Centrale Italia: The newest Italian restaurant is from the old guard

Centrale Italia, with its light, airy interiors and green tones, brings an Italian restaurant to Preston Hollow Village in a space that has seen several restaurant turnovers since the shopping center opened.

The farm-fresh concept from Patrick Colombo’s Restaurant Works taps Chef Matthew Antonovitch to lead the kitchen. Neapolitan pizzas with dough that’s been rested for 48hours, house-made pastas (except for one or two) and traditional crafted cocktails make up the menu.

It’s a very Dallas Italian restaurant, which makes sense since Colombo has spent the better part of his career making Italian food for Dallasites.

Long Island native Colombo, along with a few classmates who lived around the corner, started washing dishes at a family-owned nightclub, Jupiter’s, when he was 14 or 15 years old. His mom would pick them up after their shift ended in the wee hours of the morning. They’d hear Ray Charles, The Spinners, and Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes. And when there wasn’t a live act, it was disco music.

It was just the right taste of the hospitality business. Colombo completed a hotel degree at a community college before starting at Hilton hotels like Waldorf Astoria. Food and beverage at a hotel with several departments was a different beast.

“When it’s big properties like that, sometimes you’re insulated. You don’t even know if the guests had a good experience or a bad experience,” he says.

He ended up at the Washington Hilton Hotel in D.C. in 1981. It was his third day on the job when John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, firing six shots and wounding Reagan and three others. A year and a half later, he was in Dallas opening the boutique hotel Mansion on Turtle Creek after Caroline Rose Hunt acquired and repurposed the historic mansion.

“I figured it would be something that would help round out my career,” he says. “That’s what got me to Dallas, and I thought I’d get here, and then I would go to California and go back home to New York. But I never left.”

If you use his stint at Jupiter’s as the starting point of his career, Colombo has spent five decades in the hospitality business, most of it in Dallas. In the mid-’80s, Colombo, along with his brother Robert and two other partners, started Sfuzzi’s on McKinney Avenue, where Trader Joe’s currently sits.

“The success of it was about timing,” he says. “It was kind of the first time in Dallas where high-energy restaurants started to get popular.”

After a 20-location, 10-year run ended in the mid-’90s (there have been several short revivals since then), Colombo went back to hotels to manage food and beverage across the country for Paul Nussbaum’s Patriot American Hospitality, which rebranded as Wyndham International in the late ’90s.

Then the hum of a restaurant came calling. Phil Romano, of Eatzi’s, Fuddruckers and Romano’s Macaroni Grill, wanted to launch a steakhouse in Uptown. Nick & Sam’s – Nick is Colombo’s oldest son – opened in April 1999.

Colombo sold his interest to Romano, left the steakhouse and went back to the hotel industry long before opening the CRÚ Wine Bar & Bistro in the West Village in 2002. One of the first concepts of its kind, CRÚ was recently acquired and is planning to rapidly expand its 10-location portfolio.

In 2011, Tuscan-inspired Princi Italia opened on Royal Lane. Later, another location opened in Legacy West.

“We’re going to start our 15th year in September, you know. So we feel really fortunate that the consumer and the community has accepted us,” Patrick Colombo says. “It’s unbelievable how many regulars come in and out of there, multiple times a week.”

That’s the hope for the newest concept, Centrale Italia, located in Preston Hollow Village.

This time it’s a little different. It’s a family affair.

“If something’s not right with a guest experience, it hurts more as a family versus before it probably hurt me more,” Patrick says.

Julian Colombo, his youngest, joined Restaurant Works two and a half years ago after spending a little time in finance post-graduation from the University of Utah. Finance didn’t seem like it was the path for him.

“I just wasn’t loving it,” Julian says. “I find that I’m very creative and have an entrepreneurial mindset, so I think I wanted to try something where I could have more impact.”

He assisted in the food and cocktail menu development of Centrale Italia with Patrick and Antonovitch, who went to Johnson & Wales University with Emeril Lagasse.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Julian says. “We get to collaborate on things. Always have something to talk about, bounce ideas off each other. Obviously, there’s a couple of ups and downs, but overall I’d say we make it work really well.”

Antonovitch also got his start in hotel food and beverage and cooked in Los Angeles at the Century Plaza Hotel. His hotel and Ronald Reagan experience was cooking for the President’s inaugural dinners. He did a stint at the Mansion on Turtle Creek, worked with Wolfgang Puck and owned Spango on Knox Henderson.

“When I came here in ’94 I was competing against him [Colombo] and his corporate chef for the last 20 years,” Antonovitch says. “So then I said, if you can’t beat him, join him. So I joined him this year.”

Catherine, Patrick’s wife, whom he met at a Sfuzzi’s in Colorado more than 30 years ago, designed the interior of the restaurant with Julian. Restaurant Works keeps project management in-house for its concepts, so Patrick focused on the flow and structure of the restaurant, while Catherine and Julian focused on the finer points like the color, fabric and lighting. The split-level restaurant only has one TV for the just-in-case, must-watch events. The bar is not the focal point in the room, a step away from restaurant interior trends in the city.

There have been a few changes since the opening in December 2025. The difficult-to-prep Chicken Spiedini was removed from the menu. But then they made several additions – a roasted beet and burrata salad with a sherry thyme vinaigrette ($16), a rock shrimp scampi toast with Calabrian chili butter ($18) and a regularly requested, despite not being on the menu, chicken parm ($25). Then there were the dish adjustments – the salmon is now grilled ($30), not pan-seared. The cooking techniques on the chicken piccata ($24) were adjusted so the dish presented golden brown.

It’s all par for the course. Some of the adjustments are to remove obstacles for the kitchen to execute better, and some of the changes are to better guest experience, says Patrick.

The fig and rosemary old-fashioned and the espresso martini are popular items. The new Centrale Gardener, which is a cilantro, ginger, lime and serrano mezcal or tequila cocktail, tastes exactly how you imagine and not at the same time. Patrick’s favorite is the fedelini pomodoro ($21), which features burrata and thinner noodles. Julian likes the Romano chicken breast with the rigatoni à la vodka ($25).

Centrale Italia doesn’t exactly have a seasonal menu, but Antonovichto believes in cooking with the season.

“Tomatoes have been sitting there for almost 10 days before we even use them,” he says. “So they’re super ripe … We think about every little thing that we could do that’s authentic. And it’s not like we’re copying someone. We’re learning from the masters of Italy and we’re learning from our local market. And then we create a menu that we hope is fun.”

Centrale Italia, 7859 Walnut Hill Lane 469.780-9463