Lions Den marks chef Michael White’s first restaurant in Texas, and he picked a location with real weight behind it. White has held five Michelin stars at once across his career and earned multiple three-star reviews from The New York Times, credentials that made his Dallas debut genuine news in a city that doesn’t see a chef of his caliber arrive often. The restaurant opened May 7 inside The Stoneleigh, the Uptown Dallas hotel that first opened in 1923 and just came out of a $20 million renovation under Marriott’s Autograph Collection.
White built his name running Altamarea Group and its flagship Marea in New York before launching his own hospitality company, BBianco, in 2020 with partner Bruce Bronster, opening restaurants since in Coral Gables, the Bahamas, San Juan, and New York. Lions Den is the first time that résumé has touched Texas.
The design leans directly into the Stoneleigh’s history. Lions Den is built around the glamour of Dorothy Draper’s bold, maximalist design style, marbled stone, inlaid wood, patterned wallpaper, filtered through a contemporary lens rather than a straight period recreation. The room is meant to shift character with the day: bright and open for breakfast service, then darker and moodier once evening sets in. White has described the concept as anchored in Italian tradition but reimagined through Dallas’s own character rather than imported wholesale.
Breakfast runs on classics done with real technique: omelets, ricotta pancakes, and challah French toast, alongside two versions of eggs Benedict, one topped with mortadella and another built around lobster. It’s a serious morning menu for a hotel restaurant, not an afterthought before the real cooking starts at dinner.
Dinner is where White’s coastal Italian instincts take over. Starters include caviar with crème fraîche and potato chip, a simple mushroom toast, and a classic Caesar salad alongside White’s lobster burrata, a dish that’s followed him across multiple restaurants and menus over the years for good reason. The pasta course runs deep: gnocchi, garganelli with prosciutto and English peas, agnolotti with oxtail and leeks, a mushroom risotto, bucatini with clams, a bucatini with crab and Calabrian chili, and a straightforward tagliatelle with ragù Bolognese for anyone who wants the classic done properly rather than reinvented.
The menu leans seafood-forward beyond the pasta course too, with a grilled Branzino and a classic preparation of Dover sole bathed in brown butter and lemon both anchoring the fish side of the menu.
For the table willing to go big, two dishes are built specifically for sharing: a surf and turf pairing filet mignon with langostino, and a Porterhouse Two Ways, tartare de manzo and strip loin served alongside a baked potato and a tableside egg preparation. Dessert runs to seven options, including an olive oil cake, a soft-serve ice cream, and a tiramisu built large enough to actually share rather than the single-portion version most Italian restaurants default to.
The cocktail program gets its own real identity too, with signatures like the Sicilian Iced Tea, the Venetian Margarita, and the Martini D’Oro anchoring the bar list. For larger groups, a private dining room tucked off the main restaurant seats up to 26 and comes with its own prix fixe menu, sommelier service, and a private sound system.
Next door, the same hotel renovation brought in Bar Leonessa, a companion concept from the same BBianco team that runs as a daylight café serving artisanal coffee and European pastries before shifting into a nocturnal cocktail lounge once the sun goes down, giving the Stoneleigh a second, lower-key option alongside Lions Den’s full dining room.
Lions Den is located at 2927 Maple Avenue on the first floor of The Stoneleigh, open daily from 6:30 to 11 a.m. for breakfast and again from 11:30 a.m., with dinner service running until 10 p.m. most nights and 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Management at Brookfield’s Real Estate Group, which owns the property, has described the reimagined Stoneleigh as reclaiming its place as a cultural landmark for Uptown, and putting a chef of White’s caliber behind the stove is a serious statement of intent for a hotel that’s spent recent years out of the city’s dining conversation.
