From the outside, there’s almost nothing marking what’s happening inside Scilla. Duro Hospitality has built its reputation on rooms that reveal themselves slowly, and its newest restaurant, set into the ground floor of the new 8111 Douglas office tower at Preston Center, keeps that habit intact.
Duro partners Corbin and Ross See designed the space as two connected dining rooms sharing one central bar. One side runs louder and more theatrical, the other quieter, both pulled together with upholstered walls and hand-painted murals. One ceiling carries a piece called “Eight Mermaids Beyond Nature,” painted by Dallas artist Kyle Steed. It’s the group’s first restaurant this close to Preston Center, a neighborhood better known for boutiques and business lunches than for the destination dining Duro built its name on with The Charles and Mister Charles a few miles south.
The kitchen is led by chef J Chastain, an alum of the Mansion on Turtle Creek and Stephan Pyles, with executive chef Brendan Frankel running the line day to day. The menu moves through courses meant to be shared. It opens with cicchetti, small plates like gnocco fritto with prosciutto and tomato jam, lobster arancini with curry aioli, and an Ossetra caviar pizza finished tableside with generous spoonfuls of roe.
From there it moves into raw and chilled dishes. The hamachi crudo comes dressed in meyer lemon kosho, finger lime, and bergamot limoncello vinaigrette, one of the kitchen’s more technical plates. The toro crudo pairs a generous cut of tuna with tomato tartare, yuzu vinaigrette, and oregano. Pastas tend to be where Duro restaurants earn their reputation, and the rigatoni alla Zozzona has become one of the more talked-about dishes on this menu, built on a pancetta ragù finished with carbonara espuma. A sweet corn cappelletti topped with Ossetra caviar and meyer lemon sits alongside it.
The wood grill closes out the menu with a whole red snapper, a branzino served with artichokes and muhammara pesto, a grass-fed Wagyu ribeye finished with salumi sugo and pickled mustard seed, and za’atar lamb kabobs. Chastain has named paella di mare his personal favorite on the menu. It’s also Duro’s first paella after years of large-format, wood-fired mains across the rest of the group’s restaurants. For dessert, the Scillian lemon cheesecake is the plate most people bring up on their way out.
The wine list changes daily, pulling from Italy, France, and a library selection out of Napa. Cocktails run from spritzes to sours to a granita finished tableside. Most of the menu, food and drink alike, is built around the idea that people will come back more than once, not just for one big occasion. A business lunch on a Tuesday works the same way a Friday dinner does.
The name itself has two sources. Scilla is a real fishing village on Italy’s Calabrian coast, perched over the Strait of Messina, tied to the Greek myth of Scylla and Charybdis. It’s also a family name. Scilla was what Duro founding partner Chas Martin’s father called his mother, Priscilla. The mythology shows up in the drama of the design. The family history is harder to see, but it’s there in how much care went into the whole project.
