Bastille Day arrives Tuesday, July 14, and while Dallas will not be storming any prisons, we can honor the occasion the way the French would prefer: at the table, unhurried, with a glass of something cold and no particular plans afterward.
The French do not eat the way we do. Lunch is an event, not a refueling stop. Cheese comes before dessert, not instead of it. Dinner starts late and ends later. If you want to celebrate properly this week, pick one of the spots below and give it the two hours it deserves.
Start with Parigi, which has been holding down Oak Lawn since the mid-1980s, longer than some of its regulars have been alive. Chef Janice Provost took over in 2001 and has run it ever since as the neighborhood bistro every neighborhood wishes it had. The menu changes with the seasons and leans on local farmers, but the French bones never move. Order the escargot with a warm baguette, follow with whatever the kitchen is doing that week, and finish with an espresso on the patio. That is how they do it in the 6th arrondissement, and it works just as well at 3311 Oak Lawn Avenue.
For the full Provençal treatment, drive north to Lavendou at 19009 Preston Road, where Pascal Cayet has been serving the lighter cooking of Southern France since 1996. Cayet is the real article, born in Argenteuil, trained in Paris, and a Dallas fixture since he opened the much-missed Chez Gerard on McKinney Avenue back in 1984. The baguette alone justifies the trip. Add the sole almondine, a bowl of lobster bisque, and a Burgundy from a list that takes its regions seriously. The staff speaks French, the owner works the room, and for two hours Preston Road disappears entirely.
Stay on Preston Road and you will find the man actually throwing a party for the fourteenth. Jean-Marie Cadot grew up in a Paris family that has been in the restaurant, hotel, and bakery business since the 1700s, started working in his father’s bakery at age eight, and apprenticed at Lasserre, the storied Michelin-starred dining room overlooking the Champs-Élysées. His Cadot Restaurant at 18111 Preston Road is hosting a special Bastille Day dinner on Tuesday, July 14, and the regular menu tells you everything about his training: duck terrine with pistachios and foie gras, escargots in Pernod garlic cream, Dover sole prepared to your taste, and a Grand Marnier soufflé from a chef who holds pastry degrees to go with the savory ones. There is live entertainment most nights, including a wandering accordion player, which on Bastille Day is not a gimmick. It is a requirement.
Then there is Rise nº1 in Inwood Village, which built an entire restaurant around the one dish most home cooks fear. Hedda Dowd and chef Cherif Brami opened the salon de soufflé in 2008, filled it with French antiques and vintage linens, and let the jambon and Gruyère soufflé do the talking. Regulars know to start with the marshmallow soup, a tomato bisque floated with tiny cheese soufflés that once caused a minor uprising when it briefly left the menu. Save room for the chocolate soufflé, order a French wine flight, and understand why this room stays full at 5360 W. Lovers Lane.
If the soufflé is France’s high-wire act, the crêpe is its street food, and nobody in Dallas does it more honestly than Julien Eelsen. The Parisian-born chef opened Whisk Crêpes Café in 2015, built around the food he grew up eating, and last year moved the operation into Bishop Arts at 408 W. 8th Street, a relocation we covered when it happened. Order the buckwheat crêpe complète with egg, ham, and cheese the way they fold them in Brittany, then circle back for a Nutella crêpe or the pistachio-loaded Jourdain, and do not skip the espresso, pulled from a gleaming La Marzocco that Eelsen treats like a member of the family. For those north of LBJ, his second act, Whisk & Eggs, holds down a stall inside Legacy Food Hall at 7800 Windrose Avenue in Plano, putting a proper French crêpe within reach of a Tuesday lunch break.
Knox-Henderson gives you two ways to go. Toulouse at 3314 Knox Street has been pouring French-Belgian comfort since 2004, with steamed mussels, beignets, and a patio built for lingering right off the Katy Trail. Tuesday happens to be half-price wine bottle night, which means Bastille Day itself is a fine excuse for a second bottle of Bordeaux. The French would approve of the math.
A few blocks away sits Le Bilboquet at 4514 Travis Street, the Dallas outpost of the Upper East Side institution that opened in New York in 1986. Stephan Courseau brought it here in 2013 and built an empire around it, and the garden room remains one of the prettiest places in the city to eat steak tartare and drink Sancerre. This is French dining with the collar unbuttoned, elegant without the starch. Courseau’s Travis Street Hospitality now stretches across the neighborhood with the Michelin-recommended Knox Bistro and Georgie, so the wait at one door usually solves itself at another.
The group’s newest argument for France sits in Preston Center. Frenchie opened last summer at 8420 Preston Center Plaza in the space that housed Corner Bakery for over two decades, and it may be the most French thing Courseau has done yet: a true all-day brasserie. Chef Bruno Davaillon’s menu runs from morning croissants and crepes to quiche and salade Parisienne at lunch, then poulet rôti, steak frites, and profiteroles after dark. The wine list champions small French producers, and the freezer martini, bottled and pre-chilled in-house, arrives colder than a Parisian waiter’s opinion of your accent. Come July 14, this is the room built for lingering from breakfast straight through dinner.
If the occasion calls for the city’s biggest French statement, Uptown has it. Mamani opened at The Quad last summer and collected a Michelin star roughly two months later, the fastest anyone in Dallas has ever managed the trick. Executive chef Christophe De Lellis, a Parisian who ran the kitchen at Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas, cooks the food of the French and Italian Rivieras with the kind of technique that makes simple plates feel inevitable. The Dover sole in brown butter and the veal cordon bleu with Robuchon’s famously buttered pommes purée are the moves, and the Paris-Brest closes the argument. The restaurant is named for the owners’ grandmother, who split her life between Paris and the South of France, which explains why the room feels the way it does. Find it at 2681 Howell Street.
For romance, Old East Dallas holds the trump card. St. Martin’s Wine Bistro has been serving candlelight and Champagne-Brie soup since 1980, and after leaving its longtime Greenville Avenue home, it reopened at 4223 Bryan Street with the chandeliers, the white tablecloths, and the nightly live piano all intact. We covered the return in detail right here, and the short version is that the room still believes dinner is an occasion. Start with the soup, because everyone does, and let the piano do the rest.
Fort Worth holds the region’s most romantic argument of all. Saint-Emilion has occupied its little A-frame at 3617 W. 7th Street since March of 1985, when Bernard Tronche, who grew up in the Bordeaux village the restaurant is named for, decided Texas was home after all. The three-course menu changes seasonally, the seared duck breast has been the signature for four decades, and the wine cellar carries bottles from Tronche’s own corner of France. One note for planners: Saint-Emilion serves dinner only and is dark early in the week, so this one belongs to your weekend celebration. Book through Resy, because the room is small and the regulars are loyal.
However you spend the fourteenth, remember the one rule the French never break. Nobody asks for the check. It arrives when you ask, and not a moment before, because the table is yours for the evening. Vive la République, and pass the bread.
