David Campisi is moving his family’s restaurant into a space that already has a chef’s fingerprints all over it, and he’s doing it as a favor to a friend as much as a business decision.
Campisi’s, the Dallas Italian institution that’s been slinging pizza and red sauce since 1946, is taking over the old Perch Bistro & Bar location at 7709 Inwood Road. Perch started life as Dea, an upscale Italian and Mediterranean restaurant Lynae Fearing and Tracy Rathbun opened in 2022 in the old Fireside Pies space, before the pair rebranded it into the more casual Perch in 2024. Perch closed this spring after a two-year run that never quite found its footing, even as Fearing’s other two restaurants nearby, Shinsei and Lovers Seafood and Market, kept humming along. Campisi and Fearing worked out a lease assignment between themselves, and Campisi’s plans to open in the space in early 2027.
“Lynae and I negotiated and she assigned the lease to me,” Campisi told CraveDFW. “It works out great for both of us. We’re going to be happy neighbors.”
The move puts Campisi’s back on the same stretch of Inwood and Lovers Lane it’s occupied for decades, just a few doors down from where its old location sat before a fire tore through the shopping center at 5405 W. Lovers Lane in late December. That fire, which damaged the attic space above several businesses in the strip, forced Campisi’s out of the building it had operated in for more than twenty years, and it started a standoff that’s become depressingly familiar to Dallas restaurant owners…