Antonio’s Pizza-Rant

Antonio’s Pizza-Rant has been serving Davie since 1983, which makes it one of the true old guard restaurants in a town whose commercial strips are more often defined by newer strip-mall turnover than four-decade runs. The restaurant sits in Shenandoah Square on West State Road 84, in the western stretch of Davie that runs out toward the Flamingo Road area, well removed from the historic Davie Road downtown but just as rooted in the town’s independent business culture.

The restaurant’s own history, as told on its website, traces back to Antonio Silvestro Jr.’s parents, who immigrated from southern Italy in 1971 and opened the first Antonio’s Pizza-Rant in 1983. The current owner describes carrying on the business as “a great honor, and a blessing to be able to carry on my parents’ dream,” language that reflects the kind of multi-generational family restaurant story that is increasingly rare along South Florida’s commercial corridors. More than forty years after opening, the restaurant is still run by the same family that started it, a rare thing in a shopping center that has surely seen plenty of other tenants come and go over four decades.

The menu centers on New York-style pizza built on handmade dough and sauces prepared daily, along with a broader Italian menu that goes beyond pizza into the kind of red-sauce Italian-American dishes that define a classic family pizzeria. The restaurant markets its ingredients and preparation as fresh and made in-house, a claim consistent with a business that has had four decades to refine a small, focused menu rather than chase trends.

Hours run seven days a week, with a schedule built around dinner service: Monday through Thursday from 11am to 10pm, extending to 11pm on Friday and Saturday, and a later Sunday opening from 4pm to 10pm that suggests the restaurant treats Sunday as a slower, evening-focused day rather than a full lunch-through-dinner shift. That kind of consistent, dinner-heavy schedule has clearly worked for the restaurant across a very long run in the same shopping center.

Antonio’s can be reached directly by phone or by email through its own website, and the restaurant’s presence on delivery platforms like DoorDash and Uber Eats shows it has adapted its decades-old model to newer ordering habits without changing the fundamentals of the food itself. There is no sign of any franchise structure or additional locations attached to the Antonio’s Pizza-Rant name, which fits the story the restaurant tells about itself: a single family, one restaurant, in the same corner of Davie since the Reagan administration.

For a town known more for rodeo grounds and western wear than for old-school Italian pizzerias, Antonio’s Pizza-Rant is a genuine piece of Davie’s independent restaurant history, and its longevity in Shenandoah Square makes it a useful landmark for anyone exploring the western end of State Road 84 beyond the newer development nearby.