Slices go for $3.95 and 18-inch whole pies start at $22.95 at Salisbury's Pizza, a new New York-style pizzeria that opened Tuesday at 9540 Garland Road in Casa Linda Plaza. Co-owners Will and Julie Salisbury built and renovated the space themselves, and Will Salisbury says the low prices are a direct answer to what he sees happening across the industry: “Restaurants are becoming more and more expensive.”
The couple signed the lease in April 2026 and spent months turning the space into a family-friendly slice shop, according to The Dallas Morning News. Will Salisbury, who also serves as the restaurant's general contractor, told the outlet, “We built this place with our bare hands,” right down to roughly $500 spent on wall decorations. The menu keeps things simple: pepperoni and veggie supreme slices run $4.95 each, and the kitchen also turns out meatballs, pasta bowls, and full pepperoni and veggie supreme pies alongside toppings like ricotta, stracciatella, basil pesto, Anaheim peppers and Italian sausage.
Will Salisbury is a Culinary Institute of America graduate whose resume includes fine-dining kitchens in New Orleans, Dallas and Nantucket. He was named Rising Star Chef of the Year at the 2024 Dallas Tastemaker Awards for his work as chef de cuisine at Carbone Dallas, according to CultureMap Dallas, the upscale Italian concept operated by New York-based Major Food Group that he and Julie helped open in Dallas in 2022. Julie Salisbury is the pizzeria's co-owner and sommelier, having worked the wine floor at Monarch, 55 Seventy and Dee Lincoln Prime before landing behind the counter of a slice shop. “We're ready to go in a different direction,” she said.
A Long Island Pizzeria's Ghost Lives On
The idea for Salisbury's Pizza traces back to Tony D's, a pizzeria that once sat 150 feet from Will Salisbury's childhood home in Plainview, New York. The shop's Marsal pizza oven — the same model used at Tony D's — now anchors the East Dallas kitchen, turning out long-fermented, high-hydration dough into 18-inch pies topped with a blend of low-moisture mozzarella. Tony D's itself burned down in 2003, after Salisbury had already moved to Massachusetts, but its influence is baked into the new restaurant's name and menu.
Salisbury has weathered more than a rough restaurant market. He survived cancer in 2019 while working as sous chef at Bullion, and afterward co-founded the Heard That Foundation, a nonprofit that served hundreds of free daily meals to furloughed Dallas hospitality workers during the 2020 pandemic shutdown, according to the Dallas Observer. That relief work earned him a D Magazine Front Line Hero honor. Of opening a casual slice shop after years in fine dining, he put it simply: “The best rewards come with risks.”
Skipping the Apps to Keep Prices Down
To keep costs manageable for both the business and its customers, Salisbury's Pizza plans to run its own in-house delivery service with its own drivers rather than list on third-party apps, per the Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate. Third-party delivery platforms like DoorDash or Uber Eats typically charge restaurants commissions of 15% to 30% per order, a cost that often gets passed on to diners. The move dovetails with a regional trend: Dallas-Fort Worth has seen a surge of pizza-by-the-slice spots as national chains like Prince St. Pizza and Slice House expand into the metroplex, with sub-$4 slices pitched as a hedge against rising whole-pie prices, according to the same Advocate report.
The timing also lines up with restaurant-inflation numbers. National prices for food away from home rose 3.4% year-over-year in July, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro saw a comparatively milder 2.8% increase in restaurant prices over the same period, per the agency's regional data. Against that backdrop, a $3.95 slice looks like a deliberate bet on affordability rather than a fluke of the address.
Filling a Storefront With a Turnover History
Salisbury's Pizza occupies the former home of Be Home Soon, an eclectic home-cooking restaurant from local musician-turned-chef Madison King that closed in October 2025 after less than a year in business due to rising operating expenses, according to CultureMap Dallas. The address sits inside Casa Linda Plaza, built in 1945 and recognized as the oldest shopping center in the City of Dallas, with Spanish Revival architecture including tile roofs and masonry walls on what was once agricultural land, according to property owner EDENS, which bought the center in 2015 and has since poured millions into redeveloping it.
The plaza's tenant roster has shifted noticeably in recent years, with national chains like Schlotzsky's and Pei Wei — which closed its Casa Linda space in December 2023 after a decade there — giving way to chef-driven independent concepts, a pattern noted on the Capritta Substack. Hoodline previously reported on Maman taking over the old Schlotzsky's, part of the same wave now bringing Salisbury's Pizza to the plaza's Garland Road storefronts near White Rock Lake and the Dallas Arboretum.
Salisbury's Pizza opened for takeout and dine-in this past Tuesday with initial hours running Tuesdays through Saturdays, 3:30 to 9:30 p.m. For now, the couple who once poured wine at some of Dallas's most exclusive tables are betting that a $3.95 slice, cut from a recipe rooted in a childhood pizzeria on Long Island, is what East Dallas wants next.
