by Andrew Chalk
If I had friends coming into town from the French wine industry I would tell them that we were going out to a "bistro-type place" for dinner and take them to Rye. The restaurant interior would play the part: brick walls and filament lights making for a comforting and dimly-lit space. I would not talk up the place, I would let it speak for itself. What it would say would be one of the loudest expressions of creative definition and refined execution available in Dallas today. Enough, I would not be surprised to find, to cause my Gallic visitors to recalculate their culinary impressions of Dallas: ”There are great steakhouses here, but not just steakhouses”.
To get this experience, order the 12-course tasting menu. I added the beverage pairing as well. The courses were small plates and filled me up without leaving me stuffed. The ingredients spanned the culinary universe.
For example, the first course is three mouthful-sized preparations: A kangaroo tartare, A “cannoli” filled with crab and topped with caviar, and a blue cheesecake which is actually a cube of blue cheese mixed with pecans and topped with a sprightly cherry gastrique. This course does its job of grabbing the diner’s attention to announce “there is serious cooking going on here”.
Not only do the chefs hijack the vocabulary, they are not afraid to invoke a little trompe-l’oeil. The picture below appears to be a quail egg. It is actually carrot, and coconut milk, made to resemble said egg through the modernist technique of spherification. The result is so realistic that you can even ‘smash’ it open like an egg yolk. The tartare itself is actually vegetarian, made from fava beans and beet on a disk of challah.
The cleverness goes on. My favorite was cornucopia, five expressions of corn on one plate (white corn tamale, red corn grits, yellow corn ice cream, thin slices of blue corn chips), charred maitake mushrooms and huitlacoche. This little plate harnessed the sweetness of corn meal with the texture of chips and added creaminess through that clever use of ice cream.
Two of the dishes are dessert and come after overall portioning that is so controlled that you feel full, but not stuffed. Greenville Avenue is co hopping crazy now on weekends that I had to park in Nova Scotia, Canada, so the walk back to the car was welcome.
There are two beverage pairings, each seven items. Both span the beverage universe so I had sake, tequila, and a gin-based cocktail at various points. If you expect your beverage to be wine, order off the list. Also, tequila is offered in a margarita or straight. Take it as a straight sipping beverage. Rye may want to add a Texas wine to the selection, given their local ingredient focus. One liftout could be the Domaine Raspail-Ay 2021 Gigondas, which averages $44 retail. Good Texas GSMs from Pedernales, Ron Yates, and William Chris are competitive.
The culinary magicians behind Rye are Executive Chef Taylor Rause and Chef de Cuisine Jay Vopatek. One interesting factoid I gleaned about Rause is that he is self-taught. Thereby following in a long tradition of chefs, like Heston Blumenthal who has amassed six Michelin stars across three properties. At Rye, Rause is yet to garner his first, but I dined at three Michelin-starred restaurants last year and Rye is in that league. Watch the 2025 Michelin results for Dallas.
One final point is Rye’s unusual policy of unbundling certain overhead, employee benefits, from the menu prices. There is a 3% surcharge added to the bill to pay for them. I dislike this practice (and regard them as one form of ‘junk fees’ to go with hotel ‘resort charges’, etc.). It makes the menu prices inaccurate signals of price. For example, the tasting menu at Rye appears to be the same price as the one at Georgie ($185). But Rye charges 3% more when the bill comes. I had an interesting discussion with co-owner Tanner Agar about this and I accept his point that his intention was to highlight Rye’s emphasis on employee benefits. However, I think there are better ways to do this that don’t leave the sour taste of junk fees.
Note: For those who use "Alt Text" to read web pages, the alt text for all the images herein were generated by AI.
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