The word midcult has a history. The critic Dwight Macdonald coined it in 1960 to describe a particular kind of cultural production — work that borrows the vocabulary of serious art while making itself easier to swallow, that flatters its audience into thinking they are engaging with something elevated without demanding too much of them. Macdonald meant it as a put-down. Mike Stites and Evan Pemberton are reclaiming it as a mission statement.
The two chefs are opening Midcult Society this summer at 841 Exposition Avenue in Exposition Park, in the former RAYO Bar and Lounge space on the corner of Parry and Exposition — a short walk from Fair Park and directly across the street from the neighborhood that has been quietly building toward something for years. The room seats about 70. The menu will lean on Southern cooking with global influences. The technique will be serious. The setting will not be.
Stites spent years at Cry Wolf, the modern American restaurant on Gaston Avenue in East Dallas that became one of the most respected kitchens in the city before closing in 2024. The space Cry Wolf occupied is now Olōyō — which we’ve covered — and Stites has been looking for the right next move since. Exposition Park is it. The neighborhood has been getting real investment — sports facilities, hospitality projects, development money tied to Atlético Dallas and the broader growth of the Fair Park corridor — and Midcult Society is betting on what that investment produces rather than waiting for it to be fully finished.
Pemberton comes from Roister, the Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas concept in Chicago’s Fulton Market that occupied the other end of the Alinea Group’s range — where Alinea was controlled and cerebral, Roister was loud and approachable and built around an open hearth, with wood fire driving everything from the duck wings to the ember ice cream with crushed hazelnuts and cherry jam that Michelin inspectors took note of. Roister was the place where serious cooking stopped taking itself seriously, which is more or less the definition of what Stites and Pemberton are trying to build in Dallas. We wrote about the Alinea Group’s evolution here.
The name is deliberate. Elevated technique in a middlebrow room — not dumbed down, not dressed up, just good food made by people who know what they’re doing in a space that doesn’t ask you to celebrate the occasion of being there. Dallas has plenty of restaurants at both ends of that spectrum. It has fewer in the middle, done well. That’s the gap Stites and Pemberton are aiming at.
The duo says they will not rush the buildout to hit a date, which is the right call and also the thing every restaurant says before either opening on time or opening late. They are eyeing summer 2026. Given the Fair Park activity around the World Cup this June and July, hitting that window would put them in front of an audience that doesn’t yet know they exist. Follow their progress on Instagram at @midcultsociety.
