Thunderbird Pies, Cane Rosso and Zoli's Menus To Be Revamped by Celebrity Chef

The PILF Restaurant Group is about to get a major facelift.

PILF, which consists of Dallas pizza hotspots Cane Rosso, Thunderbird Pies and Zoli’s NY Pizza, has brought on chef and Food Network star Christian Petroni as its new Chief Culinary Commandante. Petroni first rose to prominence as the winner of the 14th season of The Next Food Network Star and has since gone on to build a brand that includes a large social media following, a line of products and merchandise and an upcoming cookbook. He's now set revamp the menus at PILF restaurants.

Cane Rosso owner Jay Jerrier has long admired Petroni and had wanted to work with him for years before bringing him on board.
“I was obsessed with him, his restaurants, and his style of cooking because it’s a real hardcore New York, Italian-American, Bronx-born way of putting together dishes," said Jerrier in a statement. “We’ve gone back and forth about working together for the past decade [...] the planets aligned when Christian told me that he was anxious to get back into the restaurant business.”

This announcement is coming at a time when one PILF concept in particular is being discussed all over the internet. TikTok foodie Keith Lee is currently visiting Dallas as part of his nationwide restaurant review spree. Thunderbird Pies was one of the first restaurants Lee chose to try and critique for his 15 million followers. Unfortunately, Lee was less than impressed, specifically expressing dissatisfaction with the amount of sauce on the pizzas.

"The only real comment on the Keith Lee thing is that we wish he liked it more than he did, but we still hope that people see our name out there and come try our pizza for themselves,” says Jeff Amador, a representative for PILF. “Most (or all) of his critiques seemed to boil down to just personal taste, not execution. We anticipate some tweaks to our menu items and maybe a few recipes, but those will solely be the result of Christian's influence."

In other words, they will be deciding for themselves how much sauce their pizza needs.

PILF’s goal is for Petroni to infuse their menus with authentic New York and Italian influences as well as his well-known personality, with plans for special one-off events and dinners built around the chef’s name.

“Authenticity is my superpower, and the one thing in my life that had been missing,” Petronia says of his return to working in a restaurant. “The act of hospitality, making somebody’s day; I love it.”