It’s steaming hot and there’s still no air conditioning inside of the building at 409 North Zang Boulevard, but in about a month, the unfinished space will soon be a hopping neighborhood joint for food and beer. Owners Alycen Cuellar, Felix Garcia, and Paul Delgado plan to open their first restaurant together, the Local Oak, by September 15.
The Local Oak, named after the giant oak tree that stands in front of the restaurant, is waiting for a few things to get fixed before the last and final push toward a big Oak Cliff opening. “We’re really building something out of nothing. We took a space that was so not like this. We reclaimed everything – like the wood floors are original and all this pine came off the walls – and we tried to reuse as much of everything. I believe the building is 1927… The outside’s got a funky mid-century modern facade, but the inside is 1927. It even has its own vault,” says Cuellar. (Cuellar comes from a family that already has its toes dipped in the restaurant business. El Corazon, which is just down the street, is her family’s.)
The menu has all your basic soup/salad/sandwich offerings, plus bar bites. “There’s a little bit of American, little bit of Mexican, Asian influence in some of the dishes… just a little bit of everything. It’s eclectic,” says Garcia.
He also says that the beer program will be “pretty old-school,” with 70-75 bottles of beer behind the bar. There’ll also be 12 beers on tap. Five of them will be local craft beers.
The Local Oak neighbors Zoli’s NY Pizza Tavern. Once the trolley station is built over there, it’s going to be chaotic town over in that little area of Oak Cliff.
