A little over a year after it opened, Dallas restaurant Modest Rogers is closed.
Owner and chef Modesto Rodriguez, who opened the restaurant in 2021 after years of being a line cook and sous chefs in Dallas restaurants like Nonna and Carbone’s Fine Food and Wine, said the tiny Oak Lawn restaurant was struggling financially and couldn’t hold on.
“We just ran out of money. We didn’t have enough funds to keep us alive,” he said.
Friday, Oct. 21 was a busy night for the restaurant. It was a full house and dinner service went great, but when Rodriguez and his wife looked at the numbers at the end of the night, the bleak realization hit. If the restaurant couldn’t bring in enough money on a busy weekend night to make it work, they couldn’t keep going.
After service ended, Rodriguez sat in the 24-seat dining room with friends and family who came to dine that night, and he felt the room move around him as he quietly became enveloped in the reality that he had to close his restaurant – the one he dreamed of for years. Modest Rogers closed the next day and never reopened.
“I was kind of already getting the feeling that this is where it was going. The money was going out and just not coming back in in the same amount,” he said. “I think the issue was it was too small of a place, and we didn’t have enough money to begin with to fix that space and its issues. It took so much to fix it that we had no money left to just run as a business.”
He opened the restaurant with his wife, Kathryn, in a small house on Fairmount Street in Dallas’ Oak Lawn neighborhood on Sept. 16, 2021 and named it after a nickname he received in high school. Modest Rogers quickly garnered attention for its clever, rotating menu and its intimate atmosphere.
Rodriguez usually ran the kitchen solo or with one other cook, and delivered a small but exciting and spread of dishes like arepas, nopales, carne asada with chimichurri, and wagyu burgers with tomatillo aioli. It received the accolade of best Latin American restaurant of 2022 from D Magazine and was recognized as one of the most exciting and promising new restaurants in Dallas.
But the restaurant’s success was crippled by its size and the constraints of the building it was in, Rodriguez said.
“I blindly went into something. I should have studied a little bit more about the space,” he said. “I let my vision blind me and said, ‘We can make it work.’ And we did for a year, but I always said we were cooking out of a food truck. I love the space and I think it still has great potential, but we spent money trying to fix things that weren’t related to the food. What we needed to fix was the size of the kitchen and get a flow down that was able to accommodate larger numbers. It killed us by not being able to accommodate more people.”
Staffing issues exacerbated the struggles and the time he would have spent working on new dishes was eaten away by also being the restaurant’s prep staff and dishwasher.
Rodriguez doesn’t know what comes next. He’s still in the acceptance stage of the process, and he’s sorting out his relationship with the restaurant industry.
“At first I was thinking that I really don’t want to go back to the industry. I’ve been in it for close to 20 years now and I just had that feeling of being burned out. But as time has passed, I’ve realized I definitely want to stay in a kitchen and cook, but I don’t want to go back to being a line cook. I want to continue to grow as a chef,” he said. “I’m hoping that maybe some people will contact me who might need help.”
All things considered, Rodriguez said he’d do it all again, just perhaps little differently.
