Before Dallas had a food identity, it had Stephan Pyles. And before Stephan Pyles had Star Canyon or Stampede 66 or Flora Street Cafe, he had a restaurant on Routh Street in Uptown that opened on November 27, 1983, and quietly changed everything about what this city thought it was capable of doing in a kitchen.
Pyles grew up in Big Spring, Texas — fifth generation, as deep in the state as roots go — where his family ran the Phillips 66 Truck Stop Café on the outskirts of town. He bussed tables as a kid, watched his mother turn flour and sugar into cobblers and cream pies, and absorbed the West Texas roadside food that would eventually become the foundation of his cooking philosophy even after he’d gone to Paris, studied at the Great Chefs of France Cooking School under Michel Guérard and Paul Bocuse and the Troisgros brothers, and become the kind of chef that serious food magazines started paying attention to. He came back to Dallas. He always came back to Dallas.
Routh Street Cafe was the result of all of it — the truck stop childhood and the French training and the Texas ingredients and a conviction that the two things were not in conflict. The building itself was a converted dilapidated art gallery at 3005 Routh Street, originally a home, sitting on a foundation of bois d’arc tree stumps. Pyles nearly walked away when he found out. He called the restaurant New American Cuisine at first, because that was the language the industry had at the time, but what it was becoming was something more specific: a Texas kitchen that took its own pantry as seriously as any European kitchen took its terroir.
The first menus featured catfish mousse with crayfish sauce and Colorado lamb with Texas pecans and garlic — French technique applied to ingredients that Dallas fine dining had no previous interest in. Then Pyles pushed further into the pantry he’d grown up with. Texas black buck antelope with pasilla-tamarind sauce. Sweet potato tamales. Crayfish enchiladas with black bean sauce. Hickory-grilled catfish on smoked-pepper butter sauce with black bean relish in a tomatillo husk — a dish that the food writer Michael Bauer later described as an epiphany, catfish that had always lived at roadside diners suddenly given star billing on an expensive fixed-price menu alongside black beans and tomatillo handled with the panache normally reserved for French nouvelle cuisine.
The room served Paula Lambert’s handmade cheese and American wine. It was written at the time that another restaurant in town that combined such excitement and comfort. It was wondered, cautiously, whether Southwestern cuisine was anything more than a gimmick. Routh Street spent a decade proving it wasn’t.
Around 1984 and 1985, a cookbook author named Anne Lindsay Greer noticed that several Dallas chefs were cooking with Texas regional ingredients in a way that amounted to a movement without a name yet. She gathered them for dinner: Pyles, Dean Fearing at the Anatole, Avner Samuel at the Mansion on Turtle Creek, and Robert Del Grande from Houston. They kept meeting and cooking together, and what came out of those dinners was the formal recognition that New Texas Cuisine was a thing — not a trend, not a gimmick, but a legitimate culinary identity rooted in a specific place. That group became known as the Gang of Five. Routh Street Cafe was where the conversation started.
The Dallas Morning News gave it five stars. Courvoisier’s Book of the Best named it the fifth best restaurant in the United States. It ran on most national lists of the top 25 restaurants in America for the better part of a decade. In 1990, while at Routh Street, Pyles received the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southwest — the first James Beard award ever given to a chef in the Southwest, a detail worth sitting with. He was not just winning an award for himself. He was putting a region on the map that the foundation had not previously thought to look at.
He closed Routh Street in 1993, a casualty of the recession and the overhead that comes with running a restaurant at that level for a decade. Food & Wine had a six-page feature scheduled to run the month after it closed that had to be scrapped. That is the type of timing that reminds you how arbitrary the ending of a great restaurant can be.
Star Canyon opened the following year at The Centrum on Oak Lawn and Cedar Springs, and it took the argument Routh Street had been making and amplified it to a national audience. The James Beard Foundation named it one of the top five new restaurants in America the year it opened. The Bone-In Cowboy Ribeye with its pinto bean and wild mushroom ragout and the pile of red chile onion rings became the dish that food writers cited when they tried to explain what New Texas Cuisine actually meant. The lobster tamale pie. The prickly pear margarita. Mick Jagger came. Jon Bon Jovi. Kevin Costner. Bill Gates. Three cookbooks. An Emmy-winning PBS series. Spinoffs in Las Vegas and Austin. A generation of Dallas chefs who came through those kitchens and went on to build their own restaurants, their own versions of the idea that Texas food deserved the same rigor and attention as anything being done in New York or San Francisco or Paris.
The restaurants kept coming, each one a different expression of the same restless intelligence. The eponymous Stephan Pyles restaurant on Ross Avenue downtown, where he opened a four-seat, twelve-course tasting menu at the ceviche bar in front of a wood-burning oven — named the most exciting dining experience in Dallas at the time by the Dallas Morning News. Then in 2009, Samar by Stephan Pyles in the Arts District, the restaurant that remains for many the most personal and transportive thing he ever built: international small plates drawn from his travels through Spain, India, and the eastern Mediterranean, blistered chiles with smoked salt, white gazpacho, chorizo with potatoes and fried egg and foie gras, tandoor chicken with butter masala, coconut fish curry, lamb pizza, veal tagine. The Dallas Morning News named it Restaurant of the Year. It was the kind of room that made you feel like you’d been somewhere without leaving the city, which is the best thing a restaurant can do.
The books ran alongside the restaurants the entire time. The New Texas Cuisine came first — 150 recipes drawn from the Routh Street years, the book that gave the movement a text. Then Tamales, co-authored, then New Tastes from Texas as the companion to the Emmy-winning PBS series of the same name. Then Southwestern Vegetarian in 2001. Four books that together form the most complete record of what New Texas Cuisine actually was and where it came from.
Pyles has kept cooking through all of it — through Stampede 66 and Flora Street Cafe, which he closed on January 2, 2020 when he retired from restaurant ownership, and then at The Seeker inside a restored 1960s motor hotel in Stephenville, an hour southwest of Fort Worth, where he served what he called his greatest hits to people who make the drive on purpose. He is, by any honest measure, the most important figure in the history of Dallas food. Routh Street Cafe is where that history began.
Some restaurants feed a neighborhood. Some feed a city. Routh Street Cafe fed a city’s idea of itself, and Dallas has been eating off that for forty years.
