Change is in the air at Dallas restaurant Meridian. The modern Brazilian restaurant recently rolled out a four-course prix fixe menu format and announced a new executive chef.
Justin Mosley, who helped open Meridian as chef de cuisine, was recently promoted to executive chef. Chef Junior Borges, who was recently named a 2023 James Beard semifinalist in the Outstanding Chef category, is still at the helm of the restaurant and will continue to work alongside Mosley. Borges also remains vice president of culinary over all of the restaurants at the Village Dallas, where Meridian is located.
“He deserves to be executive chef,” Borges says of Mosley. “He deserves to further his career. He is one of the most talented people I have worked with and one of the most talented chefs in Dallas. We’ll still be working together every day.”
Borges and Mosley have worked side by side for the better half of the past decade at FT33, Mirador and now Meridian. The two developed a close relationship, with Borges calling Mosley a “little brother” of sorts, and Borges’ mother granting Mosley the designation of an “honorary Brazilian.”
“He has put a lot of effort into learning the culture, the dishes and the names of everything,” Borges says.
The chefs worked together to overhaul Meridian’s menu and reconstruct it into a fixed-price layout with four courses of three to four dishes each. The result was a $73-per-person meal with optional $40 wine pairings and al la carte additions like the restaurant’s signature beach cheese.
Prix fixe menus aren’t common in Dallas, but since the pandemic they have become increasingly popular around the country, and it’s likely Dallas diners will see more local restaurants soon follow suit. The city is already seeing more set-price tasting menus at restaurants like Georgie, Petra and the Beast, Carte Blanche, Tatsu and Shoyo. Such menus give diners a level of certainty about what they’ll spend, and they allow kitchens to operate with greater efficiency and less waste, which is largely why Meridian made the switch to prix fixe.
Borges says that since the restaurant opened in 2021, the menu had grown to nearly 30 dishes, and it was time to scale back and refocus. With a prix fixe menu, ingredients go further, dishes must be more intentional, and value for diners must be carefully weighed.
“Four courses is a great progressive meal, and it allows us to keep the price reasonable while still giving people options,” Borges says.
The new menu is a catalog of collaborative creativity between Borges and his team, and it’s designed to change frequently with the seasons and micro seasons. The meal begins with bread service followed by one of three first-course dishes, one of which is rounds of shrimp and salted cod sausage over silky confit yolk with potato pave and pickled ramps.
The second-course selections are mostly pastas like anolini, an Emilia-Romagna pasta typically stuffed with stewed beef and served in a beef broth. Meridian’s version is filled with duck confit, topped with small leaves of red sorrel and served in a delicate broth made from Brazilian tucupi, a derivation of cassava root.
The moqueca — a Brazilian fish stew that has become a signature dish at Meridian in one form or another — is still on the menu as a third course. The current iteration is served with flaky skate atop steamed rice with a plantain and coconut broth poured tableside. Dry-aged pork loin, Wagyu New York strip and stuffed quail make up the other third-course proteins, followed by a dessert course of cheesecake ice cream, a grapefruit crémeux pavlova and a Brazilian brigadeiro.
The prix fixe menu presents a fun creative challenge, Mosley says. When one part changes, the rest must be shifted and tweaked to maintain cohesion.
Those changes often come from Mosley and Borges bouncing ideas back and forth and hammering out a dish until it’s ready — something that won’t change with Mosley’s new role.
“We both think really similarly about food,” Mosley says. “And with this new menu it’s been nice to get more dialed in. It allows us to push each other in a healthy way.”
Meridian is at 5650 Village Glen Drive, Dallas. thevillagedallas.com/meridian/.
