7 reinvented restaurants in Dallas-Fort Worth opening in 2024

As seen in our list of the most exciting new restaurants opening next year in Dallas-Fort Worth, 2024 will be a year of burgers, pasta and barbecue. But 2024 will also be a year of restoration.

The revived restaurants of 2024 are championed by people who cared enough to keep an old idea new — and those who found the capital to reinvent history.

St. Martin’s Wine Bistro, the Greenville Avenue restaurant where decades of Dallasites celebrated anniversaries and birthdays while listening to live piano, reopened on Bryan Street in March 2024. Margie’s Italian Gardens, a family-owned pasta restaurant that opened in 1953 in Fort Worth, will return to its former glory in 2024, some 71 years later, at the same address.

And, some breaking news: The father-daughter owners of the beloved Stoneleigh P signed a lease on Lemmon Avenue and moved in May 2024. Why? They lost their lease after 50 years open on Maple.

Other longtime restaurants didn’t make it in 2023 though, so first let’s offer a moment of silence: Ranchman’s in Ponder. Cisco Grill in University Park. Great American Hero in Dallas. The original Original Mexican Eats in Fort Worth. And others.

We’ve made it a point to celebrate historic restaurants in Dallas-Fort Worth. And we’re cheering on the restaurateurs who are helping restaurants live on, like Gigi Howell, the Benbrook resident who is reinventing Margie’s Italian Gardens in Fort Worth. It’s almost as if we are getting to know Margie, its owner and chef, posthumously.

Margie opened the restaurant in 1953. “There was Margie, smoking in the kitchen and cooking and wearing her red lipstick,” Howell says. Howell’s mother worked at Margie’s. When Howell was a kid, she would walk in the back door like she was family. (Funny enough, Howell thought Margie was her real grandmother until she learned otherwise.)

“When I was a baby, she’d sit me on her hip while she stirred sauce,” Howell says.

Margie died years ago, but the memory of the 1950s beauty with big hair and red lips continues. Howell is doing what other restaurateurs in North Texas strive to do in 2024: keeping memories alive.

“We want people to walk in and say, ‘Hell yeah, This is what this restaurant was like,’” Howell says.

Restaurants listed in order of expected opening date.

St. Martin’s Wine Bistro in Old East Dallas

The owners of St. Martin’s Wine Bistro promised their longtime French restaurant would live on after it closed on Greenville Avenue. The piano, the artwork, the white tablecloths: All of it moved south to Bryan Street, where the family recreated the fine-dining romance from the 1980 original. “It has been a part of a lot of people’s lives for a long time,” Omid Haftlang told The Dallas Morning News in mid-2023. You’ll find Champagne Brie soup and escargot back on the menu, just like before.

• Opening date: March 2024 [read more about it here]
• Cuisine: French-American, with live music seven days a week
• Address: 4223 Bryan St., Dallas

Bugatti Ristorante in Farmers Branch

Michael Bugatti has been selling pasta at his eponymous restaurants in Dallas since 1980. Bugatti tells an amusing story of moving to Dallas and recalling it was a “big city with nowhere to eat.” (He qualifies that today: “Dallas has become a great food city.”) He and restaurant president Zee Aziz were most famously at Northwest Highway and Lemmon Avenue in Dallas for more than 30 years. Bugatti moves in 2024 to Farmers Branch, where both operators believe they can reach a wider swath of diners from the Dallas suburbs. They’ll move into a new development at Interstate 635 and Interstate 35E among a bunch of interesting, new restaurants.

• Opening date: TBD; original date of March 2024 was pushed back
• Cuisine: Italian
• Address: 1940 Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway, Farmers Branch

Margie’s Italian Gardens in Fort Worth

The spirit of Italian immigrant Margie Walters is still inside the vacant restaurant on Camp Bowie West in Fort Worth’s Westland neighborhood. Since it opened in 1953, Margie’s Italian Gardens was one of the nicest places to eat in West Fort Worth. Gigi Howell would walk in the back door every Friday night, greet Margie, and eat rigatoni with meat sauce with her godparents when she was a child. Howell went on to celebrate nearly every birthday there. Although the restaurant stayed open for decades, the spirit of its glamorous owner faded until Howell made a plan in 2023 to reinvent it, along with several other properties in her old Westland stomping grounds.

The new Margie’s Italian Gardens will have a big Italian menu of lasagna, pizza, chicken Parmesan and “saucy and delicious” meatballs, Howell says, in tribute to Margie. “I hope that I’m making her proud,” Howell says. “She was such a cool person. If I can be half of what she was, that would be really great.”

• Opening date: TBD
• Cuisine: Italian
• Address: 9805 Camp Bowie West Blvd., Fort Worth

Stoneleigh P in Dallas

The Stoneleigh P celebrated its 50th birthday in 2023. The party was bittersweet, because owner Tom Garrison and daughter Laura Garrison knew then that the P would have to relocate because the landlord didn’t renew the lease. How could this place, once the site of a bizarre 24-hour dance-off, be anywhere but on Maple Avenue? It’s the people who matter, not the place, Laura Garrison says. The memories of the amusing fundraisers with Kinky Friedman, and the burgers enjoyed by celebrities Owen Wilson or Kenny Loggins, moved with them, as did the menu of burgers, wings and Lone Star beer on draft. Laura Garrison, who, at age 29, has been at the P her whole life, is both excited and scared. “If it doesn’t scare you, it’s not worth it,” she says.

• Opening date: May 2024 [read more about it here]
• Cuisine: burgers and beer
• Address: 4218 Lemmon Ave., Dallas

Pulido’s Mexican Restaurant in Fort Worth

Two months after the owners of beloved Tex-Mex restaurant Pulido’s announced its 57-year-old restaurants would close, Gigi Howell and her business partners Bourke Harvey and Marc McBride swooped in to save it. (You know them: Their restaurant group is reviving Margie’s Italian Gardens and reinventing the neighborhood gas station as a cocktail bar called Fuel Stop 80. They also sell burgers at JD’s and diner food at West Side Cafe.) The Pulido’s name will remain on the restaurants out of “immense respect for the legacy they’ve built,” Harvey said in a statement. Pedro and Dionicia Pulido were famous for their combo plates called the Papa Dinner and the Mama Dinner, and Howell says those will make the menu when Pulido’s comes back.

• Opening date: spring 2024
• Cuisine: Tex-Mex
• Address: 2900 Pulido St., Fort Worth

Jaxon Texas Kitchen in Las Colinas

Piggybacking on the $500 million Wells Fargo campus coming to the Irving-Las Colinas area, D-FW entrepreneur Kevin Lillis plans to open a beer garden named Jaxon Texas Kitchen to feed the banking company’s nearly 6,000 employees. If this sounds familiar, Lillis opened Jaxon on AT&T’s campus in downtown Dallas a few years back. The restaurant closed, but Lillis said then — and now — that Jaxon can live on. Jaxon 2.0 near the Toyota Music Factory will serve a mix of American and Southern food like a cheeseburger and a fried chicken sandwich. It’s expected to be neighbors with a barbecue joint and a cocktail lounge, two more indicators that the food and beverage options near Toyota Music Factory are getting a necessary redo.

• Opening date: September 2024
• Cuisine: American
• Address: 340 W. Las Colinas Blvd., Irving

III Forks in Addison

The original III Forks, a beacon for birthdays and business dinners, closed in 2020 after nearly 23 years in North Dallas. It was an iconic restaurant, serving pricey steaks and decadent desserts in a nearly 25,000-square-foot palace. III Forks reopened in Frisco mid-pandemic, and in 2024, III Forks makes a triumphant entry into Addison, just a few miles from its former home. Executive chef Chris Vogeli will be in the Addison kitchen, searing steaks. III Forks president Curtis Osmond says the food and service will remain the same, but they will operate in a 6,000-square-foot dining room. “It will be more intimate, and likely, more festive,” he says.

• Opening date: late 2024
• Cuisine: steak
• Address: 5100 Belt Line Road, Suite 800, Dallas

Story published Dec. 28, 2023 and updated June 10, 2024 with news of several restaurant reopenings.

For more food news, follow Sarah Blaskovich on X (formerly Twitter) at @sblaskovich.