New Dallas restaurant Carte Blanche manages to be casual and lavish all at once.
Guests at the Lower Greenville restaurant will be presented with a 12-course tasting menu created by a chef who has worked at Daniel Boulud’s eponymous restaurant Daniel and Thomas Keller’s restaurant Per Se. But Casey LaRue has an easygoing demeanor — far from the stiff, stuffy service of a fine-dining restaurant — as he plates foie gras atop smoked peach foam, tweezers in hand.
Co-owner Amy LaRue adds to the menu with sorbets and house-made bread, coursed precisely so diners don’t get too full.
We had to ask: How often will the 12-course menu change? Do you ever run out of elaborate ideas?
Amy LaRue looks at her husband Casey LaRue and shrugs, as if all restaurants work this way.
“We enjoy the technicality of French cuisine,” she says. And they’ve been working toward opening a restaurant like this for years.
The two cooked in fine-dining restaurants all over the country, eventually moving their three kids, now ages 13, 10 and 4, to Garland. Once in North Texas, they started hosting pop-up dinners inside Airbnbs in an effort that seems fit for some kind of food-TV challenge: They’d bring all their own glassware, plates, pots and even a dining-room table. After a few hours of prep, the couple would serve 10 people 10 courses, all while making conversation and acting as stand-in servers and sommeliers, explaining each wine and making sure their glasses didn’t go empty.
“I can pretty much cook anywhere,” Casey LaRue told me in February 2020. (Once, the oven door came off in the middle of a dinner at an Airbnb, but he kept cooking. Yikes.) During the coronavirus pandemic, the couple rented closed restaurants, paying them a by-the-day rate so they could continue to host fashionably rogue pop-up dinners.
Now, finally, the LaRues have a permanent place to cook, in the former Mudsmith Coffee on Greenville Avenue.
Their 12-course tasting menu priced at $150 per person comes with the option of wine pairings ($115 to $225) or tea pairings ($45). The tea pairings will be especially interesting: options will be both iced and hot and are designed to pair with the food, just like wine. Dinner might start with chilled jasmine silver tip tea, zhuzzed up with a soda siphon that Casey LaRue says drinks a bit like Champagne.
Carte Blanche will also offer the option of a four-course dinner tasting for $75, for those who want a lower price point and/or less food.
The LaRues have made the choice to not serve beef in their restaurant, saying they were inspired to do so for environmental reasons. They also seem to like the challenge.
“Every other luxury restaurant does Wagyu, and we do not,” Casey LaRue says. “I think what’s more special is elk, antelope and boar.”
But first, breakfast
While Carte Blanche will be a high-end restaurant in the evenings, it’ll operate as a bakery in the morning where Amy LaRue’s doughnuts, breads and laminated pastries will be on display. Customers will be able to take home sourdough or focaccia, or stop in and grab a cheddar-jalapeño-boar danish and a cup of Eiland drip coffee.
Amy LaRue’s lemon-poppyseed cruller is a stunner, not too sweet and nicely airy inside. It’s one of about 25 pastries she’s planning for the bakery.
The shop won’t have an espresso machine. It will serve tea lattes, produced with similar care that was put into the tea tasting menu at dinnertime, Casey LaRue says.
They plan to change the menus whenever they want to. And they like it that way.
“This is the first time we’ve really had full control,” Casey LaRue says. “That’s why we called it Carte Blanche.”
Carte Blanche is at 2114 Greenville Ave., Dallas. Dinner service is expected to start on June 15, 2021; reservations are open now on Tock. The bakery is expected to open June 16, 2021.
The restaurant will be open for dinner Tuesday through Saturday starting at 5 p.m. Bakery hours are Wednesday through Sunday from 7 a.m. to noon.
