Italian Restaurants in Dallas

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).

“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.

The Grill at Silver Creek Lanes treats bowlers and spectators to hearty American feasts. As diners watch bowlers haul spheres down alleys lit by blacklight and 135" projection screens, they can keep hunger at bay with slices of pizza and chicken strips. The menu also includes cheeseburgers and jumbo hot dogs, complemented by sides such as sample platters, cheese sticks, onion rings, and curly fries.

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.

You don't mess with good dough. It’s a lesson the Perfect Pizza Company owners learned the hard way when they tried to add butter to Head Chef Anthony Hartmeier's tried and trusted recipe. They recounted how their failed dough experiment forced them to throw away 58 balls of the unstretchable stuff but restored their unwavering faith in the expertise of the Oregon-born Hartmeier.

Today, the owners concern themselves with the quality of the pizzeria's ingredients and service and let the chefs flex their creativity in the kitchen. Hartmeier's famous hand-tossed crusts get topped with whole-milk Bacio mozzarella and emerge from a brick oven brimming with a unique and diverse smattering of toppings. Specialties include pies such as the Perfect Chicken pizza, which swaps out red sauce for alfredo sauce and includes generous sprinklings of red onion, grilled chicken, feta, and bacon bits.