The soul of Carbone’s Fine Food and Wine is still inside the Italian restaurant on Dallas’ Oak Lawn Avenue. But its new name is Barsotti’s Fine Food and Liqueurs.
It’s now open.
Owner Julian Barsotti is happy with the changes made to his 11-year-old restaurant. It’s prettier. The menu is bigger. The bar, now a focal point, feels like a place you’ll want to linger. And the room feels more spacious.
It wasn’t Barsotti’s preference to strip his great-grandfather’s name from his Dallas restaurant. He sued new Dallas restaurant Carbone in 2022, concerned customers would be confused about two Dallas Italian restaurants named Carbone’s and Carbone. (And they were.) The lawsuit ended in a settlement, and Barsotti maintains that it was amicable. He agreed to close Carbone’s and rebrand.
This reestablished Italian restaurant marks the first time Barsotti has put his own name on one of his businesses. Dallas residents picked the name in a poll, making Barsotti’s feel by the people, for the people.
Past the main dining area, Barsotti hung two separate signs, side by side: Barsotti’s and Carbone’s. “They’re an obvious metaphor for this evolution,” he says.
It’s good to see the restaurant in action again. It had been a construction zone for more than four months, closing just after New Year’s Eve.
“The whole place is perfumed,” Barsotti muses as we walk through the kitchen: “It smells like garlic and tomato.”
The menu nearly doubled in size, with many of the daily specials like chicken parm vodka and veal piccata getting a permanent place on the menu. Barsotti’s general manager Jonathan Neitzel drove the menu reinvention — “He’s the captain, el capo,” Barsotti says.
Neitzel added minestrone soup, tomato soup, beet salad with goat cheese, ravioli with spinach and ricotta, meatballs with provolone and more. Juanita Cruz and her kitchen staff still make the ricotta, mozzarella and pastas in-house, like they always did.
Barsotti’s favorite — a permanent addition now — is linguine with white clam sauce. He loves mafia movies and TV shows, which is probably why he points out that this dish would be his final meal.
The restaurant will still sell Italian specialties to go from a big fridge installed near the back. Sunday gravy, meatballs, lasagna Bolognese and ravioli are among them.
Fans of Carbone’s needn’t worry; Barsotti left all the former favorites on the menu. At lunch, for instance, the Thursdays-only porchetta hero is now available every day.
By far, the most noticeable part of the restaurant is its roomy dining room and navy wall covered in family portraits and Carbone’s memorabilia. A picture of Barsotti’s grandfather is up there. So are Barsotti’s son Leonardo, black-and-white wedding portraits from way back when, and a sketch Tony Bennett did once when dining at Carbone’s. Look closely: One framed photo is Barsotti as a kid, wearing Superman jammies.
The restaurant is not actually bigger, but by resituating the kitchen and curving the bar around it, Barsotti’s feels like a whole new place. Booths for six abound, where group dinners used to be tricky here.
Despite the lawsuit that put this Italian restaurant through a David-and-Goliath battle, the new Barsotti’s feels familiar. It’s a neighborhood Italian joint with a fresh coat of paint.
Barsotti’s Fine Food and Liqueurs is at 4208 Oak Lawn Ave., Dallas. It reopened in mid-April. Reservations are recommended but not required. resy.com/cities/dfw/barsottis-fine-food-and-liqueurs.
