Matt McCallister’s River Sing Opens This Month Behind a Garden Wall in Expo Park.

Matt McCallister’s new restaurant is almost ready, and the way in is through a garden.

River Sing is set to open in late November at 820 Exposition Ave., a block from Fair Park in Exposition Park. It fills part of a 1928 building that once held a General Motors truck showroom and service bays. The front of an old service room is now a walled garden. Guests walk through it to reach the dining room, and after dinner they can come back out and linger over a drink.

The restaurant is small on purpose. It seats about two dozen people, most of them at a counter facing the open kitchen. The crew is tiny too, and the cooks are expected to bring many of the courses out themselves.

Dinner will be a four-course tasting menu built around Texas farmers, ranchers and foragers, served five nights a week. There’s also a cookbook library and a wine room. In a preservation room, the kitchen makes its own pickles, vinegars, misos and dried ingredients.

The name comes from the Grateful Dead song “Brokedown Palace” and its line about the river singing. McCallister has said plainly that this isn’t a Grateful Dead restaurant. The name is about the music and the moments that pushed him toward cooking in the first place, and the dinner is meant to carry some of that.

For anyone who has followed Dallas dining since the early 2010s, this one matters. McCallister opened FT33 in the Design District in 2012, and its farm-driven cooking put him on the national radar and earned him James Beard recognition. Filament in Deep Ellum came next, then Homewood, then UnaVida in West Village. Over the past few years he has kept a lower profile. River Sing is his return to cooking the way he likes to cook, in a room built around it.

He brought back a familiar face, too. Chris Morina, his second in command at Homewood, is working alongside him again, and the kitchen picks up where Homewood left off: local, seasonal, and closely tied to whoever is growing the best things in North Texas that week.

The rest of the country is paying attention. Food & Wine put River Sing on its national list of the most anticipated restaurant openings this fall.

Exposition Park is having a good year. Midcult Society is also on its way to the neighborhood, and the stretch of Exposition Avenue that empties out when the Fair closes is turning into a reason to drive over on a weeknight.

Reservations haven’t opened yet, and with seats this scarce they won’t last long once they do. Watch River Sing’s social accounts for the date. CraveDFW will be back with a first look once the doors open.

River Sing is at 820 Exposition Ave., Suite 1, Dallas.

Chef Matt discusses foraging in a past Crave article.