Take a look at the list of most exciting new restaurants and bars that opened in North Texas in 2023, and you’ll see we’ve had a year of creative cuisine. And still more restaurants are on the way.
Wherever you are, start with a celebratory martini. (Martinis never went out of style, but they had an ice-hot moment in 2023.)
We’ve been eager to watch the reinventions of three notable restaurants: luxury downtown Dallas place Mirador, homey Italian joint Carbone’s — now called Barsotti’s — and kid-friendly hangout Slider and Blues. We’re thrilled that East Dallas gets an Austin-style beer garden in an old Luby’s and an Italian restaurant on Lowest Greenville.
Knox Street in Dallas is the hottest block for food, with Deep Ellum and the Dallas Design District hot on its heels.
And this summer, our focus was on Fort Worth, where the region’s first vegan tasting menu opened in a brand-new building in a historic part of Cowtown. Ready to get goose bumps?
“Since we will be one of the first concepts like this in D-FW, if you’re vegan and you’ve lived in D-FW your entire life, this could be your first fine dining experience ever,” says Amy McNutt, owner of vegan tasting restaurant Maiden. “The servers will be there to answer all questions, to walk everyone through it, so you won’t be left wondering, ‘Oh, what’s this item I’ve never had before?’”
How lovely, to pioneer a restaurant in such a friendly way.
Here’s a look at all the restaurants we’re excited about in 2023.
Restaurants are listed in order of approximate opening date.
Portillo’s
in The Colony
Chicago restaurant Portillo’s might just be the most anticipated new restaurant of the year. It’s serving up Italian beef sandwiches, hot dogs, burgers and chocolate cake in Grandscape, the mega development in The Colony, as of Jan. 9, 2023. Even though the restaurant is nearly 8,000 square feet — that’s massive for an order-at-the-counter place — we expect it to be packed inside, outside and in the drive-through for weeks to come.
- Opening date: Jan. 9, 2023 [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: Italian beef sandwiches and hot dogs
- Address: 4560 Destination Drive (at Grandscape), The Colony
Tina’s Continental
in Deep Ellum
Tina’s is teeny: It’s an 800-square-foot martini bar that will share a vestibule with Tatsu, an intimate omakase restaurant. Tina’s co-creator Elias Pope describes the place as both classic and modern, with cocktails that are batched in advance and kept ice-cold in the freezer. The space is already teeming with character, as it’s located in the Continental Gin building, which has been around since 1888.
- Opening date: April 2023 [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: Martinis
- Address: 3309 Elm St., Dallas (inside the Continental Gin building)
Crown Block
in downtown Dallas
A couple with restaurants in Las Vegas and Vancouver, British Columbia, have opened a handsome place on the 18th floor named Crown Block. “No matter where you are at night, there is a spectacular view,” says co-owner Elizabeth Blau. She and her husband, Kim Canteenwalla, have decided the main dining room will not spin 360 degrees like the previous restaurant, chef Wolfgang Puck’s Five Sixty. “Believe me, it was a real emotional tug of war,” Blau says. But she believes the view from the host stand — after a straight shot up on the elevators — is pivotal to the start of a lovely dinner experience. If the restaurant were to spin, that view would change by the minute, Blau says.
The restaurant will serve modern American food like steak and seafood, but Blau is also passionate about plant-based dishes, tequila cocktails and desserts. All of those will find a stylish seat at the re-imagined Reunion Tower restaurant.
- Opening date: April 17, 2023 [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: Modern American steak and seafood
- Address: 300 Reunion Blvd. E., Dallas
Barsotti’s, aka, the former Carbone’s
in Highland Park
A year ago, Carbone’s was a great neighborhood Italian joint. Today, it’s nationally known as the little company that launched a trademark lawsuit against global Italian restaurant Carbone. The lawsuit ended amicably (and a bit mysteriously). On Jan. 1, 2023, Carbone’s Fine Food and Wine closed for a renovation and a new name — which many of you helped pick. It reopened in April 2023 with a longer menu, one that includes all the favorites from before. It will no doubt be even more beloved.
- Opening date: mid-April 2023 [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: Italian
- Address: 4208 Oak Lawn Ave., Dallas
Maiden
in Fort Worth
The most fascinating new restaurant coming in 2023 is vegan fine-dining restaurant Maiden in Fort Worth. There’s nothing like it in Dallas-Fort Worth, says Amy McNutt, also the owner of one of North Texas’ best-known vegan restaurants, Spiral Diner. Maiden serves an eight-course menu that will change seasonally, with a fixed price. Chefs make foams, spheres and emulsions using no animal products. The restaurant, built from the ground up, is an intimate place with about 12 tables.
The goal is elevated and elegant food without being pretentious. “You can show up in jeans and a T-shirt,” McNutt says. “You’re also welcome to show up in a tuxedo and a ball gown.”
- Opening date: June 1, 2023 [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: Vegan
- Address: 1216 Sixth Ave., Fort Worth
Bobbie’s Airway Grill
in Preston Hollow
Fans of Il Bracco at Preston Center have already been buzzing about Bobbie’s Airway Grill, an American restaurant from the same owners, in Preston Hollow. The former Dougherty’s pharmacy is gone but not forgotten: CEO Robert Quick added the word “airway” in the restaurant name in a nod to its more than 50-year history, and he had the pharmacy’s neon “airway” sign refurbished so it can hang outside. The exterior has gotten a major overhaul, however, with tall arches encasing the restaurant and a 35-foot-tall oak tree planted on the partially covered patio. The menu is full of neighborhood grill classics that Quick and chief operating officer Matt Gottlieb are still fine-tuning. The interior is meant to evoke the Mad Men and Jackie O era, without the gimmick.
- Opening date: June 2, 2023 [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: American
- Address: 5959 Royal Lane, Dallas
Slider and Blues
in University Park
Finally, a restaurant where parents can take their kids and avoid embarrassment. That’s the idea behind Slider and Blues, a reboot restaurant from the owner of Hudson House. Slider and Blues was a kid-friendly pizza and wings restaurant with games that was open in Dallas and several of its suburbs in the 1990s and 2000s. Dallas restaurateur Hunter Pond’s 2023 version on Hillcrest Avenue, across from Southern Methodist University, has a Sandlot movie theme. The menu will include pizzas, smash burgers, chicken tenders, Nathan’s Chicago hot dogs and milkshakes.
- Opening date: June 3, 2023 [read more here]
- Cuisine: American
- Address: 6309 Hillcrest Ave., Dallas
Le Margot
in Fort Worth
Although TV personality Graham Elliott spent 20 years in Chicago, he lived in Dallas in the late ‘90s and cooked with Dean Fearing and Stephan Pyles. He’ll use this varied background to help create the menu at Le Margot, a French restaurant near the Tanglewood area of Fort Worth. It’s named after co-owner Felipe Armenta’s 3-year-old daughter. Dishes include Lyonnaise salad, escargot and tartare, without the fuss, Elliott says.
“With French cuisine, you’ve got two worlds: the super stuffy server wearing a tuxedo, and then you’ve got French peasant country food: pâtés and pigs’ trotters,” he says. Le Margot is aiming for sophisticated and lively, and it’s one of the best business lunch restaurants in D-FW.
Armenta and Elliott also plan to open a steakhouse in Fort Worth’s Mule Alley named Cowboy Prime and an unnamed Italian restaurant in Benbrook. They hope to open eight restaurants within 20 months.
- Opening date: June 21, 2023 [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: French
- Address: 3150 S. Hulen St., Fort Worth
Via Triozzi
in East Dallas
Dallasite Leigh Hutchinson spent a year learning to cook in Italy, elbow to elbow with an Italian chef who took Hutchinson under her wing as if she were her nonna. “It was the best time of my life,” Hutchinson says. She’s bringing that knowledge, coupled with a year studying Italian gastronomy and culture, back to Dallas to open her first restaurant, Via Triozzi. The restaurant is named after the street Hutchinson lived on in Scandicci, a small Italian town surrounded by olive groves, where she says she learned to love Italian culture and food. Her two-story restaurant on Lowest Greenville is designed to feel like a trattoria, “like my grandma’s house,” Hutchinson says. Her lasagna is destined to be a star.
- Opening date: Aug. 16, 2023. [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: Italian
- Address: 1806 Greenville Ave., Dallas
F1 Smokehouse
in Fort Worth
Fort Worth mover and shaker Felipe Armenta has partnered with Iron Chef contestant and MasterChef judge Graham Elliott for a fleet of new restaurants in Fort Worth and beyond. F1 Smokehouse moved from its food-truck spot near the Trinity River to Fort Worth’s Cultural District, near the new Crescent hotel. Armenta wants to elevate the service at his reinvented barbecue joint: “Sometimes I struggle at traditional barbecue spots,” he says. “Service is lacking, or I really don’t want to eat off of a paper plate, with plastic forks.” The 2.0 version of F1 takes a smoked-meat menu and “put it in a nicer home,” Elliott says.
- Opening date: Sept. 21, 2023 [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: Barbecue
- Address: 517 University Drive, Fort Worth
Green Point Seafood and Oyster Bar
in the Knox District
Restaurateur Greg Katz has mastered the attitude behind a brasserie with his Fitzhugh Avenue restaurant Beverley’s, and he offers a similar feeling to Dallas’ Knox Street with his new seafood-focused restaurant Green Point. It’s named after the suburb in Cape Town, South Africa, where his grandparents had a flat. Green Point is designed to be an “all day, every day” restaurant that’s more refined than a lobster shack — but also not a special occasion place, Katz says. He created a menu that focuses on fish and oysters but also offers appetizers like steak carpaccio and entrees like roasted chicken or steak.
Katz believes in the vibrancy of the neighborhood, and it’s easy to join him. “I can just picture people shopping on a Saturday afternoon and stopping in for oysters and Champagne,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about this for years.”
- Opening date: Sept. 26, 2023 [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: Seafood
- Address: 3219 Knox St., Dallas
A word about the restaurants in Dallas’ Knox District
Green Point is “right in the middle of everything” on Knox Street, Katz says, and it has become home to a who’s who of restaurants. Other restaurants of note on Knox:
- New restaurant Pizzana opened in fall 2022, joining the street’s staples like Toulouse and Taverna, Up on Knox, Georgie and Le Bilboquet.
- In 2023, Mister Charles opened in the former Highland Park Soda Fountain. It comes from the owners of the Charles and El Carlos and an American restaurant
- Sushi and martini spot Anchor Bar, another project from Hunter Pond, opened in fall 2023.
- Knox also has a new Berkley’s Market, Foxtrot coffee shop and convenience store, and Village Baking Co.
The Knox District will be the busiest food block in Dallas, and there’s much more to report on what will open there next.
The food zone at EpicCentral
in Grand Prairie
South of Interstate 30, just off the Bush Turnpike, the city of Grand Prairie is cultivating a 172-acre park that’s unlike anything else in Dallas-Fort Worth. EpicCentral is the name of the yearslong project that will include at least five restaurants and two hotels. Five man-made lakes, a rock climbing park, a water park, a fitness center and an entertainment complex called Chicken N Pickle are open now. Imran Sheikh, the restaurateur who invested heavily in Deep Ellum with his restaurants Vidorra, Stirr, Harper’s and Serious Pizza as well as a nightclub named Citizen, is taking inspiration from some of those concepts with a new plan to open several new restaurants in Grand Prairie’s Epic development.
There’s The Finch, Mexican restaurant Vidorra, and a coming-soon food hall called Serious Eats that will sell slices, sliders and shakes. Near those is Loop 9 BBQ, a smoked-meat restaurant from Larry Lavine, the co-founder of Chili’s.
- Opening date: Throughout 2023; most are open now
- Cuisine: various
- Address: In and around 2960 Epic Place, Grand Prairie
Kaiyo
in East Dallas
Jimmy Park, who operates an omakase restaurant named Shoyo and is one of Dallas’ best chefs, opened a casual izakaya on Lowest Greenville. Kaiyo and Shoyo — say those two names aloud — are sibling restaurants about 400 feet apart. Whereas Shoyo is serious and pricey (and reservations are difficult to come by), Kaiyo is a freewheeling place, no reservations required, that starts with Japanese cocktails and then moves on to shareable plates like marinated chicken, takoyaki, sushi and sashimi. Park wants the experience to be fun.
“I grew up in the ‘90s, listening to Biggie and Nas,” he says. “I want to play my playlist and I just want this restaurant to be me.”
- Opening date: Nov. 21, 2023 [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: Japanese
- Address: 2014 Greenville Ave., Dallas
Mirador
in downtown Dallas
One of Dallas’ loveliest restaurants of the past decade, Mirador is making a comeback in late 2023. The restaurant is on the penthouse level atop designer shop Forty Five Ten in downtown Dallas. Its evolution has the potential to be a spectacular story of Dallas talent: Dallas chef Junior Borges opened Mirador in late 2016 and eventually worked with a chef named Travis Wyatt. After Borges moved on to create his own unrelated restaurant, Meridian, Wyatt became his executive sous-chef. In 2023, diners will find Wyatt back at Mirador as its executive chef. He’ll make the Mirador menu his own, but favorites such as the ricotta toast, chicken paillard and farro bowl will reappear.
- Opening date: Dec. 8, 2023 [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: Progressive American
- Address: 1608 Elm St., Dallas
Birdie’s Eastside
in East Dallas
The vacant Luby’s on East Mockingbird Lane in East Dallas has been the talk of East Dallas for well over a year. In late 2023, the owner of Dallas restaurants TJ’s Seafood and Escondido Tex-Mex Patio opened an Austin-style neighborhood restaurant and beer garden in the space formerly occupied by the sprawling East Dallas cafeteria. It’ll be massive, with a 7,500-square-foot patio and a 10,000-square-foot indoor restaurant. Owner Jon Alexis says Birdie’s will have “a solid kids menu” in addition to sandwiches, salads and entrees. Adult beverages, too.
- Opening date: Dec. 13, 2023 [read more about it here]
- Cuisine: TBD
- Address: 6221 E. Mockingbird Lane, Dallas
Royal Bastard
in the Dallas Design District
The only restaurant we’ve moved from 2022′s most exciting restaurants list to 2023′s is Nick Badovinus’ coming-soon supper club Royal Bastard. A restaurant has to be seriously anticipated to make our list twice, and this one is. Perhaps it’s the fact that Badovinus’ “unapologetically premium” restaurant is inside the former King’s Cabaret strip club. Maybe we’re drawn to the flashy synergy that will surely be created between Royal Bastard and Town Hearth, another one of Badovinus’ restaurants that’s across the street. And it could be that Badovinus’ style here, an “urban ruin” interior juxtaposed against a high-end menu, is just puzzling enough to be alluring. For once, we’ll allow the tease.
- Opening date: TBD
- Cuisine: Retro continental
- Address: 1602 Market Center Blvd., Dallas
Chloe’s Newsstand
in Deep Ellum
What happens when Super Bowl champion Remilekun “Remi” Ayodele, Lights All Night music fest entrepreneur Hank Keller and MasterChef contestant Rami Rassas are in the same room? They dream up an idea to open a newsstand-themed lounge in Deep Ellum with modern American fusion food and flashy cocktails. The menu might include dishes like Rassas’ Chilean sea bass or a sumptuous filet served in a room the founders describe as vibrant and classy. (“You do want to look good when you come,” Ayodele says.) Before customers even open the door, they’ll find an actual newsstand in front, where newspapers, magazines, coffee and hot dogs will be for sale.
- Opening date: opening date has slid into early 2024
- Cuisine: Modern American fusion
- Address: 2540 Elm St., Dallas
Bar Sardine
in University Park
Dallas restaurant operator Pond is expected to have a whopping seven restaurants open in or near Snider Plaza by the end of 2023. The smallest one — and perhaps the most charming — is Bar Sardine, named for the New York City gastropub that closed in the West Village in 2020. It was Pond’s favorite oyster and cocktail bar in New York, so he secured the trademark to reopen it as his own in Texas. Bar Sardine is Pond’s first straight-ahead bar, as his fleet of restaurants is otherwise dominated by American food: Hudson House, D.L. Mack’s, Brentwood, Anchor Bar (in Preston Hollow and on Knox Street) and others. An evening at Bar Sardine should start simply, with a martini.
- Opening date: opening date has slid into early 2024
- Cuisine: Oyster bar with cocktails
- Address: 6805 Snider Plaza, Dallas
Lucky Dog Saloon
in Uptown Dallas
From the owners of Katy Trail Ice House down the street comes a smaller, drinks-focused bar called Lucky Dog Saloon. It will move into the former Asel Art Supply, in a building that bar owner Buddy Cramer says has been standing since the 1920s. Lucky Dog will be a no-frills corner bar with shuffleboard. “There’s nothing like that in Uptown anymore, because nobody can really afford to do it,” Cramer says. He bought the property because he can use the parking lot for Katy Trail Ice House customers. The bar is a bonus.
- Opening date: opening date slid to July 2024 [read more here]
- Cuisine: Mostly cocktails and beer; barbecue sandwiches and bar bites will come from Katy Trail Ice House
- Address: 2701 Cedar Springs Road, Dallas
Read The Dallas Morning News’ past stories about exciting new restaurants each year:
Story originally published Dec. 26, 2022 and updated Jan. 9, 2023, April 11, 2023, June 6, 2023, Nov. 20, 2023 and Feb. 20, 2024.
