Every so often somebody opens a restaurant in Dallas that has no comparison point, nothing to measure it against, and you find yourself explaining it to friends in fragments. Punk Noir, which opened June 2 in the Design District, is one of those. Twenty courses.Multiple rooms. A Mistress of Ceremonies. Graffiti on the walls and Kaluga caviar on the plates. It should not work. Early word is that it does.
Start with the chef, because the chef is the reason to take any of this seriously. RJ Cooper won the James Beard Award for Best Chef Mid-Atlantic in 2007 during his seven-year run at Vidalia in Washington, D.C. He then built an entire restaurant, Rogue 24, around a 24-course tasting menu, back when almost nobody in America was doing that. Nashville got him next, at Saint Stephen and Acqua. He has been refining this long-form style of cooking for well over a decade, and Punk Noir’s twenty courses are not a stunt for him. They are the format he knows best.
The restaurant belongs to John McKeel and his sons Cole and Clay, Dallas natives who ate their way through Michelin-starred rooms in Europe and Japan and kept having the same reaction: remarkable food, joyless rooms. Punk Noir is their answer, 9,500 square feet of Design District warehouse carved into a progression. The evening starts in a communal dining room with projection-mapped visuals and graffiti, guided by that Mistress of Ceremonies. It moves to an open kitchen where Cooper hands over select courses himself.
Then comes a dining room hung with chandeliers and Michael Shellis’s oversized punk canvases, formal and irreverent at once. The night can end there, or in the Noir Lounge up front, where bar manager Shane Scully runs a cocktail tasting of his own, drinks arriving clarified, frozen, aerated, and gelled until the line between drink and dish gives up entirely. There is even a car service option that delivers guests up a private ramp through an unmarked entrance, which is either theater or noir, depending on your mood.
The menu changes often, but it opens with what the kitchen calls an agrarian prologue, working through soil and root and garden before turning to the sea. Recent courses have included blue crab with seaweed and calamansi, scallop with turmeric and Kaluga caviar, camote morado with huitlacoche, cod cheek with dashi, Peking duck, and Australian wagyu, before closing on pairings designed to raise an eyebrow, white chocolate with kombu and sunchoke with ash among them. Chef de cuisine Jay Vopatek, formerly of Rye, keeps the machine precise, and pastry chef Rachel Maykut, an Uchi alum, handles the landing. The wine list, overseen by general manager and sommelier John D’Alexander, whose resume runs through Everest, Grace, and Les Nomades, leans on Champagne, Burgundy, the Loire, and California without turning into a trophy case.
A few practical matters, because this is not a walk-in kind of place. Seatings are limited, roughly two dozen guests at a time, and the kitchen asks diners to arrive thirty minutes early so the progression starts together. Strong fragrances are discouraged. Vegan menus and certain severe allergies can’t be accommodated, so call ahead if that matters. The lounge offers a shorter tasting for anyone who wants a look without committing the whole evening.
Punk Noir is at 139 Turtle Creek Blvd., Suite 130, in the Design District. Reservations are through Tock.
Whether Dallas needed a twenty-course tasting menu with graffiti is a fair question. But the Michelin Guide changed what this city’s diners will sit still for, and Cooper has spent his career proving that a long menu can be a story rather than an endurance test. Dallas has never had a restaurant quite like this one. Now it does, and finding out what that means is the fun part.
