Among the crop of new Dallas dining destinations, Perfect Union Pizza Co. and Fachini make the strangest of strange bedfellows. Owned by local celebrity chefs Nick Badovinus and Julian Barsotti, the Italian restaurants are stacked one on top of the other in the same shopping center and are definitely chasing the same upscale-customer dollar. But instead of trying to kill each other, they’re all love love, kiss kiss.

At Fachini, which has the upstairs perch, the menu wallows in old-school Italian American classics, the waiters wear tuxes, and Dean Martin is on the sound system, belting out his 1953 monster hit, “That’s Amore.” At Perfect Union, on the ground floor, the servers wear mismatched T-shirts from other Dallas businesses, the menu runs to fun takes on Italian standards (especially pizza), and the music is eighties new wave (think Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf”).