Photography by Kathy Tran
When it was announced in January that Cane Rosso would move into the former Taco Diner space at the Lake Highlands Town Center, the news was met with serious enthusiasm. Founder and owner Jay Jerrier, who also considered Walnut Hill-Audelia, says the brand had its eyes on Lake Highlands for a while.
“We knew that Taco Diner was kind of shutting down units,” he says. “And this was one of the last ones, and they were still going to be here, but our real estate guy talked to their real estate guys like ‘Hey, do you really want that space? We’d love to take it.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, we’ll sign the lease to you.’ And it just kind of came together really quick. We’ve been looking around forever.”
The 4,000-square foot space comes equipped with two kitchens. One houses the all-important pizza oven, while the other has a flat-top grill. Side Hustle, his restaurant group’s smashburger ghost kitchen, has set up in the auxiliary cooking space. He also teased that a separate bar menu may be on its way.
“We’re gonna do some fun things at this location,” he says.
The Lake Highlands location is equipped with two kitchens.
But the main star of the show will remain the brand’s iconic, wood-fired Neapolitan pizza.
“Every bit of mozzarella on a pizza has been hand-stretched by us,” Jerrier says. “We’re not using machines to do that. We ball all of our dough by hand, and every single one of our Cane Rossos is fired by logs.”
For those who may not know what Cane Rosso’s wood-fired Neapolitan pizza entails, it starts with the ingredients: fresh mozzarella — which Cane Rosso produces 7,000 pounds of a week—patchily laid over bright tomato sauce atop a stretched-out ball of dough made with imported Italian 00 flour.
Then comes baking.
The ingredients are placed in a large, double-domed brick or concrete oven. The heat — preferably reaching temperatures around 900°F — comes from a pile of burning logs in the back. As the process continues, the pizza maker, or pizzaiolo, continuously moves the pie across the oven to ensure even cooking.
The finished product is light, floppy, and may require a knife and fork.
When Cane Rosso first burst onto the Dallas dining scene in the early 2010s, Jerrier says Dallasites were a little confused.
“It was floppy and it was soggy, and there’s not enough toppings. It’s not edge to edge cheese,” he says. “And I can’t have 1000 different ingredients on the pizza. Everybody wanted a supreme with sausage, pepperoni, meatballs, onions, olives, any kind of thing you could throw on. They wanted to max out the pizzas. Now, I think people are a little more refined, or where they get it, we don’t have to go into great detail to explain what Neapolitan wood-fired pizza is.”
Dallas has gotten a little more familiar with the style since then, and Cane Rosso certainly isn’t afraid of toppings, although its pies typically feature no more than four add-ons to remain true to Italian style.
Cane Rosso’s menu features 21 signature pizzas, in addition to seasonal rotators, which sport add-ons like Calabrian chile béchamel, truffle mascarpone, prosciutto and brisket. Customers can also create their own as long as they keep it under three toppings — no supremes! If those ingredients seem outlandish, don’t worry, traditional margherita and sausage pies still headline the offering.
Past pizza, Cane Rosso offers a varied selection of appetizers, sandwiches, salads and pastas, which Jerrier says he got some help from a neighbor on.
“Jeff Bekavac, who’s a Lake Highlands guy, worked with us for a while,” Jerrier says. “He was, I think, the first chef that we brought on that was up to the task of making everything on the menu that was non-pizza just as good as the pizza, you know, where he kind of brought us up to about as high as we could go, and then he was ready to open. He had always wanted to open his own restaurant, and Goodwins [on Greenville] is obviously awesome.”
The pasta selection is serious. Penne all’amatriciana, truffle carbonara, cacio e pepe, and fusilli alla vodka all offer ample competition to the ‘za menu.
The menu also features a well-balanced and unbusy cocktail list, with staples like a barrel-aged old fashioned sitting alongside intriguing seasonal house concoctions. The wine list is affordably-priced and offers a mix of Old and New World selections.
Coming up on five months in the Town Center, Jerrier says the smaller space is what Cane Rosso is trying to move to — following closures in Houston and Austin — as the brand refocuses on the Metroplex, with plans to open another location in Sachse soon.
Business in the Town Center has been going well, he says.
“I think our strength is being a neighborhood restaurant. It’s someplace that’s reliable, that we hope you can go to a couple times a month, if not a couple times a week. Now that our menu has enough variety on it, I think it’s a spot where you can come and sit in the bar by yourself, you can sit on a patio, you can push tables together, and it really is the kind of neighborhood spot that’s kind of always how we’ve always envisioned it.”
Cane Rosso, 7150 Skillman St., 214.774.6757, canerosso.com
