New in Amarillo: A Japanese restaurant, steakhouse and pizza shop expand dining options

AMARILLO, Texas (KFDA) - In recent weeks, three new restaurants opened their doors in Amarillo.

These restaurants offer new and unique takes on popular foods, further expanding the variety of dining options Amarillo has to offer.

When opening his new restaurant, Arnie Padilla was inspired by two things: his love for pizza and his love for being a dad.

Arnie’s Pizza Place opened as part of J’s Bar and Grill at 3130 Soncy.

The new addition offers pizza until two in the morning.

Padilla opened the restaurant with his daughter, allowing them to spend time together and make people feel good during such a difficult time.

The father-daughter duo believe nothing makes people smile quite like a good slice of pizza, and the pair hope one day they will look back on this time knowing they made a positive difference in their community.

“I told her the other day [when] she kind of got stressed, 'I want you to look back 20 years from now and I want you to smile, and say we had fun doing this," said Padilla.

Arnie’s Pizza Place is unique thanks to their aged pizza dough. A mixture of art and science, the crust tastes like you are eating a piece of garlic bread.

Using an active yeast and allowing the dough to sit for 24 hours, Arnie’s special dough ensures the crust never gets soggy.

“Moisture is your enemy when making pizza. So, we use low moisture cheese. We thicken our sauces...we thicken them a little bit more to get some of that moisture out. Even if it cools down a little bit, it sits for a little while (so) we’re still able to have that crispness on the bottom,” explained Padilla.

If you’re feeling hungry for Japanese, head over to Sumo Japanese Steakhouse at Bell Street and I-40.

The restaurant has the only classically trained sushi chef in the area.

Guests can sit at the sushi bar and watch the chef roll the seafood fresh.

Owners created their sushi menu after traveling the country, trying the best sushi houses in multiple states.

After saving hundreds of photos of their favorite sushi combinations, they believe it’s time to try it out for themselves.

“We love sushi! We love Japanese food,” exclaimed co-owners Jeremy Green and Puntita Panyadee. “We traveled a lot, all over different states, trying restaurants all over the place and wanted to come up with our own concept. You can look at my phone [and] I probably have four thousand photos of different sushi places we’ve eaten at and looked to say ‘oh we want to put this one on, we want to do something like this, we love this one."

The restaurant also offers signature steak, fried rice and noodles.

Authentic Japanese flavors and an authentic atmosphere transports customers to another country as soon as they take their first bite.

Green said after posting their Beef Yaki Udon noodle on Facebook, so many people came in for the dish that they started selling out.

“It’s got the thick Udon noodle in it with thinly sliced New York Strip, along with our vegetable medley. It has the pickled ginger on top which is a traditional Japanese style garnish,” said Green. "Along with what we call a wasabi-type mayo, which goes on top and is a traditional Japanese style.”

If you’re looking for panhandle steak instead of Japanese steak, X- Steakhouse has opened their doors in Townsquare.

With many chain steakhouses in Amarillo, X- Steakhouse wanted to become the go-to locally run steakhouse in town.

X- Steakhouse offers nine different cuts of steak on their menu, all of which are aged 30 days. The restaurant also offers seafood and chicken, making everything in house to provide a family-owned feel and personal touch.

“We age our meat 30 days, we cut everything in house. We make all of our sauces, soups, side items in house so everything is fresh not frozen,” said Rowdy Leal, managing partner of X- Steakhouse. “When you age a good quality meat for 30 days like we do, the quality of the meat is just tremendous.”

The steakhouse has space for any type of dining you need.

They are equipped with a classic dining room, a banquet hall for large parties, a patio to come soon, and a large bar offering live music on Wednesday’s and Friday’s.

The manager believes the excellence of their front and back of the house staff allows them to offer this large variety of services.

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