The Pizza Joint That Began in a Train Depot
By The Magnolia Standard · June 9, 2026 · Issue 08
Gary Hammons grew up in a pizzeria his parents ran out of an old train depot in the far corner of Texas. He became a CPA. He never let go of the pizza. Two years ago, with his wife and their chef niece, he opened his own in a restored Old Town house, where you order by the flight and the wine bar is called the Detour. The latest profile in the Founders of Magnolia series.
Gary Hammons grew up in Hooks, a small town in the far northeast corner of Texas, in and around a pizza restaurant his parents ran out of an old converted train station. He loved it as a kid. The booths, the oven, the warm smell of the place on a slow afternoon. Somewhere in there he decided he would own a pizza joint of his own someday. The decision took most of a lifetime to keep. It finally opened in Magnolia.
WanderCrust Pizza Company sits in a restored historic house at 312 Commerce Street, in Old Town Magnolia. Two stories, three porches, board games on the tables, a wine bar in the back. It turned two years old this month. And the train depot Gary remembers from childhood is stamped all over the place, on purpose.
What you find when you walk in is a family business that waited a long time to exist, built by people who clearly thought hard about every corner of it.
A boy, a depot, and a pizza oven.
The pizza came first, a generation back. Gary's parents ran their restaurant out of a depot in Hooks, and he grew up inside it. As the story goes, he developed a love of pizza joints young and dreamed of owning one someday. Then life happened in the usual order. He became a CPA. The dream went in a drawer, the way most childhood dreams do.
It did not stay there.
A running joke that turned serious.
Gary and his wife, Dr. Tina Hammons, a professor at Sam Houston State, are travelers. They liked to find a new pizza place wherever they landed, try it, and rate it, joking the whole time about opening one of their own. For years that was just the bit they did on vacation. It got serious when Tina's niece Liz, a chef with close to a decade in kitchens, agreed to run theirs.
The name comes straight out of that habit. WanderCrust is a play on wanderlust. The wine bar in back is called the Detour. The walls carry old travel postcards, the kind people mailed home between the 1920s and the 1950s. None of the theme is accidental. It is two people who love the road building a room around the feeling.
Order a flight and travel the menu.
The signature move at WanderCrust is the flight. Instead of committing a whole table to one pie, you get four small pizzas, about five inches each, and sample your way across the menu. It is the travel idea turned into dinner: a little of this place, a little of that one, all on the same board.
The flights have themes, naturally. The International Flight runs Mediterranean, Nacho Nirvana, VolksPizza, and Pompeii. There is a Jimmy Buffett tribute flight too: A Cheeseburger in Paradise, Margaritaville, He Went to Paris, and Volcano. If a flight is more than you came for, the regular menu holds full twelve-inch pizzas, salads, and sub sandwiches.
Sauce from whole tomatoes, a crust baked thin.
The food underneath the theme holds up. The crust is thin and crisp, baked in a traditional oven. The sauce is made in-house from whole, vine-ripened tomatoes instead of poured from a can, which is the kind of small, unglamorous decision that separates a real kitchen from a reheating station. They make what they can on site. You can taste the difference between a sauce someone cooked and a sauce someone opened.
- Where
- 312 Commerce St, Old Town Magnolia
- Run by
- Gary & Dr. Tina Hammons; kitchen led by their niece, chef Liz
- Opened
- June 2024 — two years in Old Town
- The concept
- Pizza flights: four ~5-inch pizzas so you can sample
- Made in-house
- Sauce from whole vine-ripened tomatoes; thin, crisp crust
- After dark
- Detour Wine Bar, wine flights, live music on select nights
The Detour, board games, and a raccoon on watch.
By day it reads family restaurant: kids, board games, pizza on the porch. By evening the Detour Wine Bar in back gives the grown-ups their own reason to stay, with wine flights that mirror the pizza flights, craft beer, cocktails, and live music on select nights. A wooden raccoon, carved from a tree that was coming down anyway, keeps watch over the room.
The owners describe what they were after plainly. "It is a little bit of a step back in time," they say. "We just want this place to be part of people's memories." That is a modest goal said out loud, and it is most of what a good neighborhood restaurant is for.
Two years in Old Town.
Magnolia has been adding rooftops faster than it has been adding the kind of small, owner-run rooms that give a town a center. WanderCrust is one of the good ones. A pizza joint that started in a train depot a generation ago, carried in a CPA's head for decades, opened at last on Commerce Street, and run day to day by family. Two years in, the door is open and the porches are full.
The profiles in this series keep landing on the same thread. Independent. Family-run. Built on something the owners cared about long before it was a business. WanderCrust fits the pattern, postcards and all.
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