Most people in Dallas have walked past The Crescent, looked up at that postcard Uptown skyline, and assumed whatever is happening on the 17th floor of the office tower is none of their business. They are mostly right. The Crescent Club sits up there in the manner of a private club from another era — hardwood floors, deep wood paneling, panoramic views over the Dallas skyline — and on a normal day it is open only to members and hotel guests. Mother’s Day is not a normal day.
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Sophia Adisson is not a chef by training. She spent years working as a project manager, and she will tell you that freely. Her mother owned restaurants in Haiti, and Adisson grew up in those kitchens — watching, cooking alongside her, learning what it meant to feed people well. She moved to Dallas in 2015 and eventually did something about it. Arôme, her restaurant in McKinney, is the result.
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East Dallas has been waiting on Serritella for a while now. The project was announced in 2024, was supposed to open in early 2025, then early 2026, and is still not open as of today. The co-owner confirmed to the Dallas Morning News recently that it’s delayed but still happening. Given what’s been planned for that corner of Skillman Street, it’s worth the wait.
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Kevin Ashade was born in Dallas, grew up in the U.K. and Nigeria, came back to Texas, went to the Culinary Institute of America, and spent years inside some of the most serious hotel dining rooms in the city — Nana at the Hilton Anatole, Craft at the W Hotel, The Oceanaire Seafood Room. He built a catering company called GourmEats. In 2016, he went on Beat Bobby Flay and beat Bobby Flay, with his coq au vin.
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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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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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There is a restaurant in Denton called Osteria Il Muro with 22 seats, a backyard garden, and a menu that changes every single day. It is one of the hardest reservations in North Texas. People set calendar alarms for the last Monday of each month — the one morning the next month’s tables are released — and still don’t always get in.
The chef who runs it is a James Beard finalist for Best Chef: Texas. His name is Scott Girling. Most of Dallas has never heard of him.
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Jackson Kalb was 13 years old the first time he walked into a real kitchen. Not his family’s kitchen — his parents, by his own admission, were not good home cooks. The kitchen he walked into was Mélisse in Santa Monica, a two-Michelin-star French restaurant, and he was there because a guest at one of his backyard catering gigs happened to know the chef. That chef was Josiah Citrin. He let the kid in.
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