About This Blog

This blog features: neighborhood restaurants, nearby restaurants, downtown restaurants, Casa View Shopping Center, nearby shopping, Downtown shops.

I will first list places and my connections with them. For the spirit of completeness, I will then list other places, known to me but not visited. I choose not to list the unknown.

I like the section entitled Places I Wish I Had Visited.

My focus is places and locations which existed from 1953, when I moved to Dallas, until 1965, when I graduated from high school. This list will continue with my college years, until I turned 21. I left Dallas in 1969 and, as I did not return except to visit my parents until 1973, my memory of East Dallas ends at that time.

Some categories were easy to separate – restaurants and shopping. Some experiences are not so easy to categorize, but are still meaningful. They may be all lumped in together, and then teased out as other connections are made.

Music wise, we may have thought we were born of the “wrong generation.” I always thought the older generation (i.e. 3 to 4 years older than me) had a richer and deeper experience.

But we, the beginning of the Baby Boomer generation, had it best – stable family life, rising expectations for the middle class and parents who wanted to give so much to their children, which most did not have in their childhood. We were left to play and roam outdoors to make our own fun. We had the best toys and the best music.

And yet we lived in tumultuous times – the Cold War, Civil Rights, Integration and the Kennedy Assassination through the killings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Hopefully we came out as loving, caring, sharing adults whose experiences made us better people and gave us the ability to show appreciation and gratitude for the neighborhood and experiences which enriched us and our loved ones.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Food Memories - From the First Pizza Sold East of White Rock Creek to Campisi's and the Philippines

Campisi's started in 1946.  the late Sam Campisi opened the Idle Hour and introduced Dallas to its first slice of New York style pizza in 1947.

When a new location, known as the Egyptian Restaurant, couldn't afford a new sign, he kept the name.

Another source:  Campisi's Egyptian Restaurant started as a family business at Knox and McKinney Ave.  Carlo Campisi and his sons, Joe and Sam, sold pizzas from the location for 5 years.

In 1950, they bought the Egyptian Lounge, the present location, and set up shop there. Two years later, a temperance-minded Dallas City Council passed an ordinance that prompted Campisi to change the name to the Egyptian Restaurant.
--Ron Whittington, DFW Business Journal
November 11, 1985.

Probably the second oldest place serving pizza would be Gordo's, which opened in 1952.  In 1963 it was at 5221 E. Mockingbird Lane, 4 blocks away from Campisi's.  In the early 2000s, it was located at 2008 Greenville Ave.

Maybe the earliest would be Tommie Lee's Pizza Palace, at the corner of Buckner and Garland Road.  According to the picture in the White Rocker, they also offered hamburgers for 12 cents and a chicken dinner.

Later on came:

Pizza Palace - 2526 Gus Thomasson, DA-7-7051
--"11 Delicious Varities."

Pizza Inn - 10204 Garland Road,  DA-7-9303
Large pepperoni pizza $2.40
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