d always throw whatever they had at the end of the day on the pizza, and we were like, ‘Whoa, some of this is really good.'”

As a result, Timber plans to have a rotating collaboration pizza. In the past, they’ve worked with DCity Smokehouse and Indigo Indian restaurant. Right now, they’re teaming up with DGS Delicatessen for a Reuben-style pizza that uses the Dupont deli’s pastrami. DGS smoked salmon is also available on bagels, which are made and boiled in New York then shipped down and finished in the wood-fired oven.

There’s no alcohol, but the pop-up (open 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Friday through Sunday) does serve glass bottle sodas and will continue Blind Dog Cafe’s coffee offerings.

Check out the full menu here:

Photo courtesy Timber Pizza Co.