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Restaurants & Bars

At Catarina’s, Let Tim Love Take Your Phone

We didn’t want to fall for Tim Love’s new restaurant, with its ridiculous phone policy. Then they brought out the meatballs.
By Diana Spechler | |Photography by Kevin Hunter Marple
Tim Love Caterinas
Ring Tone: Love’s latest forgoes the cowboy in favor of the caprese. Kevin Hunter Marple

To step into Caterina’s, celebrity chef Tim Love’s new Italian fine dining restaurant in Fort Worth, is to exchange the heehaw tourist vibe of the Stockyards for a dimly lit, white-tablecloth, 40-seat hideaway. The kind of place where a smiling maître d’ locks your phone into a pouch.  

Caterina’s—named after one of Love’s sisters—is the most recent addition to a $700 million push to swankify the Stockyards. It is also the latest in a spate of fine dining Italian spots (Carbone, Monarch, Il Modo) that have sprung up along both forks of the Trinity in the past year or so.

This is only the second Italian-focused offering among Love’s many Fort Worth ventures, though the first, Gemelle, is comparatively casual. Half a mile away, the chef does have another upscale establishment, but Lonesome Dove has a painting of an actual cowboy hat hung on its exposed-brick wall. By contrast, Caterina’s is more Carbone than cowboy. Men must wear jackets. Cocktails are prepared tableside. The whole wine list is Italian. The pasta is fresh. The meatballs are off-menu and make your eyes roll back in your head. Between courses, servers pop by with complimentary “bites,” such as prosciutto and parmesan, and tastes of rosé prosecco. 

Executive chef Darlian Rodriguez, formerly of Copeland’s of New Orleans in Southlake, encourages diners to order multiple courses at once, which servers space out over the evening for a “slow dining” experience. Standout antipasti include crispy fried zucchini with aioli dipping sauce and an asparagus-and-artichoke carpaccio so fresh that the asparagus tastes like sugar snap peas. Of the secondi options, in keeping with Love’s fondness for game meat, the coniglio steals the show with its balance of savory and sweet. The rabbit is braised in an Italian sweet-and-sour sauce, agrodolce, and garnished with golden raisins and pine nuts.

Perhaps because there are no windows and no phones, a sense of timelessness infuses dinner here. A meal can easily become a four-hour affair. In fact, the whole point is to take a breather, to be present, to have real conversation and maybe even chat up other diners. (The cocktails, garnished with little paper umbrellas, go down like lemonade, easing the talking-to-strangers part.)

“I grew up the youngest of seven,” Love says, “and we were poor, but I didn’t even know it. We’re all very close. We love to get together and tell stories. When our parents had dinner parties, it was so special.”

With his new restaurant, he aimed to achieve that special feel—proper hors d’oeuvres, everyone dressed up not just to eat dinner but to “go out for dinner.” That nostalgia pushed him toward American-Italian cuisine, like the old-school red sauce restaurants of New York. So you won’t see traditional Tim Love flourishes like bacon-wrapped everything skewered with Texas flag toothpicks, nor will you suffer pretension. Even the rule against phones feels more fun than affected, and if you really need to make a call, you can just step outside and have your pouch unlocked on the way. 

But to do it right, give the restaurant’s phone number to your emergency contact, and enjoy the rare notification-free opportunity to sip house-made limoncello and twirl fresh linguini around your fork. 


This story originally appeared in the October issue of D Magazine with the headline, “Off the Grid.” Write to [email protected].

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