Take a stroll through the restaurant park at Trinity Groves in West Dallas right now, and about half of the storefronts are closed. Business woes and the COVID-19 pandemic caused the shuttering of The Hall Bar & Grill, V-Eats Modern Vegan, Sushi Bayashi, Souk Kebab House, Amberjax Fish Market Grille and Off-Site Kitchen.
All of those restaurants closed between May and July.
Babb Bros. BBQ and Blues closed in March.
Nearly all were concepts that were part of the incubator program, meaning that a group of deep-pocketed Trinity Groves investors owned a stake in each of the restaurants. Trinity Groves’ dining theme park is a giant test kitchen and culinary playground — a place that might be the launch pad for the next big chain restaurant. It also was a place where chefs could try out a new concept without needing a few hundred thousand dollars of their own financial backing.
More than six years after Trinity Groves started opening small restaurants with big dreams, investor Phil Romano says he’s moving away from the incubator concept he created with Trinity Groves co-founders Stuart Fitts and Larry “Butch” McGregor.
“It got to be a chore,” Romano says. “The ones that listened to us were successful. The other ones, they just didn’t do it. It just didn’t work.”
The new plan is to lease restaurant spaces without the incubator model. Romano will continue testing his own restaurants there, too. He’s got three in Trinity Groves right now: Holy Crust pizza, Sum Dang Good Chinese and St. Rocco’s New York Italian.
Romano is not closing the incubator restaurants that are still operating in Trinity Groves. Beto & Son, AvoEatery, Kate Weiser Chocolate and Cake Bar remain open.
Flourish, a private event space that opened in early 2020, also remains open in Trinity Groves. Operator Lisa Lavender says Flourish has continued hosting events during the pandemic: It’s “large enough to give that necessary 6 feet, but cozy enough that no one feels separated from the group,” she says.
Flourish is one of the newer concepts at Trinity Groves and is not one of the incubator participants.
In the future, Romano anticipates that the coming-soon restaurants will be his ideas, backed with his money.
“We’re going to control our own destiny,” he says.
Behind the incubator
Trinity Groves was home to incubator restaurants over the years that helped catapult chefs’ careers in Dallas. Casa Rubia, a Spanish restaurant that earned a glowing review from The Dallas Morning News, was from chef Omar Flores, who is now growing his restaurants Whistle Britches and Muchacho in other parts of North Texas. Luck (Local Urban Craft Kitchen) was lauded for its “terrific sandwiches” in a 2014 review. And Kitchen LTO was a revolving door for chefs, including Anastacia Quiñones-Pittman and Blythe Beck, who continue cooking in other kitchens.
But alas, all of those eventually closed.
Romano was rarely sentimental when a business didn’t hit its financial goals. In fact, a few of his own restaurants failed in Trinity Groves.
“If it doesn’t work, we zip it up,” he says matter-of-factly. “If it works, we keep it there.”
Casie Caldwell was one of his first tenants, having opened Kitchen LTO in fall 2013. She looks back on her restaurant’s three years happily, especially in the beginning when Trinity Groves was “crazy popular.”
As a member of the incubator program, Caldwell owned 50% of Kitchen LTO, and Romano and his partners owned the remaining 50%. She says the arrangement “never felt like I was in a true partnership.”
“I think that alone is at the crux of [the incubator’s] downfall,” she says.
Caldwell and her colleagues also paid a management fee to Trinity Groves executives, who provided accounting support and other services. Because of the structure of her deal, Caldwell says “making a profit was tough.”
Still, she’s “extremely grateful for the opportunity [Romano] gave me.”
Uno Immanivong, who created Chino Chinatown in Trinity Groves, agrees with Caldwell that she’d launch her restaurant in Trinity Groves all over again, even though it ultimately failed.
”This business is relentless,” she says. “Whether an incubator or not, restaurants fail.”
She now owns a restaurant named Red Stix Street Food in University Park and says, “If it weren’t for Trinity Groves, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
Karen Williams, co-owner of Amberjax with her husband Larry Williams, has a different memory: She feels burned by the six years she spent in Trinity Groves. Amberjax closed the last week of July 2020. She doesn’t blame the COVID-19 pandemic for the restaurant’s demise; she says she didn’t get the support she desired from Trinity Groves’ management.
“I don’t think it was ever an incubator; it was a gimmick,” she says.
What’s working?
Beto & Son is a current Trinity Groves incubator run by chef Beto Rodarte and his son Julian Rodarte. He was Trinity Groves’ youngest restaurateur when he opened the Mexican restaurant at age 23 in 2016.
Beto & Son’s dining room remains closed for COVID-19 safety reasons, but the Rodartes have expanded their patio business into the restaurant space next door, where Sushi Bayashi was, and say they’re back up to about 75% of their sales.
Julian Rodarte says they don’t have immediate plans to open the dining room, and that the business can survive without dine-in for now. He calls the inside of the restaurant “a safe haven” for his employees.
“We’re a family-run restaurant, and the staff is like family,” he says. Keeping the dining room closed to guests “definitely makes them feel more confident about showing up to work every day.”
Romano and Rodarte both say one of the reasons Beto & Son is surviving is because it made quick moves early on in the pandemic. To-go sales used to make up 1% of their business, Rodarte says; now, it’s over 30% of their sales.
“For the first time, we had to buy to-go boxes that made sense for our food, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all box,” he says. “We were 100% focused on experience [before the pandemic]. And now, our sole focus is safety, for our staff and our guests.”
Rodarte says he did not have to pay rent when the restaurant was forced to close during the pandemic. He’s one of at least two-dozen small business owners who have told Dallas Morning News that delayed or forgiven rent is an essential component to help restaurateurs survive through the COVID-19 crisis.
“He was extremely gracious,” Rodarte says of Romano and his team.
Beto & Son and many of the other tenants operate on a sliding rent scale: The higher their sales, the more they pay in rent.
The cake vending machine
Let them eat cake? Sure, Romano says. Cake Bar has continued to sell desserts in Trinity Groves as restaurants around it quietly failed.
Tracy German, Cake Bar’s operator, says people sometimes lined up out into the street — socially distanced, she says — waiting for a slice.
To entice customers in a new way, German spent $2,000 on a vending machine she installed outside of the restaurant in August. It accepts cash and credit, and it’s open 24 hours a day. German says people have come over from the apartments across the street, in their pajamas, for dessert. “We had someone get cake at 12:38 [a.m.] the other day,” she says.
The machine allows German to close her shop earlier in the day, at 9 p.m., instead of staying open until 11 p.m. in an attempt to reach an after-dinner crowd looking for dessert.
“People have said, ‘cake is essential,‘” German says. “People have been thanking us for even being open. And we’re thankful we’re here.”
A new coworking space — with beer
A small number of restaurants and a brewery remain open in Phase 2 of Trinity Groves, on the south side of Singleton Boulevard, across the street from the original restaurant park. Steam Theory Brewing Company and K’s House Korean Cuisine & Grill are two food-based businesses that are still open.
Notably, they are not participants in the incubator.
The co-owners of Steam Theory Brewing Company have developed a list of “pandemic-friendly concepts” to try. The facility is open, despite Gov. Greg Abbott’s orders that bars and breweries close, because it has a restaurant on site.
“I made a big decision two months ago,” says co-owner Chuck Homola. “Everybody’s moaning about wanting to get back to normal. Let’s create a new normal that’s even better. Otherwise, you’re not going to succeed. You just won’t.”
He and partner Jonathan Barrows want Steam Theory to be a coworking space. They have Ascension nitro cold brew on tap and will start selling breakfast at 9 a.m. He says they have room for 16 socially-distanced pods of people.
He guesses that half of the people living in residences above the brewery will never go back to their offices but will want to get out of the house. For now, it’s free to hang out and use their wifi, though the owners hope customers order food or drink.
“There’s going to be a need for this,” Homola says.
What’s next for Trinity Groves
Romano still wants to inspire the next jackpot restaurant idea — like when he created Romano’s Macaroni Grill and Fuddruckers, then watched them take off (and reaped the financial rewards).
He believes that after more than six years, some of the restaurants at Trinity Groves got stale.
“Like anything else, after a while, it gets old,” he says. “People want new and different things.”
He says restaurateurs need to be “gregarious,” and that restaurants need to provide an experience beyond just dinner. At EatZi’s, which he helped create, the speakers blast opera music. It creates an aura of opulence, he says, and it’s memorable. His steakhouse in Uptown Dallas, Nick & Sam’s, is another example: “People want to see and be seen,” he says. “That’s what that thing is all about.”
Trinity Groves needs a new approach, Romano says. This time, the restaurants will be led by his team’s decades of experience instead of by budding chefs’ new ideas.
