The wood-fired oven at Felina sits where the brew tanks used to be. That’s the detail that tells you the most about how this restaurant came together. Alessandro and Alfonso Salvatore needed a bigger kitchen for a bigger idea, and the old Funky Picnic Brewery & Cafe space on Bryan Avenue in South Main had the bones for it, so they took an industrial shell and warmed it up until it felt like theirs.
The brothers already had a hit two blocks over. Bocca Osteria Romana opened in South Main a year and a half before Felina and turned into one of the hardest reservations in Fort Worth, the kind of place that gets called the city’s best new restaurant of 2024 and then spends the next year living up to it.
Alessandro picked up Fort Worth Chef of the Year honors along the way. But Bocca’s kitchen was never built for a wood-fired oven. There wasn’t room. So instead of squeezing pizza into a restaurant that wasn’t designed for it, the Salvatores went and built a second restaurant around one.
That restaurant is Felina, and the name carries more weight than it looks like on a sign. Felina means feline in both Italian and Spanish, which happens to double as a nod to Fort Worth’s old nickname, Panther City. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of detail that shows up everywhere once you start looking for it here.
The Salvatores didn’t come up through culinary school pedigree. They were born in McAllen and grew up moving between Mexico, Italy, and Puerto Rico, where they eventually opened their first restaurant, Acapulco Taquería Mexicana, followed by the original Bocca Osteria Romana in San Juan. Everything since has been an extension of that same instinct: cook what you know, tell the truth about where you learned it, and don’t dress it up as something it isn’t. Felina is built on that same honesty. It’s pizza, but it’s their version of it, filtered through Rome, Puerto Rico, and South Texas all at once.
The pizza itself is Roman-style, which matters if you’ve spent any time in Fort Worth’s recent pizza boom and started assuming every new spot is chasing the same Neapolitan blueprint. Felina’s crust is thin, crisp, and built to hold its shape past the first bite, cooked in that imported wood-fired oven at a hotter, faster clip than a typical Neapolitan pie. The Margherita is the standard against which the rest of the menu measures itself, tomato and fior di latte and basil handled with restraint.
The La Felina is the one that shows off the kitchen’s range, house-made ragu against roasted poblano crema and golden raisins, sweet and savory pulling in opposite directions on the same slice. The Amatriciana pizza leans into guanciale and pecorino. The Hot Mess earns its name honestly, sopressata and whipped ricotta cut with hot honey.
Start the meal somewhere other than the pizza and the menu keeps making its case. The hummus with pizza bianca is an odd pairing on paper and a smart one at the table, naked wood-fired dough baked without sauce or cheese, torn and dragged through hummus that’s loose enough to work as a dip and rich enough to stand on its own. The calamari fritti and Mediterranean octopus round out a starter list that clearly isn’t trying to be Italian for the sake of being Italian.
The mortaza, a pressed sandwich built on burrata and mortadella, and the lamb lollipops in mint vinaigrette both make the same point a different way. This kitchen is telling a personal story, not filling out a checklist.
The room matches the food’s attitude. What used to be a brewery now feels warm instead of industrial, low-lit and loud in the good way, built for a Wednesday night that turns into something longer than planned. It sits in the middle of South Main’s pizza run, in a stretch of Near Southside that’s added several new wood-fired ovens within blocks of each other over the past year, and Felina holds its own in that company without trying to out-shout anybody.
Felina is open Tuesday through Saturday from 3:30 to 9:30 p.m., closed Sunday and Monday, at 401 Bryan Ave. in Fort Worth. Reservations run through Resy, and the kitchen takes call-in to-go orders at (469) 507-8626. The full menu and gift cards are up at felinatx.com, and the latest from the dining room lives on Instagram.
