Night Rooster has had several months now to settle into its spot on the ground floor at 1000 N. Riverfront Blvd. in the Design District, on the ground floor below Hooper Hospitality’s Italian steakhouse The Saint. The early buzz has worn off, the reviews have rolled in, and the picture that’s emerged is a restaurant that’s very good at some things and still finding its footing on others.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Wu Wei Din Chinese Cuisine started in a tiny Plano storefront around 2016, opened by Taiwan native Todd Hung with a singular focus: bring the wontons, noodles, and dumplings of his home island to North Texas the way they’re actually made there, not the Americanized version most diners had come to expect from Chinese food in the suburbs.
It worked well enough that the original location outgrew itself. Wu Wei Din has since expanded to Lewisville, with a Fort Worth location set to open in July 2026, evidence that Hung’s bet on serving genuinely authentic Taiwanese and Shanghainese cooking paid off far beyond that first small dining room.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Cafe Hunan started as Hunan Express, a small operation that opened in Uptown Dallas in 1998 during the neighborhood’s first real wave of growth. Nearly three decades later, it’s grown into a small local chain with locations near SMU and off Forest Park Road in the Medical District, and it’s built its reputation less on flash than on the kind of consistency that gets a restaurant quietly recommended by the exact people who’d know: local chefs who order delivery on their nights off.
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Chinese-Mexican fusion sounds like a joke until you understand where it comes from. In the late 1800s, Chinese laborers working on the railroads and in the mines of northern Mexico put down roots rather than returning home. Over generations they built communities — in Mexicali, in Sonora, in Baja California — and their food blended with the Mexican cooking around them in ways that produced something completely its own. Birria and dim sum. Chile heat and wok smoke. Tacos with fillings nobody in either tradition had tried before. It’s a genuine culinary history, and most people in Texas have never encountered it.
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A new Chinese restaurant opened on Preston Road in March and it’s already one of the more interesting things to happen to North Dallas dining in a while. It’s called Uptown Dumpling, and the chef running the kitchen — Hao Wenjie — has cooked at a level most people in this city have never encountered.
Chef Hao is a UNESCO Ambassador of Intangible Culinary Heritage. He personally led three China Day banquets at UN Headquarters in New York, events the Los Angeles Times once called an edible cultural white paper. He was part of the founding team behind the Michelin Guide’s launch in Beijing and holds accreditation as a judge with the World Association of Chefs Societies. He ended up at 18101 Preston Rd., Suite 204c, in a strip mall space that used to be Tian Tian. Dallas does things like that.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Photos & Article by Joey Stewart
At Lulu Modern Chinese, the room hits you first. A long bar runs the length of the space, stacked floor to ceiling with bottles and softly backlit like a display case, with three large TVs above it. It feels polished without feeling stiff. You can sit there and not feel pushed out.
The dining room opens up from there with curved banquettes, marble tables, and a ceiling full of geometric panels and hanging lights that give the space some movement. Booths line the windows, while the center of the room carries a little more energy. It’s modern and clearly thought through, but not overdesigned.
Continue readingFiled under Joey Stewart
Most people come up Grant Avenue. That’s the Chinatown tourists know — painted lanterns, souvenir shops, roast duck hanging in windows. Brandon Jew moved the entrance to his restaurant around the corner before he ever opened it, tucking the door into Waverly Place, a narrow alley that runs parallel to Grant and feels like a completely different city. Quieter. More lived in. The street where old men sit outside in folding chairs and the shops are for people who actually live here, not people passing through. You have to mean it a little to find Mister Jiu’s. That was the idea.
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From the team behind The Saint, Hooper Hospitality Concepts introduces Night Rooster, a modern Chinese restaurant in the Design District that feels considered rather than hurried. After a long-anticipated arrival, it lands with confidence—polished, intimate, and distinctly its own despite sharing an address with its sibling concept.
The room, designed by Greg O’Neal, leans into mood without excess: low light, deep reds, and restrained gold create a space that feels quietly cinematic. The dining room reveals itself just beyond the bar, tucked behind drapery, adding a sense of arrival that matches the experience.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
