The Mercury opened on Preston Road in 1998 and has been one of the most quietly consistent fine dining rooms in Dallas ever since. Chef Chris Ward — James Beard Rising Star Chef, CraveDFW’s Best Chef in Dallas, the first American Executive Chef at the Fairmont Hotel’s prestigious dining rooms — opened it, built a neighborhood following out of it, and has run it for nearly three decades without chasing trends or apologizing for what it is. “If I weren’t here, you wouldn’t know the difference,” Ward once said. His staff runs like a well-oiled machine. He just wants his customers to be happy.
Part of keeping them happy was converting a small section of the restaurant into a sushi lounge. “It’s like Nobu without the price tag,” is how Ward described it. The concept — Sushi at The Mercury — became one of the earliest examples in Dallas of elevated sushi living inside a fine dining restaurant rather than alongside it. The hidden lounge behind the main dining room offered hot and cold tastings, sushi, sashimi, tempura, and signature Japanese cocktails, and it required someone who understood both the precision of a serious sushi kitchen and the sensibility of the Mercury room. That person was Chef Roger Man.
Roger had worked alongside Ward at Citizen before spending several years at Nobu Dallas and then Uchi Dallas — two of the most exacting Japanese kitchens in the city — which gave him a foundation in both the luxury omakase tradition and the more ingredient-forward, technique-driven style that made Uchi a standard-bearer for Japanese cooking in Texas. When Ward brought him in to launch Sushi at The Mercury, Roger quickly became known for ultramodern sashimi presentations and a globally influenced approach to traditional technique — the kind of cooking that doesn’t announce itself but leaves people thinking about it on the drive home.
Then five years ago he stepped away. His family’s Vietnamese restaurant needed him, and family comes first. He went. The sushi program at The Mercury continued, but the particular energy that Roger brought to it — the precision, the quiet confidence, the presentations that looked like they had been composed rather than assembled — was somewhere else.
Now he’s back. Chef Roger Man has returned to lead the sushi program at The Mercury, reuniting with Chef Ward and picking up exactly where he left off. The five years away didn’t soften what he does. If anything, time spent running a family kitchen — where there is no margin for waste and no audience to perform for, just food that has to be right — tends to sharpen a chef’s fundamentals rather than dull them.
For the regulars who have been coming to The Mercury two and three times a week since the early 2000s, this is the kind of news that gets mentioned at the bar before anyone has looked at the menu. For anyone who hasn’t been lately, it’s a reason to go.
The Mercury is at 11909 Preston Road, Suite 1418, Dallas. Open Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Saturday 4 to 10 p.m. Closed Sunday. Reservations on OpenTable. Phone: (972) 960-7774. We wrote about The Mercury earlier this year here.
