It’s been exhausting to watch Dallas-area restaurants pivot during pandemic years as they tried to lure in new customers and avoid failure.
But in 2022, we saw a glimmer of hope. The pandemic pivot became more of a tango, and some North Texas restaurant owners saved themselves by dancing to a different beat. Some, like Fred’s Texas Cafe, signed a lease somewhere else in town. Others, like Paris Coffee Shop, brought on different owners who could infuse new life into an old restaurant.
Plenty of great restaurants still closed, and we’re mourning those losses. But some found a way not to.
The loudest local example of a 2022 pivot is Carbone’s Fine Food and Wine. The Dallas-owned Italian restaurant sued global restaurant company Major Food Group after it opened a similarly-named restaurant, Carbone, 2 miles away. The lawsuit was settled, and the locally-owned company will close and change its name. But ask Carbone’s owner Julian Barsotti if he’s sad or mad about the whole ordeal, and he’s neither. He gets a fresh start. And soon, his business will no longer be complicated by confused delivery drivers and customers who show up to the wrong Italian restaurant.
In Fort Worth, two restaurant groups took different approaches to stay relevant this year. Fred’s Texas Cafe closed its original restaurant on Currie Street in late 2021, after 43 years in business. No big deal, CEO and co-owner Quincy Wallace said: They’d move the flagship restaurant 7 miles away, to West Fort Worth.
Seven miles. Would customers make the drive? To help, Wallace brought over a bunch of the old keepsakes and put them up on the walls of the new restaurant. The menu stayed mostly the same. Parking is much easier.
Fred’s reopened in May 2022 and Wallace says business is strong. “I’m glad I made the move. It couldn’t have come at a better time,” Wallace said in December 2022.
An even older restaurant, Paris Coffee Shop, got a similar reset in 2022. Fort Worth folks Chris Reale, Lou Lambert and Mark Harris took ownership of the 1926 coffee shop in 2021, with a plan to reinvent it with a little bit more oomph. They gave it a facelift and reopened in May 2022, serving a standard menu of pancakes, chicken-fried steak, omelets and coffee that wouldn’t scare away regulars. If they made this place too uptown, it could lose its charm.
“Fort Worth is so different from so many other cities. It’s big but it’s not,” Reale said in an interview in May 2022. He felt the pressure to keep this long-time restaurant in business, but that required a new business model.
“We’ve got to keep these legacies relevant enough to stay open,” he said.
Great American Hero, a nearly 50-year-old sandwich shop in Dallas, also got new owners and a new vision. The 47-year-old restaurant as we know it closed on Lemmon Avenue in July 2022 and reopened with a totally different look 6 miles northeast, near Lake Highlands. What was once a quaint shop run by tired restaurateur Dominick Oliverie is poised to be a booming business for entrepreneurs Danny Wilson and Jacob Cox, who have aggressive growth plans to potentially franchise it.
Some have asked: Why didn’t Wilson and Cox just leave the shop where it was, on Lemmon Avenue? They believed rent was too high, and to kickstart the business, it needed a new lease.
Grapevine Bar on Maple Avenue in Dallas, which has been open for 26 years, is in the midst of a big change. It will move somewhere else — they’re not sure where yet — before the lease expires in mid-2023. But why? The owners sold the building to Crow Holdings, which is developing the 12.5-acre Old Parkland campus.
“We’re going to be able to move the bar, and this [deal] made it financially possible,” co-owner Michelle Honea said. It’s yet another example of how a business deal saved a struggling Dallas company.
Relocation has been a theme in 2022. Some Dallas-area restaurants moved to seize an opportunity when it became available (even if they weren’t strapped with coronavirus woes). Two examples:
- CrushCraft Thai Eats in Uptown Dallas moved into a different spot in the same complex in March 2022. The Quadrangle is being renovated. While some businesses left the Quadrangle, closed or were bulldozed, like Dream Cafe, Ginger Man Pub and TNT/Tacos and Tequila, the owners of CrushCraft were asked to stay. “We thought about leaving,” owner Jack Nuchkasem said in a March 2022 interview, “but after they told us about this project, I told them I’d just love to be part of the neighborhood.”
- Bavarian Grill in Plano made plans mid-pandemic to leave its home of 28 years and move a half-mile away to a restaurant space that was in better shape, owner Jürgen Mahneke told us. Closing for good was an option, he said at the time; the lease was almost up. But Mahneke seemed invigorated by finding a new place to serve jägerschnitzel, spätzle and beers. Bavarian Grill reopened in spring 2022.
Even food and drink businesses that aren’t restaurants had to pivot. Two entrepreneurs purchased Wylie distillery Herman Marshall in late 2021, at a time when breweries and distilleries across the country were struggling mightily. The distillery was shut down for months during the coronavirus pandemic. North Texans Clint Ecord and Ryan Hamar were drawn to Herman Marshall in part because it is the first small-batch distillery to operate in Dallas County since Prohibition.
They moved the distillery to Wylie, a city Hamar says has welcomed their business “with open arms.” The tasting room opens in early 2023.
In the case of Herman Marshall — and with several businesses on this list — it needed “more youth and capital,” Hamar said. “And we came in at the right time.”
