Terra, the restaurant inside Eataly Dallas at NorthPark Center, is bringing back its Terra Takeover series, and this round pairs the Italian marketplace’s kitchen with one of Dallas’s most respected pastry programs. From July 25 through August 23, weekends only, Terra will host a limited-time brunch collaboration with Sugar & Sage Bakery, the University Park bakery that’s built a genuine following since opening in 2023.
The name behind that following is Jill Bates, Sugar & Sage’s executive pastry chef and the person most responsible for its reputation. Bates spent years working alongside Dean Fearing at Fearing’s inside the Ritz-Carlton and at The Mansion on Turtle Creek before Chad Houser tapped her to lead the pastry program at Café Momentum. When Alison and Ashley Weinstein, the mother-daughter team behind Sugar & Sage, were interviewing candidates for their new bakery’s pastry chef role, it was reportedly Bates’s salted chocolate chip cookie that closed the deal.
CraveDFW covered the bakery’s opening back in 2023, and Bates has only built on that early reputation since, developing the bakery’s menu alongside James Beard Award-winning chef Michael Laiskonis, the former head of the pastry program at New York’s three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin.
The Terra Takeover menu leans into that pedigree. The Brioche al Salmone pairs a scallion and cream cheese-filled brioche with Catsmo smoked salmon, capers, and frisée. The Danish alla Pesca layers peach, goat cheese, and thyme into a Danish, finished with fresh brûléed peaches and smoked vanilla gelato. A Mini Pastry Basket rounds out the sweeter end with miniature gluten-free banana bread, kouign amann, cinnamon roll, and pain au chocolat, while the Danish Uova e Bacon takes the savory route, Sugar & Sage’s own Danish topped with a wood-fired sunny-side egg, provolone, and double-smoked bacon.
It’s the kind of pairing that makes sense once you see it laid out. Eataly built its Dallas outpost, its seventh in the country, around the idea of shopping, eating, and learning under one roof, and the Terra Takeover series exists specifically to put Eataly’s kitchen in conversation with local talent rather than keeping its programming closed off to outside chefs. Bringing in someone with Bates’s résumé, and specifically her background in laminated dough and viennoiserie, gives Terra’s brunch service a different technical register than its usual Italian-leaning menu, without losing the wood-fired, marketplace feel that defines the space.
This isn’t Eataly Dallas’s first appearance on CraveDFW this year either. We recently did a look at all of Eataly Dallas here. The Sugar & Sage collaboration is a quieter, more intimate follow-up to that scale of event, built around two chefs and a five-week window rather than a citywide festival.
The collaboration brunch runs weekends only, July 25 through August 23, at Terra inside Eataly Dallas, 8687 N. Central Expy. in NorthPark Center. Reservations can be made through OpenTable under the “Experiences” tab.
