Centrale Italia
Audio By Carbonatix
Dough and flame have just made another appearance in Dallas. This time, they’re imagined in a newly opened modern Italian restaurant, Centrale Italia, in Preston Hollow Village next to Chicken Guy off Walnut Hill Lane.
The concept comes from Restaurant Works, the hospitality management company behind Princi Italia and CRU Food & Wine Bar.
Centrale Italia offers a modern Italian dining experience through stone-fired neo-Neapolitan pizzas, house-made pastas, signature salads and classic Italian dishes.
Executive chef Matthew Antonovich is starting things off with a full roster of antipasti and offering pasta staples like carbonara, tagliatelle bolognese and barolo-glazed short rib.
Back in the kitchen, there’s a Marra Forni pizza oven, built brick-by-brick from materials sourced from Italy. Centrale Italia’s signature neo-Neapolitan pies include the margherita, sweet-and-spicy pepperoni, fennel sausage and burrata.
It wouldn’t be a true Italian go-to without the appropriate beverages to go with all the carbs. They’re of course serving a Hugo spritz, plus a Sicilian-style margarita, an espresso martini with Caffé Milano and a fig and rosemary old fashioned.
Centrale Italia and Princi Italia’s menus form a Venn diagram: in the middle, we have pizza bianca, rigatoni alla vodka and braised short ribs, among other dishes. Then, on the side are the two concepts’ respective menus, with subtle tweaks that make them just different enough to stand on their own.
But we have to say, they’re very similar, and being partial to one will either be for nostalgia, kitchen execution or something specific that one menu has that the other doesn’t.
Alas, c’est la vie. No one’s turning down another spot for carbs and cheese.
Centrale Italia, 7859 Walnut Hill Lane; Sunday – Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.; Saturday/Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.
