Urbino Pizza e Pasta opening on Henderson in Dallas in spot vacated by Pulcinella

by Teresa Gubbins

DALLAS — Urbino Pizza e Pasta is a new pizza place opening next week on Henderson Avenue in Dallas, in the spot vacated abruptly by Pulcinella. Owner David Pedack is a restaurant and bar veteran who's colonizing Henderson; the one-time manager at Nikita, Suite, and The Club also co-owns Blue Collar Bar.

"Urbino is a riff on the word that means 'city'," Pedack says. Fortunately, he's gutted the previous tenant's tragically overblown design, with its fake Tuscan stone interior and confusing multiple levels, and replaced it with a design that Pedack calls not just mid-century modern but mid-century rustic farm.

"You’re gonna see the classic cork wall fixtures, but it's modern and clean, white with chocolate hues, and accents of wood, and I mean real logs," he says. Tables are 7-foot-long community tables with benches that further emphasize the "modern farm" look.

"The food is what we've been working on," Pedack says. "We're 100% natural, nothing frozen, nothing out of a can. All of the produce, almost all the cheese are from local growers and local farms."

For the menu, he consulted with a circle of chefs and colleagues who all have "day jobs" but who nonetheless contributed ideas and offer input.

"To me, the key was to make it easy to eat, easy to share," Pedack says. "On the pizza side of things, we have flatbreads which are hot right now but also the traditional 16-inch round, Brooklyn style, with a little crust to it. We put a little flaxseed in it, I don't want to be the tree hugger but it's something that, if you like it, you'll be happy it's there. We're doing all fresh pastas, we're using Tom Spicer's arugula, artisan sausage, salumi, pepperoni, prosciutto du Parma, that cheese shop on Oak Lawn, Scardello, is bringing in mozzarella, which right now we're buying from Italy, but we've heard that someone from Texas is doing buffalo mozzarella and we'll go for that."

One extra they're adding that's unique in a neighborhood filled with pizza places: delivery, which they'll do via 100% electric "Zap" cars.