Nick Mathers opened Élephante on a rooftop in Santa Monica in 2018 and built one of the most photographed restaurants in Los Angeles — not because the food is transcendent but because the combination of coastal Italian cooking, ocean views, a well-designed room, and a cocktail program that produces espresso martinis in volume has made it the kind of place where people go to be seen and end up wanting to come back. The Scottsdale location opened at Fashion Square and confirmed the concept travels. Dallas is next.
Élephante is coming to 2323 Cedar Springs Road in Uptown — an 11,000-square-foot standalone two-story building facing Maple Avenue, steps from the Katy Trail. The space will be designed in the same spirit as the Santa Monica original: custom furniture and artisanal details drawn from Mathers’ travels to Pantelleria and the Aeolian Islands, the volcanic archipelago off the northern coast of Sicily that has been producing capers, wine, and an intensely Mediterranean way of eating for thousands of years. Mediterranean olive trees, climbing ivy, Moroccan-style lanterns, vintage glass chandeliers, leather, stone, and mosaic tiles.
The outdoor situation, given the Maple Avenue and Katy Trail setting, should be the best thing about the Dallas location.
The menu at the Santa Monica location — which is the template for what Dallas will get, with local adaptations — runs light coastal Italian: small plates, pasta, thin-crust pizza, a raw bar section, seafood mains. The whipped eggplant with puccia bread and olive oil is the opening move that people order and then reorder. The spicy vodka canestri — shell pasta, Calabrian chili, basil, Parmigiano — is the pasta dish that has produced more Instagram posts than any other item on the menu, and it earns them. The soppressata pizza has a charred, blistered crust and thin slices of spicy cured meat balanced across it in a way that makes the table stop talking for a moment.
The grilled octopus is consistently praised. The cocktail program runs five variations of the espresso martini, which tells you the priorities of the room. The wine list covers Italian regions with limited vintage selections and proprietary private labels.
No opening date has been confirmed for Dallas beyond 2026. The Knox Hotel — the Auberge Collection property at 3319 Knox Street that anchors the same development — is also targeting a late 2026 opening, which means the Uptown corridor is about to get a significant amount of new energy at once. Élephante is at 2323 Cedar Springs Road. Follow @elephanterestaurant for opening news.
