The Network Bar, a private social club in West Dallas’ Trinity Groves development, will close on May 31, 2024.
The venue near the base of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge is a members-only lounge for happy hours, business meetings, casino nights, lunches and dinners, and for big-group events like wedding receptions and baby showers.
The Network Bar opened in 2017, at the front of a wave of private clubs in Dallas that offered an exclusive place for social events — like country clubs, but without the golf. At all of these, members pay for access. Park House in Highland Park Village came along in 2018, and Golightly in Dallas’ Harwood District opened in 2023. Dallas also has clubs for wine drinkers and collectors: Graileys in the Dallas Design District and 55 Seventy in Preston Center.
The Network Bar was conceived as a spot for businesspeople, specifically: “like LinkedIn, but with cocktails,” co-founder Phil Romano told The Dallas Morning News in 2017.
At its inception, The Network Bar was looking for “eager, ever curious, always-on-the-hunt individuals,” we reported. It was filled with leather armchairs and photos of wild animals. The bar serves classic cocktails and wine.
Trinity Groves has gone through some dramatic changes in Network Bar’s nearly seven years mixing drinks. The COVID-19 pandemic wiped out a host of restaurants, and then Romano announced a change to the Trinity Groves business model: It would no longer be a restaurant incubator. By 2022, Romano and his partners had hired then-29-year-old chef Julian Rodarte as its CEO, and for a year, he opened new restaurants in the development.
Network Bar’s closure signals yet another change in West Dallas.
In a statement to Network Bar’s private members, management said they are “looking to create a new and more inclusive environment on weekends and for late nights” in its place. Network Bar was open weekdays only for lunch, dinner and drinks, but closed by 9 or 10 p.m.
Trinity Groves is headed toward “a new chapter,” the statement said. A spokesperson didn’t say what would take its place.
Members might have seen the news coming. The note says annual memberships were turned into monthly memberships in 2023 “to prepare for this transition.”
Members will not be charged for the month of May 2024, though the bar and restaurant are expected to continue serving guests.
The Network Bar is at 331 Singleton Blvd. (in the Trinity Groves development), Dallas. It’s expected to remain open on weekdays until its closure date, May 31, 2024.
