Tracy Miller didn’t have to-go boxes in her restaurant before all of this. She had a few of those small brown boxes for folks who didn’t finish their meals, sure, but there were no plastic tops or cartons at Deep Ellum’s Local.
The full dining experience means everything to Miller ― the way the 100-year-old wood floors sing when you walk through Elm Street’s historic Boyd Hotel where the restaurant is located. The flickering candles on each table casting shadows. The roasted nuts entangled with threads of rosemary. A quickening pulse when an order of the tasting menu lands in her hands. You just don’t slide that kind of memory into a box and send it off, she says.
She disposed of her ego in March. “Absolutely everything is changing. I am so not in denial about that. I am trying to be as forward-thinking as possible,” Miller says.
Those first two weeks, she brainstormed a new menu. Like every chef in the game right now, she had to shoulder the maddening burden of redefining what it means to be a restaurant. How in the world do you send “upscale” cuisine out the door right now? She thought about what could sit for a while in its container (and about the container itself), what foods wouldn’t wilt after a drive home, and who, exactly, would be ordering her dishes going forward.
To find solutions, she reached back into her nostalgia files. Back in the day, her mom took her to the Mermaid Bar at Neiman Marcus, and they would always ― always ― order the chicken salad. It’s one of Miller’s most powerful food memories. Later, they’d learn how to replicate the salad from just that memory.
Right now, that chicken salad ― loaded with dashes of celery and in-house mayo ― is on the menu at Local in a sandwich for takeout. She pulled more from the files, of course. You’ll find sandwiches with scoops with pimento cheese, a patty melt, and a cheeseburger riveted with juices. A Monte Cristo joined the menu at one point. And remember the magnificent crispy fish sandwich, sparkling with lemon juice and a cave-blasting crunch, at Rosemont, her sister restaurant that closed? It’s coming back to Local, very soon, for takeout.
“You really have to do a lot of soul-searching right now,” Miller says. She rebooted with a lunch operation ― business plummeted during the protests and in recent weeks ― and now she’s back to dinner service. She’s using Alto exclusively for delivery. She’s employed online ordering for curbside pickup for the first time in her history. She’s added a trio of tiny grilled cheese sandwiches, because why not? The chef’s tasting menu is still available if you’re comfortable with dining inside. She’s not giving that up, she says.
“I never went into Local thinking of fine dining. And I still don’t think of it as fine dining,” she says. “But it’s taking on a new angle, and how do you maintain that while adding new things?”
For the newest innovation at Local, farm-to-table chicken rests in brine overnight, then is eased into a buttermilk bath. It gets plenty of salt and pepper and dry spices, and it’s deep-fried until the armor crackles under a knife. A heap of coleslaw for the top and bottom brioche bun, some herb aioli, and you’ve got a fried chicken sandwich.
Over in Oak Cliff, Salaryman’s Justin Holt has experienced a similar humbling feeling.
“The biggest part was letting go of the ego,” he says. There was some fear in his kitchen that Salaryman’s brand of hot food served out of a box would lead to scattershot negative reviews online. At the same time, they dropped from a staff of nine to a staff of two. “People were more forgiving than we gave them credit to be,” he says.
Most of Salaryman’s current menu, he says, can be executed in 15 minutes flat. One dish is a Texas A Bar N Ranch Wagyu beef patty that’s been relaxing in a jacuzzi of gravy ― simmered mushroom and chicken stock, soy, some sake, mirin and Worcestershire sauce. It’s served over rice with a side of potato salad. The gravy is dark magic, emblazoned with mushrooms. He calls it the “most forgiving” of all of his dishes. Holt ties its inspiration, in part, to Salisbury steak.
“Fine dining was driven by price point. And by experience. Now we’ve lost experience. And the price point is questionable,” he says.
Next door in Oak Cliff, David Uygur of Lucia and Macellaio restaurants carves the innards out of a house-made boule the size of an Olympic curling stone. The rustic white loaf, less bready now with a hollowed-out center, is ready to receive shards of slow-simmered pork, and each side is painted with Calabrian chile-spiked mayo.
“To get food hot, to go, requires more people,” Uygur says. “I wish I could be open. I didn’t open my restaurant because I want to make big batches of meatballs ― no offense to meatballs. I like to spend time on small plates.”
In one week of offering spaghetti and meatballs for takeout, they rolled out more of one shape of pasta than they ever have. Now, the mountains of meatballs are adapted into Godzilla sandwiches ― huge beasts with melted cheese and rapini. The smartly named “Meatball Sandwich for 4 People” is, in fact, the size of a UFO, and it’ll cost you $55. He’s also added a Wagyu beef bologna sandwich ― decked out with pickled veggies and arugula on homemade focaccia ― because Uygur isn’t compromising on the comforts anymore. You want bologna? Buckle up: His bologna sandwich is for two people, and it’s $30.
Why is he working with bologna and meatballs in mammoth batches? He’s making what he can make with the smallest staff possible. It comforts him. He hopes it comforts us.
Is it possible that the beginning of the pandemic marked the end of fine dining? Overnight, the idea of sitting down for a two-hour chef’s tasting menu sounds like a blissful luxury you’d experience in The Matrix.
Homewood, a restaurant where you’ll find beautiful porcini crudo and butter-basted skate, had a patty melt on the menu for a while. And before Teiichi Sakurai’s Tei-An reopened its dining room (with thermal imaging for temperature checks), the Arts District restaurant offered caviar with house-made soba chips and A5-grade Wagyu to go.
Bullion, the French-inspired restaurant downtown, was closed for weeks. Upon reopening, it sold cheeseburger kits for Independence Day delivery. CBD Provisions did the same, offering Lone Star beers with the dry-aged beef.
And Nick Badovinus’ Neighborhood Services and Town Hearth are now offering to-go menus, with items like tot poutine, a Wagyu cheeseburger, “London Broil” steak frites, and mac and cheese casserole.
When you take away the walls of a restaurant, how do upscale spots like Salaryman or Local or Lucia distinguish themselves from the rest? Chefs seem to be on their own to figure out what “upscale” even means anymore. Meanwhile, they are finding comfort in the classics.