Wyl Lima grew up in Keene, Texas, which is not a place most people have heard of. It’s a small town built around Southwestern Adventist University, a school that draws students from over a hundred countries. Lima was born in Angola, moved to Texas at ten, and spent his formative years eating food that had nothing to do with what was on most Dallas menus — flavors from Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, South America, all of it cycling through a neighborhood that looked nothing like it from the outside.
He went to Chicago to learn technique. Michelin-starred Temporis, where he worked as chef de cuisine, gave him the structure. What he’d grown up eating gave him the instinct. When he came back to Dallas, first at Sister and then at The Charlotte, those two things finally got to work together in the same kitchen.
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