There is a restaurant in Denton called Osteria Il Muro with 22 seats, a backyard garden, and a menu that changes every single day. It is one of the hardest reservations in North Texas. People set calendar alarms for the last Monday of each month — the one morning the next month’s tables are released — and still don’t always get in.
The chef who runs it is a James Beard finalist for Best Chef: Texas. His name is Scott Girling. Most of Dallas has never heard of him.
That’s the whole story right there, and it’s a good one.
Girling grew up with Sicilian roots. His maternal grandparents were from Sicily, and the restaurant is named for them — il muro means the wall in Italian, a nod to the family name. Food was always there in the background, but cooking professionally was something he came to on his own terms. He graduated from the Culinary School of Fort Worth, then did something most American culinary students don’t bother to do: he actually went to Italy. Six months in Calabria at the Italian Culinary Institute, full immersion in regional cooking — the kind of food that doesn’t translate well to menus because it’s rooted in place and season and the specific way someone’s grandmother did it. He ate his way through it, learned it from the inside, and came home.
Back in DFW he did what young cooks do — moved through kitchens, picked up technique, figured out what kind of cook he actually was. He landed at The Grape in Dallas as sous chef under Brian Luscher, one of the city’s most quietly respected operators. Spent three serious years there. Then he stepped back, took a low-key job at a neighborhood bar in Flower Mound called Local Pint, and started doing pasta pop-ups on Tuesday nights.
Nobody expected what happened next. Word got out. The Tuesday nights got busier and busier until there were 60 or 70 people lined up outside a bar in Flower Mound waiting for handmade pasta from a guy who just wanted to cook the food he’d learned in Calabria. Through the pandemic, those Tuesday dinners became a lifeline — three-course Italian meals, phones ringing constantly, a waiting list that kept growing. He and his wife Desiree looked at each other and understood: this was the moment to build the actual restaurant.
They spent two years finding the right space. In December 2021, they opened Osteria Il Muro at 311 W. Congress Street in Denton, in a converted cottage that used to be Seven Mile Cafe. Twenty-two seats. Dinner service Wednesday through Sunday. Reservations opened on the last Monday of each month for the following month. Within eight months, they were sold out every night and became reservation-only — not by design, but because there was no other option.
The food is the reason people drive from Dallas and Fort Worth and beyond and sit on cancellation lists and plan their calendars around a Monday morning reservation window. Girling makes everything from scratch, every day, in quantities that match exactly the number of covers on the books. The pasta — hand-rolled agnolotti, ricotta gnocchi, shapes that shift with the season — is made fresh each morning and not a gram more than needed. Oysters arrive from Damariscotta River in Maine, flown in specifically because they’re the right oyster, finished with a melon mignonette and herb oil grown steps away in the backyard. A thick slab of schiacciata — Tuscan flatbread made with Oklahoma-grown wheat berries — arrives warm at the table. Fried squash blossoms. House-cured lardo wrapped around tiger melon cut from the garden that morning. The menu is different tomorrow, and the day after that.
The garden is worth a paragraph of its own. What started as a practical project — a way to grow Italian varieties unavailable at Texas farms, a decompression zone between service and prep — has become something quietly remarkable. Climbing melon vines. Trombetta squash hanging from leafy arches. Broccoli rabe and four varieties of Calabrian pepper. Passersby stop to look at it. People ask him questions about growing tomatoes. He stops whatever he’s doing and talks to them. He taught himself through YouTube videos and Reddit threads, which is maybe the most Texas thing about any of this.
That’s the thing about Girling that the Beard nomination reflects but doesn’t fully capture. There’s no performance happening at Osteria Il Muro. The servers know every dish well enough to talk about it for ten minutes if you want, and most of the time you will want that, because the menu changes daily and the story behind each ingredient is worth hearing. Girling goes table to table himself. The room feels less like a restaurant and more like a dinner party where you happened to get lucky enough to be invited.
“We want to bring people back to Italy,” he’s said, “and give them that nostalgic feel — and for people who have never been, we want to say: this is what real Italian food is.”
People who have actually been to Italy keep telling him he’s right.
The James Beard finalist announcement puts Girling alongside some formidable company — Ope Amosu of ChopnBlok in Houston, Evelyn Garcia and Henry Lu of Jun in Houston, Gabe and Melissa Padilla of Café Piro in El Paso. Best Chef: Texas is one of the most competitive regional categories the Foundation runs. The ceremony is June 15 in Chicago. Whatever happens that night, the fact that a 22-seat cottage in Denton is in the conversation says something about what this restaurant has quietly become.
Reservations open on the last Monday of each month at osteriamuro.com. Set an alarm.
