For as long as Uchi has been in North Texas, getting in has meant a dinner reservation. That changes next month in Plano.
Uchiko Plano starts serving lunch on Friday, Nov. 6. It’s the first time any of Hai Hospitality’s Uchi restaurants in Dallas-Fort Worth, including Uchi and Uchibā Dallas, has opened its doors at midday. Lunch will run Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays only, from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
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Down in the lower levels of the W.T. Waggoner Building, the 20-story tower that has stood at 810 Houston St. in downtown Fort Worth since 1920, there is an old bank vault. When Musume moved in, the owners lined it with tatami and made it a private dining room. When the restaurant reopens in early November, that vault will still be there, intact, after nearly three years in which very little else down there was.
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Paul Ko was the head sushi chef at Uchi when he decided to leave. He’d been there since 2017, seven years in all, and he gave up that job to open a place with his name on it.
It took a while. Sushi Kozy ran into construction delays at 2000 Ross Ave. in the Arts District, and when it finally opened in the summer of 2025, there wasn’t much of an announcement. Four months later the Michelin Guide put it on the Texas list as a Recommended restaurant, which is a fast way to let people know you’re open.
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Uchiko Plano is running an eight-course prix fixe for DFW Restaurant Week, August 10 through September 7, and at $99 a person it’s one of the stronger values on this year’s list given what’s actually on the menu. Uchiko is chef Tyson Cole’s fire-and-smoke offshoot of Uchi, the James Beard-winning sushi restaurant that’s been anchoring Austin’s dining scene since 2003, and the Plano location at Legacy West has built its own following since opening in 2024 without losing the technique that made the original worth the drive.
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The Itoyama family has been making shabu shabu in Osaka for five generations. That is approximately 140 years of one family doing one thing, refining the same dipping sauces, sourcing the same quality of meat, and understanding something that most restaurants never figure out: that the cook at the table should be the guest, not the chef. When the family brought that tradition to DFW — first to Richardson in 2014, then to Plano in 2018 — they introduced a style of dining that most of this city had never encountered. A decade later, Yoshi Shabu Shabu is the standard by which every hot pot experience in North Texas gets measured.
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The Adolphus Hotel opened in 1912 and has been one of the defining addresses in downtown Dallas ever since — 114 years of history on Commerce Street, a Beaux-Arts façade with French Renaissance and Baroque detailing that still looks like nothing else in the city, and a dining legacy anchored by the French Room Bar, a sudden second place to the still closed formal French Room.
What most people don’t know is that there is now a second reason to go to the Adolphus for dinner, and it involves taking the elevator to the eighth floor, walking down a quiet hallway, and ringing a small brass doorbell next to a discreet plaque that reads “please ring bell for service.”
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Shohei Takamatsu died on April 26, 2026, just over a week before his 95th birthday, and the obituaries that followed described him correctly as a pioneer of Japanese cuisine in Dallas. What they couldn’t fully capture is the specific weight of that word in this context — what it actually meant, in practical terms, to open a serious Japanese restaurant in Dallas in 1973, and what grew from the seed he planted over the next three decades.
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The Mercury opened on Preston Road in 1998 and has been one of the most quietly consistent fine dining rooms in Dallas ever since. Chef Chris Ward — James Beard Rising Star Chef, CraveDFW’s Best Chef in Dallas, the first American Executive Chef at the Fairmont Hotel’s prestigious dining rooms — opened it, built a neighborhood following out of it, and has run it for nearly three decades without chasing trends or apologizing for what it is. “If I weren’t here, you wouldn’t know the difference,” Ward once said. His staff runs like a well-oiled machine. He just wants his customers to be happy.
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