Australian chef Curtis Stone has plans to open a "redefined steakhouse" in Dallas, inspired in part by his West Hollywood restaurant Gwen, says one of his partners, Dallas restaurateur Stephan Courseau.
The unnamed restaurant will be located on Travis Street in Dallas, in place of the former Villa-O, and will feature a menu created by Stone.
Stone has appeared on Iron Chef America, Top Chef Masters, Top Chef Junior, the Biggest Loser and more. He worked at Michelin-starred restaurant Mirabelle in London and now operates two restaurants in Los Angeles, Maude and Gwen.
The Dallas restaurant will be Stone's first restaurant outside of California. It won't be a Gwen restaurant, Courseau says, but it appears to be very similar to the glammy, West Hollywood hot spot.
The Dallas restaurant "is more like: use their experience [at Gwen] and translate it to Dallas," he says. However, the new restaurant's menu will contain "some dishes that already exist at Gwen," Courseau says. It will also have a butcher shop in-house, like Gwen does.
"I think the vibe will be very similar," Courseau explains. The word he uses to describe the design is "timeless." A firm from Brooklyn, N.Y., called GRT Architects will design the Dallas restaurant.
The partners in the project are Courseau, Stone and his brother Luke Stone.
That Dallas address was initially supposed to be a restaurant starring Dallas chef Nilton "Junior" Borges until they parted ways.
Courseau operates two restaurants on Travis Street already: Le Bilboquet and Up on Knox. "I [will] have three on the same street," he says. (One's technically on Knox Street. But they're very close in proximity.) "That's crazy, I know." He opened Le Bilboquet in 2013 after securing a license to debut a Dallas version of the New York original. Up on Knox opened in 2017.
Courseau is from France and lived in New York before Dallas, working in restaurants by Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud.
He's careful not to call the new restaurant a straight-ahead steakhouse. "How can we make it interesting so it's not just one more steakhouse?" Courseau asks, rhetorically. "Dallas doesn't need another steakhouse."
We have one more question: What will it be called?
The new restaurant will open at 4514 Travis St., Dallas, "sometime in 2019," says one of its partners.
