Image: Conans Pizza Archive
On July 19, 1976, University of Florida graduates Jerry Strader and Scott Leist opened the first Conans Pizza at 29th and Guadalupe Streets near the University of Texas, instantly winning over pizza-starved students and everyone else with its Chicago-inspired deep-dish pan pies and strangely compelling whole wheat crust.
Image: Conans Pizza North
Despite the closure of that original location in 2018, Conans is still going strong with two restaurants in Austin 48 years later, with its north location dating back to 1979 on West Anderson Lane still run by the Strader family, and a south location opened in 1978 on Stassney Lane taken over by an enthusiastic local after Leist retired in 2020.
The legendary status of Conans in Austin isn’t just about the pizza, which obviously remains great, but also its healthy sense of pulp kitsch. The restaurant’s name and signature “Savage” pizza are inspired by (but legally distinct from) comic book hero Conan the Barbarian, with interior decor heavy on Frank Frazetta-inspired fantasy art you’d expect to see airbrushed on the side of a van.
Image: Conans Pizza Archive
The name Conans originated with Scott Leist, who is a dedicated “Conan comic freak,” according to Strader. Conan is a science fiction barbarian, somewhere between a caveman and a quarterback in appearance, who enjoys lusty extraterrestrial adventures, often involving muscular sword-wielding women who ride around on huge mutant lizards. Maybe not the stuff of family entertainment, but it’s a safe bet that more Austinites can identify Conans the pizza than Conan the barbarian.
The vibe of the business was considered a little offbeat when it opened in the 1970s, and not much has changed since then — that nostalgic sensibility is key to its lasting appeal, and although the chain no longer dominates the local pizza scene quite like it did during its peak of eight locations in the mid-1980s, the continued existence of Conans nearly 50 years after its founding in a very different Austin speaks for itself.
Image: Conans Pizza Archive
The owners of the business appear to share that sense of nostalgia, offering an astonishingly detailed record of the restaurant’s history in the “Archives” section of the Conans North website containing historic photos, news clippings, recordings of radio promotions, and even the film negatives of advertisements from the 1980s. It’s an obvious labor of love, currently documenting the history of Conans from the 1970s into the 2000s. Today, even more than usual, seems like a great day to dig in.
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