Chef Belal Kattan grew up in Syria and came to Dallas by way of some of the most demanding kitchens in the city — Cry Wolf on Gaston Avenue, which closed in 2023 and whose absence is still felt, and then Georgie in Knox-Henderson, where Michelin inspectors took notice. What he carries from those years is a precise technique, a pasta obsession so deep that he has invented his own shape, and a culinary identity that he describes as “Syria meets everything.” In 2025 he launched Bazaar — a traveling pop-up that has been hosted at Encina, Mot Hai Ba, Meridian, and Restaurant Beatrice — and built one of the most attentive followings of any young chef in this city.
This month he has a home. Bazaar is in residence at The Statler Hotel, 1914 Commerce Street, Suite 190 — the tasting room that most recently housed Sauvage, with its own separate entrance off Commerce. The residency runs through June 27 on 14 nights: June 10 through 13, June 17 through 20, and June 24 through 27. Twenty-two seats per evening. Five to seven courses at $135 per person. Reservations on OpenTable. Seats are going.
The food is where Kattan’s biography shows up most clearly. His Syrian-American heritage is present in every menu but not in the way that gets reduced to a genre — this is not a Middle Eastern restaurant in any conventional sense. It is a fine dining kitchen that happens to be run by someone for whom Levantine flavors and ingredient combinations are native rather than borrowed. Where another chef might reach for hot honey, Kattan infuses his with baharat — the warming Lebanese spice blend of black pepper, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg — which gives the dish a depth that regular honey doesn’t produce. Where another kitchen might use clotted cream, Kattan makes ashta, the Middle Eastern equivalent, slightly floral, richer, and less familiar to a Dallas dining room.
The pasta is the other through-line. He has talked about it in every interview he has given: the tactile pleasure of making it, the way it focuses him, the reason he started cooking in the first place. At the Statler, the opening weekend’s standout was a raviolo — a single large pasta pillow filled with a runny egg yolk — topped with smoked pork jowl, brown butter, ashta, spring peas, and shaved truffle. The dish maxes out every richness register at once. It is the kind of thing that stays with you.
The kitchen is collaborative. Kattan is working alongside chefs Joshua Zacharias and Brenda Pérez of the pop-up Restaurant Shua, and the menu reflects all three of them. “Having your own food, having your say, feeling value, triggers something instinctual in your brain to give it your all,” Kattan has said of the collaborative format. The menu changes throughout the residency — it already shifted after the first six nights — and daily specials appear and disappear based on what the kitchen is thinking that morning. “This is not a set-in-stone menu,” he says. “If it’s done, it’s done.”
He is also using this month to answer a larger question. Kattan has described the Statler residency as the first time he will be able to see what Bazaar looks like as a concept — with a real kitchen, a real dining room, and the same guests coming back night after night. Whether that leads to a permanent address is not yet decided. “I’m not necessarily looking for a 5-year lease,” he has said. What he is looking for is clarity on what the thing is. The remaining 11 nights of this residency are the best opportunity Dallas will have to find out alongside him.
Not a suit-and-tie restaurant. Twenty-two seats. June 10 through 13, 17 through 20, and 24 through 27 at The Statler, 1914 Commerce Street, Suite 190. Reservations on OpenTable.
