Ray Washburne plucks a tortilla chip from the basket and holds it up like exhibit A.
“100 percent corn,” he says, like a man accustomed to winning.
We’re having lunch at Mi Cocina, the Mexican restaurant Washburne helped create, in the heart of Highland Park Village, the upscale shopping center he helped transform after buying it 15 years ago. We’re here to talk about Dallas — mostly, how to fix it — because few people fight as hard for this city as Washburne. Real-estate mogul, business developer, political fundraiser, he is quintessentially an idea man, forever trying to solve the riddle of how to make Dallas work. By the end of our two-hour conversation, he’ll sell me on moving El Centro College into the West End and filling mostly empty downtown high-rises with jails.
But first, he had to sell me on the chips.
“They’re made fresh in the back,” his pitch continued. “No wheat in them.”
I bite off the triangle tip, tilt my head. “It’s a sturdy chip,” I say, front-loading the positive.
I’ve never been a fan of the chips at Mi Cocina, an opinion I let slip upon first meeting Washburne earlier this summer. I prefer the decadence of a thick chip sprinkled with kosher salt, like a briny shovel that can pile-drive through guacamole.
“I wish it were salted,” I tell him.
Washburne waves this away. “You don’t want salt. It bloats you.”
I disagree, but Washburne is such a playfully combative conversationalist — disagreeing with him is part of the fun.
‘A great City of Oz’
Washburne started hustling at an early age. The fifth of six children, he had to make his bones somehow. A lawn-mowing business in grade school gave way to a newspaper that printed tales from his University Park neighborhood, a proto-Park Cities People. He called it The Aardvark, he says, in part so it would be listed first in the phone book.
His dad was an entrepreneur who once convinced Charles Sammons, one of Dallas’ first billionaires, to front the money for a banking idea. This simple but profound synchronicity — dreamers with a vision, investors who could back them — threads throughout Washburne’s stories. Clint Murchison, Mary Kay Ash, H.L. Hunt: These larger-than-life characters loomed over Washburne’s boyhood. Dallas became a mecca for entrepreneurs — “a great City of Oz,” in Washburne’s telling, “because why? People would take a risk on people and ideas.”
In 1984, he graduated from Southern Methodist University into the real-estate and oil boom. Dallas was in full-tilt Dallas mode, as in the TV show, but also as in conspicuous consumption. Washburne bought and sold real estate: apartments, then subdivisions, then shopping centers, riding a tide of incoming wealth. At 26, he was the youngest person to be appointed to the Dallas Plan Commission, and if that sounds boring (it did to me), consider this: The West Village shopping center exists, he says, because that commission rezoned a residential area for retail.
It was 1990 when a former waiter named Michael “Mico” Rodriguez approached him with an idea. Tex-Mex restaurants all seemed to draw from the same playbook: Dirt-cheap ingredients, kitsch decorations, colossal portions on plates that don’t break when you drop them. Rodriguez envisioned an elevated experience. Sophisticated.
“Nobody thought people would eat Tex-Mex on fine china,” Washburne says, gesturing around the table. He picked up his fork and dropped it to prove its heft.
It was Rodriguez’s genius, but Washburne had the savvy to back him. He brought on his brother Dick Washburne and Bob McNutt (now owner of Collin Street Bakery), and together they opened Mi Cocina in the Preston-Forest neighborhood in 1991. Over the next 30 years, Mi Cocina caught fire and now has more than 20 locations in Texas and Oklahoma.
Not all of Washburne’s ‘90s gambles panned out so well. His experiments in regional publishing — resurrecting the monthly Texas Business magazine and scooping up the eccentric local weekly The Met — flamed out.
Building a legacy
Washburne halts our server Adair as he sets down my Los Cabos salad. “How many years have you worked here?” he asks him.
Adair glances at the ceiling. “Twenty-two years,” he says. “Started as a busboy.”
Washburne’s questions keep coming. Got a house? Yes, in Mesquite. Got a family? A wife and three kids. After Adair departs, Washburne turns to me, as if to underline this small miracle of entrepreneurship. The right idea, paired with the right financial backing: a tide that lifts all ships.
Washburne snaps a picture of his Rico salad. “I’m gonna make my wife jealous,” he says. “She’s in Colorado Springs right now.”
Washburne is married to Heather Hill Washburne, a descendant of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, but he was not with his family at their Colorado summer home thanks to a business meeting. For the past several years, he’s been building a new vision. In 2019, he agreed to pay $28 million for the former site of The Dallas Morning News, eight acres on the southwest side of downtown that includes the iconic George Dahl building. After the city announced a $3 billion renovation of the nearby convention center, Washburne bought the 1915 Founders Square building in that same area, one of the oldest in downtown, another jigsaw piece for a future puzzle.
His idea: a destination resort near the convention center. Let’s give those conference attendees something to do! He sees a district that includes a Sands casino and a brand-new American Airlines Center before we lose the Mavericks to Arlington. He sees all the parts working together — the tourists and the street-level commerce and the pedestrians moving between buildings — unlike in the Arts District, which he calls an “architectural petting zoo.”
“Look, the only way downtown Dallas survives is if we make it not only a regional draw, but a national one,” he tells me.
Washburne is uniquely invested in making Dallas work at a time when North Texas mojo has shifted to burbs like Frisco, Southlake and McKinney. Part of his stubbornness is that he knows it once worked. He used to take the transit system with his mom to shop for clothes at Sanger-Harris and Titche’s. He had lunch with his dad downtown, took the bus home. The place vibrated with energy and industry. Fifty-some years later, that’s gone, and the little kid has become a 64-year-old developer determined to get it back.
Life between the buildings
His passion for the city of Dallas puts him at something of a table for one. He wonders what became of those outsized characters of his youth who had the vision to imagine a better place and the drive to make it happen. But those civic leaders had long relationships with the city. These days, the average tenure of a Fortune 500 CEO is well under a decade. They come, they go. For them, Dallas is not a mecca but a waystation.
“I love the city, and I want to see it prosper. Some people just don’t care,” he says. “Their goal is, ‘How quick can I get out of here in the summer and go to Southampton or Aspen?’”
I keep meaning to ask him about former President Donald Trump, whose 2016 campaign he helped raise funds for and whose administration he served in for three years, but the conversation continues shifting — either because that isn’t part of his life anymore, or because he has so many other visions.
Take El Centro, currently sitting on bond money to build a downtown campus. “My vision is, first I go to UTA [the University of Texas at Arlington] and move the School of Architecture into downtown Dallas,” he tells me, the way I might say I’m gonna cut carbs. “Then we take our West End, which is a disaster, and get El Centro to buy all the buildings.” He paints me a picture inspired by SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design, students shuffling between classes in old bank buildings and former department stores, and suddenly I can see it, too: life between the buildings, a way for new growth to inhabit old history.
“Biggest idea of all?” he asks, leaning forward. You know those downtown office towers that have emptied out? “Zombie buildings,” he calls them. Now consider that the Lew Sterrett Justice Center, our courts and jail system, has the charm of a cement block as it sits off the geometric swoop of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. What’s the first thing you see when crossing into downtown? Our jails.
So here’s the pitch: Move the jail and courts into the zombie buildings, give the lawyers and jurors some downtown atmosphere at lunch, give the prisoners a view, get rid of the old Lew Sterrett and voila: You’ve just freed up one of the best development sites in the city.
“You want to put jails in an office tower?” I ask.
He shrugs. “They do it in New York and Chicago.”
New York City actually closed its high-rise jail in 2021. But he’s right, that kind of thing has been done. And it could be done again.
Maybe his plan is crazy, or maybe it’s the future of Dallas, but whether you agree with Washburne or not, he’s got a vision.
