Mille Lire, new Southern Italian restaurant in Dallas’ Centrum building, should be on your short list

 

Giuliano Matarese, the chef and co-owner of Mille Lire, says he intends his new modern Italian restaurant in Oaklawn’s Centrum building to be a destination for lovers of authentic Italian cuisine. “No one is doing truly great Italian food in this city, so I realized I should do it,” says Matarese, who cooked in top-rated Manhattan kitchens like Aureole and Convivio early in his career. The Naples, Italy-born chef moved to Dallas last year to open Mille Lire.

His from-scratch pastas are terrific, springy and perfectly al dente, whether served as cacio e pepe (Matarese’s version of the Roman classic employs a cone-shaped campanelle pasta and a flourish of shaved truffles) or as a tangle of thick spaghettoni jumbled with fresh seafood and herbs. Lamb meatballs, buttery sea bass and thin-crust Neapolitan-style pizzas are also worth repeat visits.

But the thing that will draw you back to Mille Lire isn’t just the luxurious ingredients, the handmade pastas or the wine cellar stocked with nice Italian reds. It’s the chef’s passion, and that makes Mille Lire irresistible. 3102 Oak Lawn Ave., Dallas; (214) 269-5200.

This piece appears in the February issue of 360 West Magazine