David Campisi is moving his family’s restaurant into a space that already has a chef’s fingerprints all over it, and he’s doing it as a favor to a friend as much as a business decision.
Campisi’s, the Dallas Italian institution that’s been slinging pizza and red sauce since 1946, is taking over the old Perch Bistro & Bar location at 7709 Inwood Road. Perch started life as Dea, an upscale Italian and Mediterranean restaurant Lynae Fearing and Tracy Rathbun opened in 2022 in the old Fireside Pies space, before the pair rebranded it into the more casual Perch in 2024. Perch closed this spring after a two-year run that never quite found its footing, even as Fearing’s other two restaurants nearby, Shinsei and Lovers Seafood and Market, kept humming along. Campisi and Fearing worked out a lease assignment between themselves, and Campisi’s plans to open in the space in early 2027.
“Lynae and I negotiated and she assigned the lease to me,” Campisi told CraveDFW. “It works out great for both of us. We’re going to be happy neighbors.”
The move puts Campisi’s back on the same stretch of Inwood and Lovers Lane it’s occupied for decades, just a few doors down from where its old location sat before a fire tore through the shopping center at 5405 W. Lovers Lane in late December. That fire, which damaged the attic space above several businesses in the strip, forced Campisi’s out of the building it had operated in for more than twenty years, and it started a standoff that’s become depressingly familiar to Dallas restaurant owners.
“We’ve sat here for seven months not hearing a word from our landlord,” Campisi said. “In the real estate world, when your landlord goes quiet, they’re usually up to no good.” Campisi’s still had five years left on its lease when the landlord exercised a termination clause. Campisi says he brought in outside counsel and a commercial real estate team and couldn’t get the landlord to engage. “We were at that location over twenty years. Never a day late on rent, not once. And they wouldn’t even talk to us.”
Campisi declined to name the landlord, but he was direct that the silence itself was the problem. Terminating a two-decade tenant with a clean payment history, then going dark on that tenant’s attorneys, isn’t how he believes a landlord should operate in good faith. He’d rather point at what’s replacing it. The new Inwood Road location will finally give Campisi’s a proper bar setup, something the old Lovers Lane spot never had, and the restaurant will keep running pickup and delivery out of it the way it always has.
Campisi is the fourth generation to run the family business, and the roots go back further than most people realize. His great-grandparents, Carlo and Antonia Campisi, immigrated from Sicily and eventually settled in Dallas, opening the Idle Hour Bar at Knox and McKinney in 1946, where Carlo started making pizza out of a kitchen in the back. Four years later, the family moved into a former nightclub on Mockingbird Lane called the Egyptian Lounge. There wasn’t enough money to replace the sign, so they simply pulled off the word “Lounge” and added “Restaurant.” The name Campisi’s Egyptian Restaurant, and the neon sign that still hangs there today, is the reason nobody had the budget to change eighty years ago.
Campisi grew up in that restaurant, working under Joe Campisi, who built much of its reputation for hospitality, and much of its reputation as a piece of Dallas lore. Joe counted ballplayers, entertainers and plenty of Dallas characters among his regulars over the decades. David has run the company for more than twenty years now, expanding a single family dining room into a group of restaurants across North Texas.
He’s protective of what that expansion is and isn’t. “We’re an iconic brand, like it or don’t like it, that’s who we are,” he said. “These expansions aren’t us trying to be anyone else. We’re not trying to do anything different than we’ve done for eighty years, and that’s serving great quality food and being a community leader.”
The Inwood Road relocation isn’t the only new address on the books. Campisi’s also opened a delivery and pickup kitchen this month at 5944 Royal Lane, in the Preston-Royal shopping center space that used to house Saucy’s Thai & Pho before it closed in February. The spot sits right next to Escondido, the Tex-Mex restaurant at 5950 Royal Lane. Unlike the full-service Inwood location, the Preston-Royal kitchen is built specifically around getting food out the door fast, part of a broader strategy Campisi says grew out of the disruption from the fire.
“What we realized in the last seven months is we’re going to be opening up more locations to service our guests more efficiently,” he said. Smaller delivery radiuses from more kitchens, he explained, mean faster pickup and delivery times without leaning as hard on third-party apps. “We weren’t the first ones to deliver. In 1993 we were delivering a full menu out of the Egyptian. We’re just continuing that and making it more seamless.” Both new kitchens are built for volume, designed to handle dine-in, pickup and delivery together rather than treating any one of those as an afterthought.
Campisi also pointed to the restaurant’s ongoing relationship with the Dallas Police Department, including a recent donation of tack and saddle equipment to the department’s mounted unit, as part of what he sees as the family’s long-running commitment to giving back in the city that’s kept Campisi’s in business for eight decades.
“Dallas has been so good to us,” he said. “We’re looking forward to the next eighty years of success in DFW.
More on Preston-Royal location
