The wood-fired oven at Felina sits where the brew tanks used to be. That’s the detail that tells you the most about how this restaurant came together. Alessandro and Alfonso Salvatore needed a bigger kitchen for a bigger idea, and the old Funky Picnic Brewery & Cafe space on Bryan Avenue in South Main had the bones for it, so they took an industrial shell and warmed it up until it felt like theirs.
The brothers already had a hit two blocks over. Bocca Osteria Romana opened in South Main a year and a half before Felina and turned into one of the hardest reservations in Fort Worth, the kind of place that gets called the city’s best new restaurant of 2024 and then spends the next year living up to it.
Alessandro picked up Fort Worth Chef of the Year honors along the way. But Bocca’s kitchen was never built for a wood-fired oven. There wasn’t room. So instead of squeezing pizza into a restaurant that wasn’t designed for it, the Salvatores went and built a second restaurant around one…