Cedar Springs Road at 1:30 in the morning operates on its own set of rules. The bars are still going, the sidewalks are still busy, and at some point everyone on that strip remembers they’re hungry. Most of the kitchens in Oak Lawn have already called it. Zio Al’s hasn’t.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Twenty-three years is a long time to keep a restaurant open, and longer still to keep it feeling like the same place it was on day one. Besa’s has managed both. Garland’s own tourism site sums up owner Al Shala in one line: he waits on guests like he’s running a five-star restaurant instead of a casual Italian spot. Anyone who’s eaten there more than once knows exactly what that means.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Zalat Pizza has never been shy about mashing up flavors that have no business working together until they do, and the newest one might be the boldest swing yet. Starting August 17, every Zalat Pizza location in Texas will start slinging a Butter Chicken Pizza, a limited-time pie that takes one of the tastiest dishes in Indian cooking and stretches it across a crust.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
At the intersection of grit and indulgence in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood, Serious Pizza has carved out a name for itself—not through gimmicks, but by doubling down on what it does best: giant, unapologetic New York-style slices served with attitude. Located at 2807 Elm Street, the restaurant is as much a part of the Deep Ellum landscape as the street art and live music that surround it.
Originally opened in 2010 and now operated under the umbrella of the Milkshake Concepts group—known for places like Vidorra, Harper’s, and STIRR—Serious Pizza has maintained its fiercely independent spirit while evolving into a polished, high-volume machine.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
