In October 2019, a tornado tore through Preston Hollow and destroyed Pizza by Marco — the pizzeria that Joe Nuccio had started in 1949 on Carroll Avenue and eventually moved to Preston Royal Village in 1962, where it became a North Dallas institution over the next six decades. A few months before the tornado, Frankie Nuccio had lost his mother. His father had passed years earlier. Then the pandemic arrived. Nuccio walked away.
He came back this May. Ghost Pizza opened on May 27 at 10675 Northwest Highway, Suite 1635 in Lake Highlands, in a space that previously held a pho restaurant, near White Rock Lake. The name is deliberate — the original Preston Hollow pizzeria couldn’t legally come back as Pizza by Marco because of the national Marco’s Pizza chain, and it couldn’t come back as My Family’s Pizza, the name it had been using toward the end. So Nuccio called it Ghost Pizza, a name that carries the weight of everything that came before it without pretending none of it happened. “It’s what my parents would have wanted me to do,” he said. He’s probably right.
The menu runs pizza, salad, and pasta, built on fresh and organic ingredients throughout — appetizers fried in beef tallow, the way they should be when you’re not cutting corners on the fat. The BYOB policy is the other detail worth knowing: bring your own bottle, skip the markup, focus on the food. In a neighborhood where dinner for two can push past $100 before anyone orders a cocktail, that policy is either a throwback or a gift depending on how you look at it. Probably both.
Nuccio has mentioned the possibility of a second or third location down the road — maybe even returning to Preston Hollow, where the original stood until the tornado took it. Nothing confirmed yet. For now there’s one pizzeria in Lake Highlands, named for everything it lost and everything it came back for. ghostpizzadallas.com.
