Tim Love's new Italian restaurant in Fort Worth feels like a trip to the Italian coast

Tim Love, the chef who opened the masculine Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in Fort Worth nearly 20 years ago, is taking a decidedly feminine approach with his newest restaurant, Gemelle.

It's easy to spot on White Settlement Road, with its pink neon lettering out front and a long, white fence hiding a sunken garden with cabanas, bocce ball courts and a bar.

"I wanted to build a very feminine restaurant, which is not what people expect from me," Love says before the May 30 opening date. His plan worked. This stylish, airy space will also feel different for anyone who remembers the casual burger joint and patio that used to be there, Thurber Mingus.

The name Gemelle (pronounced "jeh-MEL-lay") is Italian for twin girls, and the restaurant is named after Love's 16-year-old identical twin daughters, Anna and Ella. It's a small place inside — just 65 seats — which means that anyone waiting for a table will be forced (forced!) to wander out to Love's raised-bed gardens, where customers can see their dinner being grown. Customers can't make reservations, and that's on purpose.

"We have a gigantic waiting area down in the garden," Love says. "You're going to want to have a drink."

It's easy to picture: parents with toddlers, college students, couples on dates and people with their pets hanging out on the lawn, drinking house-made limoncello spritzers and aperol spritzes. Close your eyes and you can almost see down the cliff at a would-be Amalfi Coast, the vacation spot in Italy that inspired the restaurant.

"I wanted it to feel very Euro," Love says.

It's been three-and-a-half years since Love has opened a restaurant, the last one being a Lonesome Dove in Knoxville, Tennessee. And it's been six years since he opened a restaurant in North Texas: Queenie's Steakhouse in Denton, named after Love's mom. Love is one of Fort Worth's buzziest chefs — known for his restaurants and for his TV appearances on Iron Chef America, Top Chef Masters and Restaurant Startup — and North Texans are bound to visit his newest restaurant with anticipation.

For a bit of dinner-theater flair, servers will prep limoncello on a table in the middle of the patio at dinnertime — instead of doing that in the kitchen beforehand like most restaurants might. Anyone who orders the margherita pizza will be given a pair of scissors to clip off their own basil in the garden. While they're down there, they can pick some mint for cocktails.

"The point of the garden is just to show people their food before they order it," Love says.

Love acts as the restaurant's executive chef, and his team of chefs led by director of culinary Amanda Vasquez has been working on the menu. During a sneak peek at the restaurant, Love stopped to taste the limoncello spritzer ("could be a bit sweeter") and budino dessert ("the caramel is too grainy"). He seemed unfazed about getting them right by opening day; it's his ninth restaurant.

But Gemelle is his first Italian one. The menu starts with upscale bar snacks like hand-battered mozzarella sticks and baked chicken wings with blue cheese. The salad selection includes a shaved zucchini and arugula option, with 100% of its vegetables coming from the garden. The celery-root carpaccio is a more adventurous vegetarian dish topped with an apple cider-walnut vinaigrette, Parmesan and spiced walnuts.

Love is "especially proud of the pasta," he says, with the simple cacio e pepe as a favorite. Despite having only a handful of ingredients, "it's the hardest dish to make," he says. It's also made with gemelli, a type of pasta that seems all but required at Gemelle.

The pizzas come square and sliced into six pieces. Fans of The Woodshed Smokehouse, one of Love's restaurants in Fort Worth, might be interested in the brisket pizza. Lonesome Dove fans might like the rabbit-rattlesnake sausage pizza with pepperoni, hamburger and country ham.

"I think every restaurant I open is an evolution of where I'm at in my life," Love says.

Right now, Love is, figuratively, on the coast of Italy. We expect the whole town to want to join him.

Gemelle is located at 4400 White Settlement Road, Fort Worth and opened May 30, 2019.