Forty-seven years ago, a tiny bistro opened on Lower Greenville Avenue. The owners were two friends in their early 20s, Charlotte Parker and Kathy McDaniel, a University of Texas art major who was bored making architectural models and a Dallas paralegal considering law school.
Between them, they had zero experience in the restaurant business. On opening night, Parker was too nervous to unlock the doors, so McDaniel sent her on an errand.
But the Grape — with its emphasis on good wine by the glass, a selection of cheeses and an ever-changing chalkboard menu — was unlike anything else in the Dallas of 1972. And despite its shoestring start, and the decades of changing taste that followed, it went on to become a Dallas institution and a sentimental landmark for those who celebrated countless birthdays, proposals and rendezvous in the dimly lighted dining room.
The restaurant’s colorful history includes artist Julian Schnabel’s stint in the kitchen, Cowboys linebacker Sean Lee as a weekly regular in the dining room, and David Uygur, one of Dallas’ most acclaimed chefs, doing endless prep work on that famous bowl of mushroom soup.
Before the doors are locked for good on Thursday, here is the history of the Grape, from the people who lived it.
The beginning
Kathy McDaniel, original co-owner: It was 1971, I was 23 and had been living in New York, and I came back to Dallas and it was a shock. Steakhouses, greasy spoons and fancy French restaurants: Those were pretty much your choices. There wasn’t any place we really wanted to go, and we couldn’t see any reason why we shouldn’t open a restaurant. So Charlotte and I started scheming: This was going to be the cool place where you could hang out with your friends.
Charlotte Parker, original co-owner: There was a place in New York that served wine and cheese and it was dark and it was small, and that’s the kind of restaurant we thought we would do.
McDaniel: We saw the old Pietro’s restaurant on Greenville and loved the ambience — grapes on the wall, latticework, travel posters. It was all already there and it felt right. And the rent was right: $345 a month. We signed a one-year lease.
Parker: A one-year lease — not the smartest thing for a restaurant! We owned the building after 1977. It was our main holding in life. One short block of Greenville Avenue. And we still have it.
McDaniel: We had 17 tables. And we kept the Pietro’s tables and chairs — in fact, the tables in the restaurant today are the original tables from Pietro’s. We switched out some of the travel posters for wine posters. The kitchen had the biggest pizza oven, and it became a storage unit. Unfortunately, the kitchen had no air conditioning and no dishwashers. So our first year, we spent unbelievable amounts of time washing dishes by hand in a freestanding sink.
The menu (and that soup)
Parker: Before we opened, someone said, you girls need to serve food, not just cheese. So we hired a chef: Frank Bailey, the brother of Kay Bailey Hutchison. I knew him through college at UT. He was cooking at a place in New Mexico called the Wild Snail, but a friend got him to quit and come to Dallas.
McDaniel: Frank was living in the back of the restaurant — free rent in a building in the back and a free night on the town was part of his salary, which was maybe $200 a month. He cooked lunch and dinner and we did everything else. Just the three of us ran the restaurant for the first six months.
Parker: The mushroom soup was Frank’s idea. And it was straight out of Craig Claiborne’s cookbook, which no one believes till this day, but that’s the recipe. It was 95 cents for a cup and $1.25 for a bowl.
McDaniel: From opening day, we had the mushroom soup, the cheese selection and a couple of entrées up on the blackboard.
Parker: There were beef tips cooked with a lot of red wine and rice. And snails in mushroom caps with garlic butter. And a fish with green grapes all over it — Sole Veronique, that’s what it was. Delicious and fabulous. The highest price on the menu was $4.95. The quiche was like $2.50.
McDaniel: People would walk in and say, I’ll have the quickie. They had no idea what quiche is!
Have a glass, Dallas
McDaniel: After the first couple of months, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald wrote about us, and the next day it was an onslaught. We ran out of everything. We closed the door at 2, with every plate and glass dirty. We opened the door for dinner and it happened again. It was a major lesson about publicity and getting our act together. And it was the beginning of our success.
Parker: We started to get a lot of press — we were something really new on the dining scene.
Kim Pierce, former Dallas Morning News restaurant critic: They were on the leading edge of a movement that grew in the later ’70s. The Grape brought Dallas the wine bar: A place where you could walk in and order wine and a little food or a bigger meal. It was a very casual place, and as I remember a very uncomfortable place — those were 20-minute chairs!
McDaniel: Wine salesmen were shocked we didn’t want to sell Mateus. We had German, French, Californian wines, and not the jug wines. We were one of the first to sell Robert Mondavi Fume Blanc. And the first to sell wine by the glass in Dallas. Before that, you’d have to order a small, medium or large carafe.
Pierce: The sommelier at Old Warsaw, Victor Wdowiak, taught wine classes. They learned from him and I learned from him too. We all did. It was just the beginning of wine becoming better known outside of haute cuisine.
That ’70s scene
Alberto Lombardi, Dallas restaurateur: I wasn’t the first waiter. There was another guy, Phillipe, a nice guy with a big beard. It was the ’70s! We would dress in jeans, a T-shirt, whatever, and when people came in I would say, Ciao, welcome to the Grape! And I would make you feel fantastic.
Most of the time you go to a restaurant, they ask if you have a reservation, they seat you and they don’t talk to you. Here you would say ciao and get to know each other. That’s a beautiful thing. There was no other restaurant like that in Dallas, until I opened my restaurant, Lombardi’s, in 1977.
Parker: There were a lot of people who came every single week at the same time. It just shocked me. Windle Turley, the famous Dallas lawyer, the Grape was one of his favorite places. Norman Mailer came in, and I was too shy to talk with him. Cloris Leachman, Sugar Ray Leonard, Tommy Lee Jones, Wally Shawn ...
McDaniel: We had writers, performers from the symphony after the symphony. Anyone interested in learning about wine came and took classes. East Dallas was a wonderful neighborhood, but a neighborhood where people didn’t eat out that much. We were one of the first to put Greenville on the map. The Swiss Avenue preservation group planned how to save Swiss Avenue over lunch at the restaurant.
Rodney Schpok, Dallas optometrist and regular: Someone told me when I moved to Texas, the Grape was the place to be. It was fun and intimate and romantic. The tables were so close together — to this day, you’re sitting real near other people, close enough to meet, and that was part of the fun of it too.
Brian Luscher, chef and eventual second owner: I always looked at the Grape and thought, that would be the place to be a cook. The first night I ever went there was 1996. It was odd and funky in a cool way. It was dark. It was a cavern. Later, when I became the chef here, there would be some clandestine luncheons and that was part of the allure too. It was always called Dallas’ most romantic restaurant and to be honest I hated that. Except for Valentine’s week.
Oh hi, Julian Schnabel
Parker: In our second or third year, Julian Schnabel showed up one day and asked, Do you need a chef? And I said Yes, tonight! And he showed up and cooked and he was good. He had just moved from Houston to Dallas, and in Houston he had worked in a restaurant.
We hit it off immediately. He was funny, and he hated chicken because his father had a chicken farm. He wouldn’t even cook them in the restaurant.
He was around for about six months. I stored five or six of his huge paintings in my garage, it wasn’t even locked. One of the paintings seemed to be mainly black with a surfboard sticking out of it. Then he left the Grape to go to New York City.
I always had faith in his ability to make himself famous, but none of our friends in Dallas believed he would ever amount to anything.
McDaniel: I was just blown away when he got famous. I knew he was an artist but …
The murals
McDaniel: We added the bar in 1979, and expanded again in 1993, when we added a party room and a new kitchen.
Gillian Bradshaw-Smith, artist: They were making a really narrow storage room into a party room. We came up with the idea of an Italian-style landscape, and I painted that and created the illusion that it was wider.
The wine rack was painted with vines and bricks, like bricks of buildings. There’s a narrow space, going into the dining room, and I created the illusion of going down a street. In the bar, the problem was integrating the mural and the ceiling, so I made it like a ruin, with some sky and ruin walls and a little cupid statue.
It took probably two or three weeks. At the same time, I was designing stage sets for various ballet companies in New York, doing some window work for Gucci, and background for fashion photographers.
I felt proud to have done those murals, and I wonder what will happen to them now?
The Grape 2.0
Parker: Twelve years ago, we could see the Grape needed attention, and it just needed a new owner. So we sold it to our old chef, Brian Luscher. We did not ask him to keep it the same, we just trusted him. Though the first thing he did was change the mushroom soup recipe, and people did not like it! So he learned something about our customers, and there were not too many other changes after that.
Brian Luscher: I was running a Relais & Chateau resort in Wisconsin and wanted to move back to Dallas. I was on the DMN website on the want ads, and it said: One of Dallas’ most unique restaurants is looking for a chef. Great opportunity for a creative individual. Fax resume to DMN. I would never normally reply to a blind ad, but I thought, let me see what it is. A couple hours later I got a call and holy s---, the ad was for chef at the Grape. I always knew this was the place I’d work.
I was chef for almost five years, then I left to be executive chef at TPC Craig Ranch in McKinney. After three years, I decided to do my own thing and I was looking for investors. I got a call from Kathy and Charlotte, and I thought, oh yeah another investor! But they said, Any interest in buying the Grape?
Courtney Luscher, manager and co-owner: Within 60 days we had the keys to the restaurant. It fell into place, it was meant to be. It was October 2007. People were so worried we’d change it too much or mess it up. Then they realized Brian had been a chef here and I was a Dallas girl, and they gave us a chance to prove ourselves.
Brian: We didn’t change much. The original sconces had candles, but they didn’t ever light the candles. It was dark. And that was probably good. Three of the walls were lined with faded burlap painted with wine regions of the world. You could see soot and it smelled like cigarette smoke.
Courtney: We got rid of the checkered tablecloths and we took down those plastic grapes. Later, after a water leak, we cut the faux paintings off the walls and framed them. We took down the candelabras and put in electric sconces and added grape-shape pendant lights.
The art deco grape lights in the bar are from the original dining room. That’s what everyone’s asking me for now. Can I buy one?
The body’s not even cold yet!!
Hey, Sean Lee
Sean Lee, Dallas Cowboys linebacker: We discovered the Grape right when we got to Dallas in 2010. We went to dinner at the bar and considered moving into the neighborhood just for this restaurant. And yeah, we ended up moving into the neighborhood a couple of months after that.
Megan Lee: We sat at the bar and had the steak frites and the mushroom soup. And we were hooked.
Sean: We go once or twice a week in the off-season. If we play a noon home game, or even a 3:30, we’ll head there as fast as we can afterward and get the hamburger.
Megan: I’ve asked them to pack the Dijonnaise to take home.
Sean: We’ve had so many special moments there. We had our wedding rehearsal dinner there in 2014! It’s like going into a family member’s home, except the food is probably a little bit better.
Megan: We’re so depressed that it’s closing. We’re gonna go every few days until it closes, and definitely on the last night.
Hard times and a burger bump
Brian Luscher: When the economy tanked in 2008, it was definitely touch-and-go. No one was going out spending money and overall, we were 25 to 30% off. But it crawled back. We increased sales, nice and steady, every year until this year and the last year. The last 18 to 24 months have been a plateau.
Courtney Luscher: What gave us a bump in volume was Texas Monthly.
Brian: In 2009, we hadn’t taken paychecks — it wasn’t about making money, just not losing the business. This guy came and sat at the bar, said he was from Texas Monthly and wanted to talk about the burger. He didn’t say it was for the 50 Best Burgers in Texas. When the list got leaked, a friend called us and said you guys got No. 1.
The burger was — is — a pain au lait bun, still made by La Francaise Bakery in Garland, a Dijonniase made from fresh mayo, a 10-ounce burger patty with a good amount of fat, Vermont cheddar cheese, house cured and smoked bacon, lettuce, tomato and onion. We added horseradish pickles after the fact. And house cut French fries.
Courtney: The next Sunday, there was a sea of people, jammed in the patio and all around.
Brian: The sheer volume to this day makes my head hurt. We had to hire a guy whose only job was to hand-make patties for burgers. Our Sunday brunch went from a dozen burgers to over 300. Every. Single. Sunday. Then we started serving them Monday night, too.
Adieu
Brian: We’re OK. We’re not closing for any of the terrible reasons that the armchair quarterbacks are going to tell you. We came to a crossroads: To be committed to what we’re doing requires us to be working all the time. I started washing dishes on weekends when I was 12. I told my dad I’m gonna be a cooker, that’s what I called it, and since then I’ve been running.
Now we look at the labor shift. All the new restaurants opening up. And we came to the conclusion that we’re gonna hold hands and take a leap and see what’s next.
Parker: I’d love to sell the building. But Brian owns the Grape. So it could come back, but someone would have to buy the building from us and the Grape from Brian.
Brian: When we bought this place, we were gonna own it for as long as we could. Now I think restaurants have a new business plan, a two- or three-year plan: Make your nut and get out. But are they even providing a quality experience for people? This is not the same world we are living in. The dynamic has changed, the diner has changed.
Charlotte Parker: I hope it will still be a restaurant. I want it to be somebody’s brilliant idea like Kathy and I had back in the old days. Of course, we’d like it to still be like the Grape. But it can be whatever someone’s crazy idea is. Just like us.
THE GRAPE’S MUSHROOM SOUP
Ingredients
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 pound fresh mushrooms, brushed and chopped medium to small
3 tablespoons flour
4 cups beef stock
Pinch white pepper
Pinch nutmeg
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
Kosher salt, to taste
Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and sauté until translucent. Add mushrooms and cook another 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the flour and stir until the mushrooms are coated. Slowly add the beef stock, stirring continually.
Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes. (If you want a smoother consistency, purée a portion of the soup using an immersion blender. Or use a standard blender and return the purée to the pot.) Add the white pepper and nutmeg, and remove from heat. Stir in the cream and adjust salt and seasonings to taste. Serve immediately.
Makes 4 to 6 servings.
