Italian Restaurants in Dallas

Latitude One whips up culinary chez d'oeuvres from fresh ingredients on a menu showcasing local and organic foods whenever possible. Led by an accomplished kitchen talent from Le Cordon Bleu, the chefs prep palates with a dozen steamed baby clams sautéed in white wine and garlic before slaying fire-breathing appetites with a sword of sicilian sweet pepper, penne, sweet red peppers, and andouille sausage. Twelve ounces of Black Angus rib-eye steak garnished with mashed potatoes and vegetables mollify maddening munchies into sleeping stomach puppies, and the house-made Latitude five-cheese lasagna nestles strata of organic beef between 500-thread-count sheets of pasta. Latitude One's selection of sippables includes the fermented craftwork of several regional wineries, revitalizing taste buds with the Vita Ridge pinot gris or inundating white pants with the Angel Vine zinfandel's torrential waves of dark fruit.

We love food! We use the best local ingredients we can find - and make just about everything we possibly can from scratch - or find sources that do the same. We think good food should be affordable and accessible to everyone, so we don't charge "fine dining" prices for our handmade food.

A den of decadence, Church St. Pizza serves a combination of classic and unique New York–style pies along with gluten-free options. Sink your venomous canines into a potato-and-bacon pie slathered in olive oil and rosemary and dotted with home-cooked bacon ($21) or opt for the pesto-chicken pizza with mushrooms, artichoke hearts, and roasted red tomatoes ($22). Satisfy wing cravings with the buffalo chicken pizza layered in hot-sauce-cloaked chicken, water buffalo, crumbled blue cheese, and celery ($21). Stick to the classics with the slice shop's margherita pizza, decorated with crushed garlic, a smattering of tomatoes, excerpts from War and Peace, and fresh basil ($22).

The founders of Garlic Jim's Famous Gourmet Pizza banded together with a common goal in mind: to craft handmade, gourmet pizzas and deliver them to your door as quickly as possible without sacrificing quality. Now, they uphold that promise at more than 20 locations throughout the western United States, consistently serving up custom or specialty pies slathered with handmade sauce pressed from vine-ripened tomatoes. Even the cheese is held to high standards, with 100% whole-milk mozzarella only produced by cows that got a perfect score on their SATs.

“We had reserved a window spot and watched the birds and boats on the lake until dark,” wrote a reporter for the Statesman Journal after a visit to Caruso’s Italian Café & Wine Bar. The view of Staas Lake, visible from almost every seat in the house, was instrumental in landing the eatery a spot on the newspaper’s Best of list in 2011 and 2012. With his wife Angie in charge of hospitality, chef Jerry Phipps brings years of culinary experience to bear on northern Italian cuisine. In addition to pastas such as linguine and prawns, Phipps sautés halibut in a sherry-wine reduction and pairs milk-fed veal with mushrooms and light marsala sauce.

Fairy lights encircle the ceiling of the dining room, adding to the soft luminescence playing off of the burnished gold walls. Visitors chat with glasses of wine and small plates in the wine room’s sumptuous armchairs and loveseats alongside stuffed trophy beanbags. Beneath a wide pergola outside, silverware clatters merrily against the murmur of a stone fountain.

Since 1997, 3rd Street Pizza Company has fused food and film into a ready-made night out. On one side of the business, hand-tossed dough is fired atop hot stones, which yields crisp New York–style pizzas topped with a signature blend of mozzarella, provolone, and monterey jack cheeses. Sauce options also reach beyond the standard red to include thai peanut, pesto, and garlic parmesan. The pies anchor a menu that features calzones, sandwiches, and microbrews, all of which can be taken into showings at Moonlight Theater. Recent releases stretch out across a full-size movie screen that teams up with a 12-speaker surround-sound system as high-tech as the ones judges use to make their verdicts extra scary. The restaurant also supports arts beyond film and pizza—a dining-room wall functions as a rotating gallery space, and live musicians occasionally play during dinner.

Owner Peter Giovanniello crafts his secret sauce with tomatoes culled from the same grower used by his Naples-born father, who perfected the recipe more than forty years ago. A variety of New York–style pies populate the menu, including the all-meat pizza ($12 for a medium), which serves as an arena upon which pepperoni, sausage, ham, beef, and bacon battle for flavor supremacy. Fix a modest hankering by selecting pizza by the slice ($1.85 for cheese, $2.08 for pepperoni) or a small 9-inch cheese pizza ($5; $0.50 for extra toppings), which can also double as an edible frisbee. For eats of the non-pie variety, customers can plunge their fangs into the restaurant's selection of calzones ($5+), strombolis ($5+), and wings ($6–$7).