Khanh Nguyen started Zalat Pizza in Dallas back in 2015, and eleven years later the company is opening its 31st Texas location, this time in McKinney’s Heritage Village at 1720 N. Central Expressway, Suite 210, just south of Highway 380 on U.S. 75. For a brand that’s grown this far this fast, Zalat has held onto the same personality it launched with, which says something about how deliberately Nguyen has grown it.
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The wood-fired oven at Felina sits where the brew tanks used to be. That’s the detail that tells you the most about how this restaurant came together. Alessandro and Alfonso Salvatore needed a bigger kitchen for a bigger idea, and the old Funky Picnic Brewery & Cafe space on Bryan Avenue in South Main had the bones for it, so they took an industrial shell and warmed it up until it felt like theirs.
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In October 2019, a tornado tore through Preston Hollow and destroyed Pizza by Marco — the pizzeria that Joe Nuccio had started in 1949 on Carroll Avenue and eventually moved to Preston Royal Village in 1962, where it became a North Dallas institution over the next six decades. A few months before the tornado, Frankie Nuccio had lost his mother. His father had passed years earlier. Then the pandemic arrived. Nuccio walked away.
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Dallas is not a pizza city the way New Haven or New York is a pizza city, but it has become something more interesting: a city where nearly every serious style of the form is being made at a high level, by kitchens that mean it. Neapolitan, New Haven, New York, Roman, Detroit, Neo-Neapolitan — they’re all here, they’re all good, and the range is wide enough that the argument about which is best usually comes down to which style you were raised on.
What follows is our working list of the pizzerias worth knowing, organized by style and neighborhood. No Cane Rosso. No chains. Just pizza.
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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.
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Florida has been quietly building something worth paying attention to. Oak & Stone started in St. Petersburg in 2018, spent eight locations proving its concept worked, and then decided Texas was the next move. McKinney got the first one. It opens May 19 at 8575 W. University Drive in the West Grove development, and if you have been waiting for something genuinely different in North Texas, this is worth the drive up.
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Khanh Nguyen was eight years old when his family fled Vietnam in 1975. His father was a general in the South Vietnamese army and the governor of a mountain province called DaLat — and when the country fell, a communist assassin was sent to kill them. The family’s escape plan collapsed at the last minute. What saved them was a bowl of pho. The cook at a roadside restaurant outside the city recognized Nguyen’s father, fed the family, hid them, and helped them find another way out. They made it through the Philippines and Guam before landing in Texas. Khanh grew up here, went to UT law school, became a corporate attorney, then a software startup CEO, then looked around at forty-something and decided he wanted to make pizza.
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There is a pizzeria in Richardson that most people drive right past. No sign on the building, no marquee, no indication from the street that anything remarkable is happening inside. Just a small space at 514 Lockwood Drive, next door to Lockwood Distilling, where Maen Azzam and Sonia Khan are making some of the most serious Neapolitan pizza in North Texas.
The place is called Farina in Grani. It opened in November 2024 and came out of the pandemic the way a lot of the best food businesses do — from boredom and obsession. Khan started baking during lockdown, moved on to pizza, made it for family and friends, then catered events with a portable oven, then decided to do it for real. The name means “flour in grains” and refers to the whole-grain wheat flour they use in the dough — germ, bran, and endosperm together — which gives the crust its signature golden color and a depth of flavor you don’t get from refined flour.
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