Seven months after signing on as as managing director at Stephan Pyles Flora Street Cafe, Dallas chef Tim Byres has left the Dallas Arts District restaurant.
Chef Stephan Pyles, who has ushered his style of Modern Texas cuisine into Dallas, hired Byres to make what seemed to be big changes to Flora Street. Formerly a very upscale dining room, Byres and Pyles partnered to "take all the intimidation factors away," Pyles explained in a story written in late 2018 about the "casualization" of Flora Street Cafe.
New lunch and brunch menus — and a dining room with no white tablecloths — debuted in May 2019. The re-imagined dinner menus land very soon.
Alongside the changes at Pyles' flagship, chefs also debuted a fancier experience in the private dining room attached to the restaurant. They're calling that restaurant-within-a-restaurant Fauna, headed up by chef Diego Fernandez, formerly of the Chicago restaurant Alinea.
Interestingly, Byres' 22-year-old son Liam Byres is a sous chef at Fauna. He will continue to work at the company, a spokeswoman confirms.
Tim Byres says his departure means he will build his consulting business. He won a James Beard award in 2014 for his cookbook Smoke: New Firewood Cooking, which explains his live-fire cooking techniques of smoking, grilling and roasting meat and vegetables over fire. Demonstrations of those techniques have taken him all over the world: to China, Chile and Kyrgyzstan.
Byres says he hopes to partner with resorts to teach them how to set up live-fire programs.
"It's excited to do this sort of thing," he says. "I think I'm a specialist in the sense — I have an understanding in high-level amenity entertaining."
Byres once operated two restaurants carrying the cookbook's name: Smoke in West Dallas, then Smoke in Plano. Both restaurants are now closed. Byres also briefly operated a food stall at Legacy Hall in Plano called Tight Quarters Power Bowls; and he was involved in a now-closed restaurant inside NorthPark Center in Dallas called The Theodore.
His fine dining experience includes working at the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek and as the executive chef for Pyles at his previous downtown Dallas restaurant, Stephan Pyles.
"We're still great friends and hopefully we'll still be able to collaborate and do stuff in the future," Byres says of Pyles.
Byres says he'd be open to being a head chef at a Dallas restaurant, but that it isn't top-of-mind.
"I don't want to discount any possibility or opportunity," he says.
"For me, right now, the best thing is doing something on my own," he says.
