After opening more than 25 restaurants in his career, Alberto Lombardi is no longer out to impress.
That’s not to say the 59-year-old, Italian-born entrepreneur is taking his line of work for granted these days; if anything, he’s more passionate than ever about his business. When he leans forward, commands eye contact, and says he wants to make customers “feel like a million dollars,” the old cliché has life; flavor, even.
It’s a phrase he repeats over and over while sitting at his newest hot spot, La Cubanita, on McKinney Avenue, a short way from where his original Lombardi’s opened in 1977. That restaurant, and more than a dozen that followed, stuck to the “million-dollars” ideal in presentation and sophistication. Nothing intimidating or untouchable, certainly, but, in striking a balance between panache and affordability, Lombardi’s concepts definitely tended toward the former.
Most of those restaurants—Lombardi Mare, 311 Lombardi, and many others in Texas, along with a series of out-of-town ventures—have since been closed or sold. Lombardi’s 31-year time line as a Dallas restaurant owner could very well have ended in the shape of a bell curve, starting with a rise to local prominence, peaking when he made strides in expanding his empire nationwide, and crashing with what Lombardi estimates was a 40 percent drop in business by the end of 2001.
Thankfully for him, the failure of his national empire gave rise to a new family of hometown eateries. In the face of a changing industry, Lombardi reassessed and reshaped his entire company, and the results are evident in the restaurant he’s sitting in today. La Cubanita is certainly scaled back, though the joint isn’t lacking. A mahogany bar, walls lined with framed photos of the menu’s Cuban inspirations, and a mild, sky-blue motif with splashes of yellow are among the tasteful design choices, and this relative simplicity wears well on both the menu and cocktail selections—flavorful, yet approachable. The overt sophistication, even excess, of old is absent, because Lombardi’s “million-dollars” approach has evolved.
Smaller, simpler, and cozier, he’s found, can still be rich.
‘Another Place To Come’
Such changes aren’t news to the party of three who walk into La Cubanita this day for brunch. As the women enter one by one, Lombardi greets each of the familiar faces by name.
“The lady sitting next to us over there, during the week, for sure, she will be once at Toulouse, once at Taverna, once at Sangria,” he says, referring with a sly smile to other of his Dallas eateries. “And now she has another place to come once a week.”
It might come off as a pompous declaration, especially in Dallas’ crowded, competitive restaurant landscape. This man expects customers to stop at his restaurants four times a week? But even if the statement is a bit of a stretch, it’s apt—both for Lombardi’s current success, capitalizing on a small, Highland Park radius of locations, and for the position he believes he holds in Dallas’ modern dining history.
It’s the city he’s lived in the most in his life, a fact that comes as a shock after a glance at his passport. After growing up in Forli, Italy, Lombardi moved a few hours east to Rimini at the age of 14 to attend hotel school. By 16, he was traveling to work at hotels and restaurants in Berlin, then Brussels, then Oslo, before taking up work around the world on Norwegian Cruise Lines.
“I remember when I was little, I was standing in a big boulevard, and each car that was passing by, I was trying to figure out the license plate,” Lombardi says. “Which country, which city they were coming from? Where they were going? In my mind, I’ve always been wanting to travel.”
That meant Dallas was supposed to be just another stop in a series of seasonal stays in American cities—Miami and San Francisco came before Big D in 1973. But after waiting tables at The Grape here, Lombardi soon became maître d’ for the Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel, a position he held for nearly three years. He quickly put down roots in the city, deciding to fulfill his longtime dream—“for forever, oh yeah”—of opening his own restaurant. “When I was growing up, cooking was a piece of every day,” he recalls. “I remember myself for so many years helping my mother, looking at my mother the way she was cooking the pasta—pretty much everything—from scratch.”
Making sense of Lombardi’s cultural allegiance is difficult; his Italian accent sounds fresh from the mother country. Little about his calm, casual demeanor or understated attire (today, a yellow sweater-vest and slacks) comes across as particularly Southwestern. And there’s no irony when he blurts out “Mama Mia!” while trying—and failing—to remember every single restaurant he’s opened since the original Lombardi’s in ’77.
