For seven years, Jennie Kelley ran one of the most talked-about dining experiences in Dallas out of her own home in Deep Ellum. The underground supper club was called FRANK, it seated 20 people per dinner, and at its peak more than 15,000 people had signed up for the weekly lottery just for a chance to get in. The Chicago Tribune called it one of the hardest reservations to get in the country. When Kelley’s partner Brandon Moore moved in, the deal was simple: the dinners continued regardless. “He got sick once, and we had to have FRANK,” she recalled later. They kept having FRANK until 2019, when the operation finally outgrew what a house could hold.
What came after was Fond — a brick-and-mortar restaurant on the ground floor of the Santander Tower at 1601 Elm Street in downtown Dallas, opened September 2023, and the first permanent home for Kelley and Moore’s cooking after nearly a decade of supper clubs and pop-ups. The name works on multiple levels — fond is the French culinary term for the caramelized browned bits left in the pan after a good sear, the concentrated essence of whatever was cooked there. It’s also how Kelley describes the whole project. “We’re fond of providing a cool culinary experience,” she says. “We’re fond of Dallas. We’re fond of each other.”
Kelley’s path to the kitchen was not the conventional one. She grew up in Dallas, attended West Mesquite High School, and double-majored in film and art history at SMU before food took over. She spent years on the road as a member of The Polyphonic Spree — the Dallas symphonic rock collective that toured with David Bowie, who affectionately called them “the polys” — and it was on those tours, eight months long in some cases, that she became the group’s unofficial scout for indigenous restaurants and authentic food across England, Japan, Canada, and Sweden. Cooking followed naturally from eating obsessively in every city on the tour schedule.
In 2011 she appeared on Season 2 of MasterChef with Gordon Ramsay, which is where she met Ben Starr, the Dallas travel writer and food blogger who would become her first culinary partner. They didn’t win. They went home to Dallas and started cooking together anyway, which turned out to be the better outcome. The communal table at FRANK was built by Starr from oak flooring salvaged from a 125-year-old farmhouse south of Fort Worth — twenty feet long, thirty inches wide, narrower than any restaurant table, designed so that the twenty people seated around it were close enough to talk to each other. Kelley and Starr sat down and ate with their guests every night. That was the whole point.
Moore’s background runs in a different direction. A Detroit native, he helmed the kitchen at Ocean Prime in Uptown, built The Pickling Collective around his passion for fermentation, and ran the “Deep Wiener” hot dog pop-ups that became their own underground phenomenon before he and Kelley started Better Half Bistro together. The Better Half pop-ups — French-inspired menus and Moore’s Detroit-style pizzas, hosted in kitchens and bars around the metroplex — sold out instantly every time they announced one. The demand made the case for a permanent room more clearly than any business plan could have.
Those pizzas came with Fond when it opened, and they’ve become one of the clearest reasons to come back for dinner. The Better Half Pizza uses sausage from Jimmy’s Food Store on Bryan Street — the East Dallas Italian institution — alongside broccoli rabe, parmesan, and a house-made vodka sauce on a fluffy sourdough crust with a secret cheese blend. The crust on a proper Detroit-style pizza has a lacier, crispier edge than its New York or Neapolitan cousins, the result of the dough pressing against the sides of the pan as it bakes, and Moore’s version achieves that without the grease that lesser versions substitute for flavor.
The rest of the dinner menu is built around shared plates that change with the season and whatever the kitchen is most interested in at the moment — the menu on the website simply says “ever-changing” and directs you to Instagram for the latest, which is either charming or inconvenient depending on your relationship with social media. What tends to show up: meatballs with ricotta and fresh basil, Parisian ham with fermented honey and hazelnuts, fried olives with Calabrian sausage and aioli, frites au poivre, and the Goodness Gracious Meatballs that reviewers keep naming by name. The Abracadabra Pizza — confit cherry tomatoes, roasted wild mushrooms — is the vegetarian option that people who didn’t come looking for one end up ordering.
Lunch is a different operation entirely: sandwiches, salads, and daily specials for the downtown weekday crowd, with the mortadella and pesto focaccia as the dish that introduced most people to the room. One early customer told Kelley it was the first time she’d thought a sandwich could be refreshing. That’s the kind of feedback that explains why the lunch program has built its own following separate from the dinner one.
The wine program is exclusively natural — no conventional wines on the list, which reflects Kelley and Moore’s own progression as drinkers and their belief that natural wine pairs more honestly with the food they’re cooking. Texas producers Soto Vino and Crowson Winery are on the shelves. The cocktail program has been praised independently of the food, and an amaro cart that the restaurant has been developing will eventually make its way to the dining room, which is worth looking forward to if you’re the kind of person who knows what that means.
Once a month, Fond runs a late-night dinner series called Fond A.D. — a callback to the FRANK era, no dish repeated, reservation-only, announced via email and Instagram. If you missed FRANK when it existed, this is as close as you’re going to get to understanding what all those lottery entries were about.
Parking is free with validation in the underground garage at Santander Tower — enter from Elm or Pacific. Open for lunch Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dinner Tuesday through Friday 5 to 9 p.m. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Reservations on Resy.
