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.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

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.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

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.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

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.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Cocktails, Wine, and Sunday Supper: Radici’s Summer Lineup 

Radici opened in Farmers Branch in May of 2024, and it did not take long for people to notice. Within a year, Radici Wood Fired Grill was named the No. 2 restaurant in the entire state of Texas by Texas Monthly, a wild jump for a restaurant that had only just found its footing. Now, in the middle of a Dallas summer, Chef Tiffany Derry and her T2D Concepts partner Tom Foley are adding two new events to the calendar that give a good sense of why the place has resonated the way it has.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Terilli’s Has Been on Lower Greenville Since 1985

Jeannie Terilli opened her restaurant on Lower Greenville in 1985 after flipping a coin. Heads meant opening a restaurant. Tails meant continuing to dig 5-gallon holes in Texas summer heat running her landscape company. It came up heads. Forty-one years later, Terilli’s is still at 2815 Greenville Avenue, still running live music six nights a week, still pouring martinis with hand-stuffed blue cheese olives, and still serving dishes named after members of the family who built the place.

Her son Joey and her daughter Amanda Ahern now help run the room, and a second location — Terilli’s To Go, in the former Val’s Cheesecake space just down Greenville — bringing weekday lunch service back to the neighborhood for the first time since the pandemic. That last detail is the one that tells you what kind of restaurant this is.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Inside Eataly Dallas, Every Corner Has Something to Eat, Here’s How to Navigate It

Italy has been exporting two things to the rest of the world with particular success for the last several centuries: its cuisine and the conviction that the way Italians eat is worth understanding. Oscar Farinetti built an entire retail concept around that second point when he opened the first Eataly in Turin in 2007 — a marketplace where the food and the knowledge of the food exist in the same room, where the person buying the flour can watch someone make the pasta and sit down to eat it within thirty feet. The idea spread. There are now more than fifty locations worldwide.

Dallas got one on December 9, 2020, and it occupies 48,000 square feet inside NorthPark Center between Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, which is either a deeply ironic location or a perfectly appropriate one, depending on how you feel about Italy’s relationship with luxury.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Campisi’s Is Coming to Preston Royal This August

The Campisi family has been feeding Dallas since Carlo and Antonia arrived from Sicily and tossed the city’s first pizza dough at a bar called the Idle Hour on the corner of Knox and McKinney in 1946. They moved to Mockingbird Lane four years later, took over a space that had been the Egyptian Lounge, and couldn’t afford to replace the neon sign — so they just removed the word “Lounge” and added “Restaurant.” That sign has been glowing on Mockingbird ever since, and the restaurant behind it has outlasted everything around it for nearly 80 years.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle