Walk into The Free Man on a Tuesday night and you might not immediately understand what you are looking at. There is a band in one room and a different band in the other room. Someone is eating crawfish at the bar. The owner is probably behind a drum kit somewhere. The gumbo smells like it has been going since this morning, because it has. This is Deep Ellum, but it is also kind of New Orleans, and that is entirely on purpose.
John Jay Myers named this place The Free Man and he meant it. He is a Louisiana native, a drummer, a screen printer, a landlord, and a political candidate who ran for U.S. Senate in 2012 on the Libertarian ticket and lost to Ted Cruz. He has described himself as having a deep, deep mistrust of the government. Then he opened a restaurant and spent the next decade fighting the city of Dallas over a water line. You genuinely could not write that story.
Myers grew up in Louisiana and carried that culture to Texas in ways that go well beyond putting gumbo on a menu. The Free Man at 2626 Commerce Street is open every day from eleven in the morning until two in the morning, and there is live music every single night starting at seven. Four bands a night across two stages — a small jazz side and a larger soul side — so you can move between a jazz trio in one corner and a blues act in the other without walking outside. That is not a typical Tuesday in Dallas.
The food is the real thing. Myers built the menu around the dishes he grew up eating in Louisiana, and the kitchen has held to those roots for more than a decade. Start with the boudain balls — rice and pork sausage filling rolled, breaded, and fried until the outside snaps and the inside is soft and savory. Order them before you decide anything else. The gumbo is the next move — a properly dark roux base built with seafood, andouille sausage, and spices that tell you this took time to make. It is the kind of gumbo that sticks with you. The jambalaya is rice-forward and properly smoky, the way it is in Louisiana and not the way it usually is in Texas. The crawfish étouffée runs tender tail meat through a creamy, butter-rich sauce with enough cayenne to notice, served over white rice with French bread on the side for getting every last bit of the sauce. The po’boys come with shrimp, catfish, or oysters — each one fried to order and loaded into soft French bread. The bread here matters, which sounds like a small thing until you have eaten a po’boy where it did not.
Then there is the crawfish. Myers boils them daily when they are in season, and that is not a phrase most Dallas restaurants can say honestly. A boil means whole crawfish, cooked in a seasoned pot with corn, potatoes, and andouille until everything in the pot tastes like the water it was cooked in — which is the whole point. Most places that put crawfish on a Dallas menu are working from frozen product or running limited quantities until they sell out. The Free Man does it every day the season allows, which is part of why regulars plan their visits around it. One reviewer said their crawfish Monica — crawfish tails tossed with pasta in a cream sauce — was better than Jazz Fest. That is a serious claim and the kind of thing people only say when they mean it.
Myers himself plays drums and sings in the house band, The Freeloaders, a six-piece swing-jazz outfit that holds a weekly residency at the venue. He plays with a cigar. He has been described as gravel-voiced, which is accurate, and as Cosmo Kramer-like in his mannerisms, which is also accurate if you have ever seen him talk about the drug war or the size limits on soft drinks.
Every year on Fat Tuesday, Myers leads The Freeloaders and whoever else wants to join into a full second-line parade through the streets of Deep Ellum — down Commerce to Elm and back — brass bands and all. It is the most New Orleans thing that happens in Dallas all year, and it happens because a Louisiana man moved here and refused to let the city forget where he came from.
Getting the expansion open was its own saga. Myers spent the better part of two years and close to $500,000 trying to connect a water line to the adjacent space — a process that involved the city requiring work that their own inspector later admitted was a bad idea, digging up the same stretch of street twice, and a three-way contract that nobody seemed to fully understand. Myers documented all of it on social media in real time. The city eventually acknowledged it had been asking him to do an incredibly stupid thing. He was not surprised. This is a man who ran against Ted Cruz and kept going.
The expansion did open. The Free Man now occupies both storefronts at 2626-2630 Commerce, two full lounges, two stages, one kitchen, and a patio. The block sits just south of the main Deep Ellum drag on Main and Elm, close enough to The Bomb Factory to catch overflow but on a stretch of Commerce that has stayed a little quieter than its neighbors. Myers has described this as protection from gentrification, which is either lucky or intentional depending on how you read him. Probably both.
Thirteen-plus years in, The Free Man is one of the few places in Deep Ellum that feels exactly like what it was supposed to be from the beginning. It did not pivot. The Free Man is open daily 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. Live music runs every night from 7 p.m. Reservations are accepted by email at TheFreeManDallas@gmail.com. More at freemandallas.com.
