The Lone Star Dinner Series has been running for two years. Austin’s Hestia launched it as a way to bring acclaimed Texas kitchens into its live-fire dining room for one-night collaborative dinners — a chef swap concept that sounds simple and is actually quite difficult to execute well. In two years of doing it, the series had never included a Dallas restaurant. That changes on July 21, when Mamani chef Christophe De Lellis takes his kitchen to Austin for an evening that most serious Texas food people have already marked on their calendar.
Mamani earned its Michelin star 48 days after opening in September 2025 — one of the fastest climbs to recognition in the guide’s Texas history — and has since become the most talked-about table in Dallas. De Lellis, a Paris native who spent nearly a decade leading the kitchen at Restaurant Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas, named the restaurant after his Italian grandmother and built a bistronomie menu around the French and Italian Riviera cooking that shaped him. Michelin described what they found in three phrases: top-drawer ingredients, faultless technique, and world-class sauces. The last phrase is the one that matters most when you’re talking about a French kitchen at this level.
Hestia’s kitchen runs on live fire. De Lellis’s runs on classical French technique and sauce work. The combination on July 21 is going to be worth the drive to Austin — a one-night menu built between two chefs who approach the same ingredients from completely different angles. “The Lone Star Series allows us to tighten our relationship with other Michelin-starred restaurants in Texas,” says Hestia chef de cuisine Paul Wensel. “It’s just fun to bring other chefs into our space for one night and do a different style of service. Our team loves it.”
Menus for the evening haven’t been announced yet. Reservations are through Hestia directly at hestiaaustin.com. July 21 is a Monday and it will book out — this is a single seating, one night only, and the kind of dinner that doesn’t come back around. If Mamani has been on your list and you haven’t made it yet, the restaurant is at 2681 Howell Street in Uptown Dallas, open nightly from 5 p.m. Reservations on OpenTable. (469) 455-1435.
The Michelin Guide described what they found in three phrases: top-drawer ingredients, faultless technique, and world-class sauces. That last one is the one that means something. Sauce is how you measure a French chef — it’s the thing that can’t be faked or rushed, the part that takes a decade to understand and another decade to master. De Lellis spent his formative years in kitchens where the sauce was the whole conversation, and it shows. The Dover sole with brown butter is the dish that the inspectors cited by name. The veal Cordon Bleu with Robuchon’s signature pommes purée — the same silky, butter-saturated potato that made Robuchon famous — is the dish that puts De Lellis’s résumé in context. The Paris-Brest with praline cream is the close, quiet and complete the way great pastry always is.
Eight months in, Mamani won Restaurant of the Year at the 2026 CultureMap Dallas Tastemaker Awards. The reservations have stayed where they went after Michelin called. This summer, on July 21, De Lellis takes his kitchen to Austin for a one-night collaboration with Hestia as part of the Lone Star Dinner Series — the first time that series has ever invited a Dallas restaurant. All of that happened in less than a year from opening night.
What De Lellis and owners Brandon and Henry Cohanim built at The Quad is not a special occasion restaurant, even if it has become one for a lot of people. The bistronomie format — the ambition of fine dining, the feel of a neighborhood room — means you can eat there on a Tuesday without ceremony and the food will still be what it is. That’s the harder thing to achieve than a Michelin star, and they seem to understand that.
Open Monday through Thursday 5 to 9:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday until 10 p.m., Sunday until 9 p.m. Reservations on OpenTable. (469) 455-1435.
