Jeannie Terilli opened her restaurant on Lower Greenville in 1985 after flipping a coin. Heads meant opening a restaurant. Tails meant continuing to dig 5-gallon holes in Texas summer heat running her landscape company. It came up heads. Forty-one years later, Terilli’s is still at 2815 Greenville Avenue, still running live music six nights a week, still pouring martinis with hand-stuffed blue cheese olives, and still serving dishes named after members of the family who built the place.
Her son Joey and her daughter Amanda Ahern now help run the room, and a second location — Terilli’s To Go, in the former Val’s Cheesecake space just down Greenville — bringing weekday lunch service back to the neighborhood for the first time since the pandemic. That last detail is the one that tells you what kind of restaurant this is.
Look at the menu long enough and the family starts to emerge. The 8oz filet with lobster and truffle butter is named “In Memory of Peter Terilli.” The shrimp and jumbo lump crabmeat in garlic white wine butter over angel hair pasta in parmesan cream is “For Vinny T.” The Chilean sea bass with lemon chive cream is “For Amanda.” The Atlantic salmon with citrus beurre blanc is “For Maggie.” Chef Franky’s weekly specials — the ones regulars come specifically for — don’t always have names attached, but they carry the same sensibility. This is not a corporate Italian chain menu. It is a family’s cooking, scaled for a restaurant, served by people who have often been there long enough to remember when the specials were different.
Start with the Italchos. Jeannie Terilli invented them and they appeared on Food Network’s Food Paradise, which is the kind of national exposure that Dallas restaurateurs rarely receive for something as genuinely original as this dish. House-made pizza dough rolled thin, cut into chips, lightly fried, then loaded with toppings — pepperoni, feta, mozzarella, depending on the version — in a format that has no real predecessor and no real competition. The spinach artichoke dip with melted provolone and mozzarella alongside garlic bread and the fried pizza chips is the table order that stalls the pace of the evening in the best possible way. The crab claws sautéed in white wine garlic butter are the appetizer for the table that came to eat rather than to socialize…