Most Oak Lawn restaurants don’t make it to their fifth year. Parigi just hit 42. Not coasting on nostalgia, not trading on a legacy — actually cooking, actually full, actually relevant. That doesn’t happen without someone very good at the wheel.
Janice Provost was selling long-distance service in the late 1980s and early ’90s, cold-calling businesses across Dallas and Fort Worth, working her way up through a telecom career she was good at but never loved. The problem wasn’t the work ethic. It was that she’d close a deal and then lose control of the outcome. The product went out the door and what happened next was somebody else’s problem. After twelve years, she was done.
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