Élephante opens its doors in Uptown Dallas on September 1, and the whole idea behind it traces back to a rock. Back in the summer of 2014, Wish You Were Here Group founder Nicholas Mathers was traveling through Pantelleria, a small volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, when he came across a natural stone formation called the Arco dell’Elefante, a shape carved by wind and water that stretches out into the sea like an elephant reaching for a drink.
That image stuck with him. It became the name, and more than that, it became the whole feeling the restaurant has spent years trying to bottle: long afternoons, unhurried food, the particular kind of ease that only shows up when nobody’s checking a watch.
Mathers opened the first Élephante on a Santa Monica rooftop in 2018, then followed it with a Scottsdale location, and Dallas now becomes the third. When asked why Dallas specifically, Mathers pointed to how much the city’s dining scene has matured, noting that Dallas diners have developed a real appreciation for thoughtful design and complete hospitality experiences, not just good plates.
It’s a fair read of the city. Dallas has spent the last several years building exactly the kind of dining culture a concept like this was built to slot into.
The Dallas restaurant sits at 2701 Maple Avenue, right next door to Little Ruby’s, the group’s Australian-inspired cafe that opened at 23Springs earlier this year. Together the two restaurants fill out the ground level of a new Uptown office tower, and Élephante takes up the larger share of it: a two-story, roughly 9,800-square-foot space with an additional 1,250-square-foot patio, seating about 270 people inside and another 78 out.
That’s a lot of square footage for a restaurant built around the idea of staying put rather than turning tables, but Mathers designed it that way on purpose. He wants people to settle in longer than they planned and leave feeling better than when they walked in, whether they came for a casual lunch or a full night out.
Chef/Partner Thomas Lim runs the kitchen, and he’s not new to this kind of food. He got his start young, co-chefing a well-regarded Sydney restaurant called Duke in his early twenties before eventually landing in Los Angeles, where he cooked at Goldie’s and helped Mathers open the Greek-inspired Kassi Club before taking on Élephante.
He’s talked before about wanting European-style dining that leans on genuinely good produce rather than heavy technique, and that instinct carries through here. He describes the goal simply: capture the freshness of coastal southern Italian cooking while still feeling at home in Dallas, with a menu built for sharing rather than solo plates.
That shows up clearly in what’s coming out of the kitchen. Whipped eggplant arrives with warm oven-roasted puccia. The ricotta cavatelli comes with a pork fennel sausage ragù that’s already built a following at the other locations, and the vodka sauce canestri uses long-fermented, wood-fired dough made from a starter the kitchen has kept alive for more than three decades.
Grilled octopus gets dressed with hearts of palm, olives, capers, tangerine, and red onion, and the branzino comes with salsa verde butter and sea beans. While the core dishes travel between every Élephante location, Lim’s team builds Dallas-specific additions into the menu too, sourcing Italian specialty ingredients directly from Italy while leaning on local producers for fresh, seasonal produce.
The bar program leans on aperitivo culture, Italy’s tradition of the pre-dinner drink meant to open up the appetite rather than close out the night. Expect spritzes and handcrafted cocktails alongside a wine list that runs through multiple Italian regions, including limited-vintage bottles and private labels made exclusively for the group.
The room itself was designed in-house by Mathers and creative partner Monica Ruma, working alongside Texas-based Alter Design Architects to adapt the concept for a Dallas audience. The palette leans tactile and warm: rift-sawn white oak, travertine, honed marble, aged brass, blonde teak, leather, and hand-troweled stucco, threaded through with landscaping dense enough that the line between the dining room and the outdoors mostly disappears.
A dramatic curved staircase connects the two floors, and the bar sits underneath a canopy of illuminated wine bottles suspended above a sculptural oak and stone counter. The second floor opens onto a terrace built to feel like dining under a Mediterranean veranda, and every material in the building was chosen specifically because it ages well, meaning the space is meant to look better in five years than it does on opening night, not worse.
Élephante Dallas is open Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Friday from 11 a.m. to midnight, Saturday from 10 a.m. to midnight, and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Reservations are available through OpenTable, and the restaurant is located at 2701 Maple Avenue.
