Rex’s Seafood closed its Dallas Farmers Market location on Sunday, May 17. The space at 920 S. Harwood St. will go to Dock Local this summer. The lease came up for renewal and the two sides couldn’t agree on terms. That’s how eleven years ends.
The story behind Rex’s is worth knowing. Rex Bellomy Sr. opened the original location on Lovers Lane in 2006 — not a restaurant at first, just a fresh seafood market, one of the few places in Dallas where you could actually buy fish worth cooking. Customers kept asking for prepared food, so the restaurant side grew alongside the market. Beau Bellomy, Rex’s son, had been working there since he was a teenager, learning the business from the floor up.
He graduated from Saint Louis University in December 2011 and went straight to work full time. In 2015, when the Dallas Farmers Market was being redeveloped and an opportunity opened up in the new food hall, Beau saw it and took it. Rex wasn’t interested. Beau had two older brothers who believed in him and put money in. He opened the Farmers Market location on his own.
Shortly after that, Rex Sr. closed Lovers Lane and stepped away from the business entirely. Beau kept the name going. A few years later he opened a full-service second location at 6713 W. Northwest Highway, near NorthPark — a larger, sit-down restaurant and market with a proper seafood case, the full raw bar, and the kind of room where you could linger. In 2023, the Bellomy family made a bigger move and purchased S&D Oyster Company on McKinney Avenue, the Dallas seafood institution that’s been on that street since 1976 and turns 50 this fall.
What the Belomys have built, quietly and without much fanfare, is a small Dallas seafood family. The Farmers Market location was always the scrappier sibling — counter service, food hall format, quick and casual — but it had regulars who came back specifically for it. The blackened salmon tacos. The oyster shooters. The gumbo. People who worked downtown and made it a lunch habit. Tourists who wandered in from the market and didn’t expect to eat that well. Eleven years of that adds up.
Beau said the closure made sense: the Rex’s brand has evolved into something more full-service and elevated, and a quick-serve counter in a food hall was increasingly a poor fit for where the concept was going. That’s true, and it’s also the diplomatic version of what happened when a lease negotiation goes sideways. Either way, May 17 is the last day.
The Northwest Highway location stays open. Rex’s Seafood and Market at 6713 W. Northwest Highway is the real flagship now — full bar, full seafood case, the whole operation. And S&D, which the Belomys have been quietly stewarding since 2023, is approaching its 50th anniversary at 2701 McKinney Avenue with a new bar and everything else still intact. The family isn’t going anywhere. They’re just done with food halls.
The Farmers Market space will become Dock Local, the East Coast-inspired seafood concept from Maryland native chef Brett Curtis, who started with a food truck in 2016 and now has locations at Legacy Hall in Plano, Harvest Hall in Grapevine, Exchange Hall in downtown Dallas, and a spot in Nashville. Maine lobster rolls, a lobster grilled cheese, seafood tacos, scratch kitchen. It opens sometime this summer at the same address, 920 S. Harwood St.
Rex’s at the Farmers Market served its last oyster on May 17. The Northwest Highway flagship is at 6713 W. Northwest Highway. S&D Oyster Company is at 2701 McKinney Avenue. Both are open.
