Dallas never settled on one kind of pizza, and that turns out to be the best thing about it. Ask five people in this city what good pizza looks like and you’ll get five different pans, five different crusts, five different fights about whether a fork belongs anywhere near the plate. Nobody here grew up on one true style, so the city just collects them instead.
Plano is the unlikely home of New York pizza. Heirloom Pizza is a takeout counter with two stools, run by a guy named Justin who taught himself the style by studying it. Get The Author, pepperoni and ricotta, and the crust folds the way a New York slice is supposed to — not too much chew, not too much char, just a crust that holds its shape until you bite it.
Justin also happens to make one of the better Detroit-style pies in the area, which tells you something about how little Dallas cares about staying in one lane. His Detroit Deep Dish Square comes in a rectangular pan with Wisconsin brick cheese pushed all the way to the edges, where it caramelizes into a crust you could set down and not need a knife for. The inside stays light. That contrast — crunchy wall, soft middle — is the whole point of the style, and it’s rare to find it done right this far from Michigan.
Lewisville has the real thing at Motor City Pizza, where owner Greg Tierney, a Detroit native, started it as a pandemic pop-up in 2020 before opening a storefront a year later. It’s since been named one of the best Detroit-style pizzerias outside Michigan by national outlets, and the restaurant stocks Vernors and Faygo to go with it. Get The Longacre — seasoned ground beef, mushrooms, ricotta, and the house “BOSS” sauce made from San Marzano tomatoes. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
Downtown belongs to Neapolitan, at Partenope Ristorante on Main Street, where the chef was born in Naples and the pizza shows it. Order the Montanara, a flash-fried pie before it ever sees the wood oven. The crust blisters and puffs at the edge the way it’s supposed to, thin enough in the center that the first bite nearly folds itself.
Sicilian lives a few blocks away at Pizza Leila near Klyde Warren Park, a walk-up counter with ten-plus pies on display behind glass at any given time. The squares are thick, dense at the base, and not shy about toppings. Get the mushroom — regulars keep naming it as the one to beat. The two-slices-and-a-drink lunch special at ten dollars is the easiest way in.
Preston Center is where Roman-style turns up, at Pizzeria Carina, a tiny storefront run by Eugene Plyako, who taught himself the style and built a following baking sourdough out of his house before he ever opened a restaurant. The pizza is thin, crisp, and slightly charred, made from a naturally leavened dough that gives it a faint tang. Order the Carina pie — white pizza with aged mozzarella, shaved pear, caramelized onion, hot honey, and pistachios. It’s the one the restaurant is named after, and it earns that.
New Haven-style apizza barely existed in Dallas a few years ago. Now there’s Fortunate Son in downtown Garland, a corner spot with a patio built for sitting outside with a beer, pizza that comes out chewy, blistered, and a little charred at the edges in the way New Haven natives insist on. Get the potato and pancetta — it draws people who’ve never been east of the Mississippi, and more than one transplant has said, out loud, that it’s the first pizza in Texas that tasted like home. Find it at 500 Main St., Suite 100.
Tavern-style, in Dallas, means Louie’s on Henderson Avenue — a bar first, pizza spot second, in the way that only matters until you taste it. Thin, crisp, cut into squares instead of triangles, loaded with cheese past the point of restraint. It’s been open since the ’90s, and the regulars treat the whole operation like a clubhouse. Stick with the sausage and pepperoni, no need to overthink it.
Late at night, when everyone else has closed, there’s Zalat Pizza, which opened on Fitzhugh Avenue in 2015 and now runs across North Texas on the strength of staying open until 4 a.m. on weekends. Khanh Nguyen built the menu for people who are still awake and hungry at an hour most kitchens have given up on. Get the Pho Shizzle, built on the pho flavors from Nguyen’s restaurant next door — cilantro, hoisin, the whole bowl reimagined as a pie. It only works at 2 a.m., which is exactly when you’ll want it.
Dallas pizza started at Campisi’s on Mockingbird, long before any of these styles had names here. It’s been slinging red-sauce pies since the 1940s, thin-crust and old-school, in a building where Jack Ruby reportedly sat the night before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Order the house special and don’t ask too many questions about the booth you’re sitting in.
