Tag Archives: Bishop Arts

Trapèze Brings a Bohemian French Brasserie to a Rebuilt Bishop Arts Bungalow

From the sidewalk on West 8th Street, the house at 240 still looks like what it is: a 1940s bungalow on a quiet block in Bishop Arts. Behind the porch, it is something else entirely now. The structure had to be rebuilt from the ground up, and because the lot sits inside a conservation district, the crew had to do it without changing the face the neighborhood has known for decades.

That house is about to become Trapèze, a French bar and restaurant from Peter Novotny and Dan Murry, the partners behind Ruins and Armoury D.E. in Deep Ellum. Their third project lands six miles southwest of the other two, and the reason has as much to do with history as real estate.

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Pillar Closes in Bishop Arts After Less Than Two Years

Pillar, chef Peja Krstic’s bistro in the Bishop Arts District, is gone after less than two years. It closed on September 30, the same day its landlord locked the doors.

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A Perfect Sunday Afternoon in Bishop Arts: Where to Eat, Shop and Drink

Sunday in Bishop Arts moves at its own speed. Dogs outnumber cars on some blocks, every patio seems to have a spritz on it, and around 2 o’clock you can hear a brass band before you can see it. Nobody is in a hurry, and that is exactly the right way to do it.

Here is how to spend an easy Sunday in the neighborhood, with a few places to eat at different price points, a couple of stops for shopping, and the best spots for a drink. Wear comfortable shoes. Everything here is walkable, which is the whole reason Oak Cliff folks guard this place like a family recipe.

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Whisk Crêpes Café’s Bishop Arts Home Is Worth the Trip

Most crepe menus hand you a finished idea and expect you to accept it. Whisk hands you the whole kitchen instead.

Julien Eelsen grew up in Paris, where crepes were as ordinary as a street snack and as elevated as a real sit-down dinner, depending on where you got them. He wanted Dallas to have both versions in one place, so he opened Whisk Crêpes Café in 2015. A decade later, the concept has outgrown its first address twice over. Whisk started in Sylvan Thirty, moved to Bishop Arts in early 2025, and has since spread well past Dallas, with locations now open in Nashville’s Assembly Food Hall and Plano’s Legacy Food Hall.

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Sketches of Spain Just Closed, and The Wild Detectives Is Taking Over the Space

Sketches of Spain served its last pintxo on July 19, closing the book on six years as Oak Cliff’s only pincho bar. The Bishop Arts spot built its following on Basque-style small plates meant to be pierced with a toothpick and shared across a table: patatas bravas, boquerones, ham and cheese croquettes, quail egg-topped chorizo, and a paella that regulars treated as the closest thing to a trip to Spain available in Dallas. The send-off came the Sunday before closing, an informal goodbye party where $20 bought unlimited pintxos and a glass of sangria alongside, presumably, a lot of stories about the place.

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Inside The Wild Detectives, the Oak Cliff House That Turned Books and Booze into a Dallas Institution

Javier García del Moral and Paco Vique met as civil engineers, which is not the résumé line most people would guess for the two men behind Dallas’s most quietly influential bookstore. Both are Spanish, both landed in Texas separately, del Moral in Austin in 2008 and Vique in Dallas a year later, and both carried the same memory from home: Tipos Infames, a bookstore and wine bar in Madrid where literature and drinking shared the same room without either one feeling like an afterthought. When del Moral moved to Dallas in 2011, the two friends started planning a version of that idea for Oak Cliff, and on February 28, 2014, The Wild Detectives opened its doors in a 1940s Craftsman house on West 8th Street, just off the edge of Bishop Arts.

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Bastille Day in Bishop Arts Looks Different This Year — Here’s the Plan

Every July 14, Bishop Arts remembers something most of Dallas has forgotten: this city has French roots. Real ones. In the 1850s, about 350 French, Swiss, and Belgian settlers crossed an ocean to build a utopian colony called La Reunion on the west bank of the Trinity, just across from what would become downtown. The utopia part didn’t take — farming socialists and North Texas summers were never going to get along — but the settlers scattered into the young city and left their mark. Reunion Tower carries the colony’s name to this day.

So, when Oak Cliff throws a Bastille Day party, it isn’t borrowing someone else’s holiday. It’s celebrating the neighborhood’s own origin story.

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The Best Patio in Dallas This Weekend Is at Paradiso in Bishop Arts

If you are going to spend a Saturday afternoon in Dallas in July, you want shade, something cold in your hand, food that encourages you to stay, and a room that doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard. Paradiso in Bishop Arts checks every one of those boxes and then keeps going.

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