Wende Stevenson took a server job at MoMo Italian Kitchen on Forest Lane in 1988, two years after it opened. Nearly three decades later she owned it.
MoMo turns 40 this year. That is a long run for any Dallas restaurant and a longer one for an independent Italian kitchen in a Lake Highlands shopping center at Forest and Shepard, a block west of Greenville Avenue. In all that time the place has changed hands once, and the person who bought it had already carried plates across its dining room.
The story starts with Antonio Gattini, who left Tuscany for Dallas in 1985 and opened MoMo the following year. He brought his mother’s recipes with him, and that mattered more than most people twirling his pasta realized. His mother was Fernanda Gosetti, who helped relaunch the Italian food magazine La Cucina Italiana after World War II and spent decades testing and writing down classic Italian dishes. Her cookbooks are still in print.
So MoMo has always cooked from the north of Italy, a long way from the red-sauce Italian-American plates most of Dallas grew up on.
The Fettucine alla Santalloro leads the menu, a mix of spicy and plain house-made noodles tossed with chicken and spinach in cream. The Trenette alla Putanesca carries Niçoise olives, capers and a touch of anchovy. Before the pasta, the Carpaccio di Manzo comes as thin raw beef tenderloin under arugula and shaved Parmigiano, and the Lamb Meatballs arrive with mint pesto and a house yogurt sauce.
The Funghi Freschi is the dish that tells you how old the menu really is. Raw button mushrooms and artichokes, dressed in lemon and olive oil. Nobody puts that on a new menu in 2026, and nobody at MoMo seems inclined to take it off.
In 2017 the Gattini family sold the restaurant to Stevenson and her husband, Aaron Gross. The two had joked for years about how much fun it would be to own MoMo, without ever thinking the family would let it go.
Neither of them was new to the business. Stevenson had worked at Lola and Shinsei, Gross at York Street and Savory, and the pair later worked together in management at Mot Hai Ba. They knew MoMo as former staff and as regulars, and they knew exactly what the neighborhood would say if the menu moved. They left it alone. Their changes went into the specials, and a few of those eventually earned a permanent place.
The room is where they did make changes. They added an event space next door for private parties and renovated the dining room with Florentine and Italian deco touches.
MoMo still runs like a neighborhood place. Plenty of Lake Highlands teenagers get their first job there, and some come back to work summers when they’re home from college.
On Sunday nights, once the dinner rush slows down, Stevenson and Gross usually sit down at one of their own tables and eat. They have been doing that since they started dating in 2000, back when it was simply their favorite restaurant.
One note for anyone who hasn’t been: MoMo Italian Kitchen has no connection to the similarly named Momo’s Pasta. The original is the one on Forest Lane.
MoMo Italian Kitchen is at 8989 Forest Lane, Suite 130. Lunch runs Tuesday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and dinner starts at 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. The restaurant is closed Mondays. The number is 972-234-6800.
