Mike Stites and Evan Pemberton met in 2017 in Stephan Pyles’ kitchen at Flora Street Cafe. Stites had come up from Corpus Christi the year before to go to culinary school and work for Wolfgang Puck. Pemberton grew up in Dallas and already had plenty of miles on his knives. The two became friends, and over time the friendship settled into something closer to mentor and student.
In 2019 they moved to Chicago together to cook at Roister, the Alinea Group’s open-hearth restaurant in Fulton Market. A year later they went their separate ways.
Stites came home and ran kitchens at Gemma and Carte Blanche before becoming chef de cuisine under Ross Demers at Cry Wolf on Gaston Avenue. Pemberton stayed in Chicago, where his résumé grew to include The Aviary and Alinea under Grant Achatz. His résumé also includes time cooking for Tyson Cole, and he has been in professional kitchens for 21 years.
They kept in touch the whole time and eventually started planning a restaurant of their own, which carried the working name Holy Ghost for a while. It became Midcult Society, and it is now set to open in late November at 841 Exposition Ave. in Exposition Park.
When we first wrote about Midcult in June, the plan was a summer opening, timed to catch the World Cup crowds around Fair Park. The chefs said then that they would not rush the buildout to hit a date. They meant it. Summer came and went, and the opening moved to the end of the year.
The restaurant takes over the former RAYO Bar and Lounge space on the corner of Parry and Exposition, which closed in February. The room seats about 70. Midcult is a project of Free Lunch Hospitality.
The cooking starts with the Southern food Stites and Pemberton grew up eating and runs it through everything they picked up in Dallas and Chicago. The restaurant describes it as “familiar flavors in an unfamiliar way,” and that is a fair summary of what they have been serving at pop-ups this year.
At a dinner this summer at Overeasy, the diner inside The Statler, the menu included charbroiled oysters with Oaxaca queso and chorizo butter, coconut buttermilk biscuits with uni butter and ember honey, Viet-Cajun caramelized prawns, and a half chicken with hot sauce and citrus jus. Those were pop-up dishes, and the opening menu has not been released, but they give a good sense of where the kitchen’s head is.
Stites has been open about what he is chasing. “I’ve felt like there’s been a Cry Wolf-shaped hole in Dallas dining for a while,” he said earlier this year. He has also been clear that Midcult is not meant to be a copy of the old place. It is bigger, for one, and the chefs want it to work as a regular neighborhood hangout as much as a special night out.
“This is going to be creative and fun and inventive and maybe a little weird,” Stites said. “And we think it will be the only place in the city where you can get this kind of food.”
The timing puts Midcult in good company. Just down the block at 820 Exposition, Matt McCallister is also aiming for November with River Sing, his tasting-menu restaurant inside the 1928 building that once housed Dallas’ General Motors Truck and Coach showroom. That puts two ambitious new kitchens on the same short stretch of Exposition Avenue, a block from Fair Park, both targeting the same month. Back in the spring, Stites and Pemberton said they hoped Midcult would be the first of several new restaurants in that corner of the neighborhood, and the block is already starting to fill in.
If you want a taste before the doors open, the pair is scheduled to cook at Chefs for Farmers on Nov. 7. Opening-date news will come first on Instagram at @midcultsociety.
Midcult Society, 841 Exposition Ave., Dallas. Opening late November.
