Radici opened in Farmers Branch in May of 2024, and it did not take long for people to notice. Within a year, Radici Wood Fired Grill was named the No. 2 restaurant in the entire state of Texas by Texas Monthly, a wild jump for a restaurant that had only just found its footing. Now, in the middle of a Dallas summer, Chef Tiffany Derry and her T2D Concepts partner Tom Foley are adding two new events to the calendar that give a good sense of why the place has resonated the way it has.
Radici means roots in Italian, and the name is not just branding. Derry spent six years working in Italian kitchens before she ever opened her acclaimed Roots Southern Table down the street, and when she and Foley started talking about a second concept, she asked him about his own upbringing. Foley grew up with an Italian mother and an Irish father, and by his own telling, his mother’s Italian cooking always won out at the dinner table. Radici became a way to honor that, built around a wood-fired grill and fresh pasta made daily, with a menu that shifts with the seasons instead of sitting still.
Derry is no stranger to a spotlight. She placed fifth and won fan favorite on Top Chef season seven, and Roots Southern Table earned her a James Beard finalist nod. But Radici has become its own thing entirely, and the two events landing this summer show a restaurant comfortable enough in what it does to open the kitchen up and let people in on it.
On Thursday, July 23, at 6pm, Radici Farmers Branch hosts a cocktail making class led personally by Foley. Guests get a real look at how T2D builds out its cocktail program, from the martinis and negronis to Derry’s own go-to, an Aperol spritz, then make two signature drinks themselves with light bites served alongside. It is a small-group, hands-on evening, not a lecture.
The following week, on Thursday, July 30, at 6pm, Radici hosts a wine dinner with the McBride Sisters. Sisters Robin and Andréa McBride grew up an ocean apart, Robin in Monterey, California and Andréa in New Zealand, each unaware the other existed until their father connected them as teenagers. They founded their wine company in 2005 with no outside investors, working their way into an industry where, at the time, Black-owned wineries made up a tiny fraction of the roughly eight thousand in the country. Two decades later, McBride Sisters is the largest Black-owned wine company in the United States. The Radici dinner pairs a four-course meal with the sisters’ reserve wines, a rare chance to taste that story glass by glass.
Radici’s monthly Sunday Supper also returns August 2 at 5:30pm, as it does the first Sunday of every month. It is the most unpretentious thing on the calendar, a family-style spread built around the kind of Italian Sunday dinner Foley grew up eating, plates passed around a shared table rather than set in front of each guest.
Reservations for all three are recommended and can be made through radiciwoodfiregrill.com. Radici Farmers Branch is at 12990 Bee Street. A second location opened last year at EpicCentral in Grand Prairie, 2979 S. State Highway 161, for anyone on that side of the Metroplex looking to try it closer to home.
