Fort Worth Star-Telegram
By Bud Kennedy
July 30, 2026
What if a Texas cattle drive town had an Italian restaurant? We’ll find out this fall when La Pistola Kitchen + Saloon opens in a former taco restaurant on Montgomery Street across from Dickies Arena.
La Pistola is a new project in the former Taco Heads at 1812 Montgomery St. It’s from restaurateur Jeffrey Yarbrough and “wine boss” Camille McDonald, part of the original team that made the Teddy Wong’s upscale Chinese restaurants a success.
The former patio has been enclosed to make a new dining room with windows facing the Cultural District. The bar is remodeled. Crews found the 80-plus-year-old lumber from the original homes, Yarbrough said. The two buildings first appeared in Star-Telegram archives as rent houses in the early 1940s. They were converted in the 1970s and had been home to a pet-grooming service, antique shop, thrift shop and small Tex-Mex restaurant before they were connected in 2016 for the opening of Taco Heads. The La Pistola website lists a September opening.
La Pistola is Italian. But it’s western, like the old “spaghetti western” movies shot in Spain and Italy to save money. In other words, it’s the kind of Italian restaurant a Beth Dutton would love. Yarbrough described it as a “cowboy-looking” restaurant with a midprice menu of entrees and pastas, specialty Italian sandwiches at lunch and a bar with a carefully curated wine and cocktail list. Both Yarbrough and McDonald said they wanted to do a 1970s retro western theme and became fascinated with the idea of the renegade moviemakers filming westerns in the Italian countryside with no permits, and doing western town scenes in Rome.
The name “La Pistola” means “the gun” in Italian as well as Spanish, and fits the spirit of the outlaw moviemakers as well as most of the plots.
The dinner menu will include a Texas wagyu steak, Iberico pork from Texas and chicken along with rotating pasta dishes, Yarbrough said. “Say I didn’t want to get dressed up and I didn’t want to spend $150,” he said, saying La Pistola won’t be like West Seventh Street fine-dining restaurants: “It’ll be lower than the super-high stuff.”
The midday menu of sandwiches with Italian deli meats and cheeses will appeal to the lunchy Cultural District crowd, he said.
“Everybody in the world wants a great sandwich,” he said,
dropping the name of Fort Worth’s favorite classic sub shop. “You can always go
to Galligaskin’s, and that’s great, but this will be a next-level sandwich,” he
said.
The makeover of the Taco Heads building — actually two old houses connected by a patio — is as impressive as the Teddy Wong’s conversion from a 7-Eleven. Yarbrough and McDonald are no longer involved in Teddy Wong’s, which recently opened a second location in Weatherford.
The former patio has been enclosed to make a new dining
room with windows facing the Cultural District. The bar is remodeled. Crews
found the 80-plus-year-old lumber from the original homes, Yarbrough said. The
two buildings first appeared in Star-Telegram archives as rent houses in the
early 1940s. They were converted in the 1970s and had been home to a
pet-grooming service, antique shop, thrift shop and small Tex-Mex restaurant
before they were connected in 2016 for the opening of Taco Heads. The La Pistola
website lists a September opening.
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