Tag Archives: Italian

The Best Chicken Fried Steak on Greenville Avenue Comes from an Italian Kitchen

Some of the best chicken fried steak in Dallas comes out of an Italian kitchen. That sounds like a setup for a joke, but anyone who has eaten at Prego Pasta House on Lower Greenville knows it is simply true.

Prego has been a Greenville Avenue fixture since September. The roots go back even further. In 1956, Joe Barraco Sr. opened a grocery store at 2919 Bryan St., part of the stretch of bakeries, markets and shops that once made up Dallas’ Little Italy. When the family moved into the restaurant business, Joe’s wife, Rose, brought her recipes with her, and many of them are still on the menu more than four decades later. It is a red-sauce house in the best sense, with garlic bread, crab claws, veal, steak pizzaiola and pastas served with a salad, the way they have been for generations.

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Caviar, Truffles and Foie Gras: Avner Samuel Is Cooking at La Stella

Avner Samuel is cooking in Addison now, at La Stella Italian Steakhouse and Music Lounge, and his latest tasting menu reads a lot like the old days on Oak Lawn. There’s live scallop with osetra caviar, scrambled eggs under black truffles, foie gras on Wagyu. The six courses he recently served are headed for the regular menu soon.

If you dined at Aurora, you’ll see it right away. If you didn’t, some background helps.

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Ethnic Dish Explained: Vitello Tonnato, The Italian Veal and Tuna Dish, and Where to Find It in Dallas

vitello tonnato

Across Piazza Carignano in Turin, the brick facade of Palazzo Carignano ripples like a curtain in a breeze. The first Parliament of a unified Italy met behind those walls. Directly across the square sits Del Cambio, which opened its doors on October 5, 1757, and has been feeding the city ever since.

Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, the statesman who did more than anyone to stitch Italy together, was a regular here, seated with a view of the Parliament across the way. The Risorgimento room has been carefully restored and still carries its 19th-century bearing, and the original parquet creaks under every step.

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On the Rocks Is Open, and Kent Rathbun’s Lobster Shooter Already Has a Trophy

Kent Rathbun has been one of the defining names in Dallas dining for the better part of three decades. He opened Abacus in 1999, followed it with Jasper’s in 2003, cooked for Queen Elizabeth and the Bush inaugural ball, beat Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America in 2008, and built a reputation that still carries weight in a city that moves on fast. These days he runs a catering operation and a barbecue venture with his wife Tracy, consults for a growing list of clients, and just helped open a restaurant in Burleson that carries his fingerprints all over it.

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Zio Cecio Is the Sardinian Dinner Dallas Needs

Francesco Farris was thirteen years old the first time he cooked for anyone other than his own family. It was New Year’s Eve, and he’d decided, the way only a thirteen-year-old can decide something like this, that he was going to make dinner for his friends. He remembered his mother’s simple pasta, just olive oil, garlic, and one long, thin chile pepper. He went to the market in Sardinia looking for that pepper. He couldn’t find one that size. So he grabbed ten of the small ones instead, figuring the math would work out.

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Burrito Bellas in Uptown Dallas with a Creative Twist on Mexican and Italian 

Burrito Bellas just opened on McKinney Avenue, and it’s doing something Uptown hasn’t quite seen before: putting Mexican and Italian food in the same burrito instead of picking a lane.

Shawn Horne is behind it, a longtime figure in Dallas dining with a resume that runs through Star Canyon, Aquaknox, and the Green Room. The idea is straightforward once you hear it. Take the comfort of a burrito and build it around the flavors of a classic Italian dish instead of the usual fillings. That gets you a chicken parmesan burrito, a sausage and pepper burrito, and a spaghetti and meatball version wrapped in a tortilla instead of served on a plate, alongside more traditional burritos and quesadillas for anyone who wants to keep it simple.

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Élephante to Bring Coastal Southern Italian Dining to Uptown Dallas September 1

Élephante opens its doors in Uptown Dallas on September 1, and the whole idea behind it traces back to a rock. Back in the summer of 2014, Wish You Were Here Group founder Nicholas Mathers was traveling through Pantelleria, a small volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, when he came across a natural stone formation called the Arco dell’Elefante, a shape carved by wind and water that stretches out into the sea like an elephant reaching for a drink.

That image stuck with him. It became the name, and more than that, it became the whole feeling the restaurant has spent years trying to bottle: long afternoons, unhurried food, the particular kind of ease that only shows up when nobody’s checking a watch.

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Campisi’s Moves into Perch’s Former Space as it Expands Delivery Across Dallas

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.

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