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Restaurants & Bars

Three Dallas Chefs Talk About Opening Their New Restaurants

How Tiffany Derry, Casey La Rue, and Jimmy Park are pushing the city's dining scene forward with new restaurants that all debuted in June.
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Whipped foie gras with charred grapes and smoked maple syrup alongside croissants.
Carte Blanche

Much like the vulnerability of opening yourself up to others, bringing a new restaurant into the world exposes you in many ways. Who you are is cast onto every facet of the space like a spotlight. For Jimmy Park, a chef who knows his way around restaurant openings—the Nobu alum brought us Pok the Raw Bar and Nori Handroll—it’s an arduous process.

After 100-hour work weeks, after practicing the logistical dance of a two-hour, 17-course omakase dinner, Park opened Shoyo. It’s Lowest Greenville’s new destination for sushi. Here, the craft of sushi is treated with reverence. Alongside executive master sushi chef Shin Kondo, or Shinsan, Park produces both traditional and out-of-the-box sushi. The particular challenge of the latter is what excites Park most. “Shinsan and I have to go outside of our comfort and create something. That’s what keeps us going. We’re always learning. Once you stop learning as a chef, I think you should just give it up,” Park says bluntly.

Such is the chef’s way. Following their culinary North Star is often what makes a restaurant more than a place for grub. It can be a personal essay writ in aged toro—or duck pastrami, for that matter. Chef Casey La Rue opened Carte Blanche, also on Greenville Avenue, this month. It’s a bakery by day and tasting menu restaurant come evening. There, find the duck and a whole manner of game meat. The choice to forego beef is La Rue’s quiet bucking of the norm that you must serve red meat to survive in this town.

“I don’t serve beef. I don’t really advertise that. It’s just an environmental thing. I don’t feel good about that one,” Casey told me in November as he prepped the former Mudsmith space for Carte Blanche. “The other thing is like beef is everywhere. We’re in Dallas.”

At Carte Blanche, La Rue and his pastry chef wife Amy La Rue, who runs the morning bakery program and does the desserts for the tasting menu, use game meat from Broken Arrow Ranch in Ingram, which is about 75 miles northwest of San Antonio. (Amy’s boar in a blanket is one very good, very tasty example.)

The La Rues are clearly inspired and motivated by the craft of cooking. “It’s kind of all I’ve ever done job wise,” he told me last year. “I don’t really want to do anything else.” This inner-knowing of purpose runs deep with chefs, I think.

This month, Tiffany Derry debuted her love letter to Southern food with the opening of Roots Southern Table in Farmers Branch. I wrote about it recently, but this anecdote didn’t make it into the story. I want to share it here because it exemplifies the stereotype-breaking work Derry is doing at Roots.

“Growing up, my family made okra like almost every week, and a lot of people don’t love okra. But that’s okay, we’ll get there! If Tom Colicchio from Top Chef, the only okra on record—this is true—the only okra that he was ever served that he did not eliminate somebody for, was mine. Till this day. He was like, ‘I’ve gone 40-something years, and I’ve never ate okra that I liked; this was different.’”

“I’ll never forget: My mom, she comes on the show at this particular episode, and it’s right before finale, we’re going into the [final] four, and I’m nervous. [Top Chef] is like, you need to cook like some food from like, your, your roots, right, or whatever word they used. My mom’s like, ‘Well, you got to cook okra.’ And I’m like, ‘No, mom…. Everybody knows you don’t cook okra on Top Chef.’ And she’s like, ‘But that’s what we know…’ So I made it. And he loved it. That was like that story of if we do things right and in a different way, sometimes we can win them over.”

Derry, it would seem, is winning them over.

By earnestly embracing themselves, their stories, their culinary points of view, chefs like Park, La Rue, and Derry—and so many more—ensure Dallas contains restaurants that push us forward as a city.


A version of this story was published in the SideDish newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the latest food and drink news and stories.

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