Before Dallas had a fine dining scene worth arguing about, it had La Tunisia — and La Tunisia had a seven-foot doorman named Abdull who had allegedly been a palace guard for Sheik Mirza Hassan of Morocco and wore ceremonial Watusi chieftain’s robes to work every day on Harry Hines Boulevard.
It was that era in Dallas. And it was that kind of restaurant.
La Tunisia opened in 1959 in Exchange Park, a 140-acre development off Harry Hines that also housed, among other things, a 32-lane Mickey Mantle Bowling Center. Owner James F. Riggs was a Mesquite developer who apparently decided that if he was going to open a restaurant, he was going to open a restaurant. The building cost $750,000 — serious money in 1959 — and it was designed and decorated by the same team that created Disneyland. You read that correctly.
Walk past Abdull and through the front doors and the first thing you entered was a cocktail lounge called The Sheik’s Tent. The ceiling was draped in hand-woven cloth to simulate a tent on the North African desert. Veiled waitresses in harem costumes served cocktails. The lighting system created a simulated 24-hour day cycle, which was considered wildly futuristic at the time. Beyond The Sheik’s Tent was the main dining room — called The Pioneer Room — which connected the cultures of Texas and North Africa through their shared tradition of cattle ranching. Someone on the design team thought that through and committed to it fully.
The menu covered, depending on the night, dishes from Tunisia, India, Morocco, and other points across the African continent and beyond. This was Dallas in 1960. You could not get a proper curry in this city without significant effort. La Tunisia offered the whole spice route.
The host for much of its run was a young man named Iqbal “Ike” Singh Sekhon, an SMU graduate student who had previously worked at the Safari Restaurant in Preston Royal. He stayed seven years and eventually left to open Rajah’s Custom Clothiers at Hillcrest and Northwest Highway. The first chef at Riggs’s other restaurant, The London House at NorthPark, was a young man named Ewald Scholz, who later became one of the better-known culinary names in Dallas. This is how restaurants work — somebody always turns out to have started somewhere interesting.
By the late 1960s the crowd had moved on, as Dallas crowds do. The city’s appetite for theatrical themed dining had found new venues and new enthusiasms. In June 1972 the space reopened as Arthur’s West, a steakhouse sibling to the original Arthur’s on McKinney. The Sheik’s Tent came down. The veiled waitresses went home.
La Tunisia lasted roughly a decade, which is a respectable run for a restaurant that staked its entire identity on a specific moment in American dining culture — that brief window when the country was curious about the world, jet travel was becoming accessible to the middle class, and a 7-foot man in ceremonial robes standing outside your restaurant on Harry Hines seemed like a perfectly reasonable investment.
Nobody built restaurants like that anymore. They probably should.
