The back room at Flora Street Cafe, a spot that even Stephan Pyles admits was a chilly Siberia, is about to reopen as one of the most exclusive restaurants in Dallas.
Fauna, the restaurant within a restaurant at Flora Street Cafe, is set to debut on Saturday night with a single seating of 16 guests served an intricate menu of 12 courses, each paired with an exciting wine, a view into the open kitchen, and a video installation meant to enhance each dish.
Check out the debut menu here.
On Wednesday, Fauna's chef, Diego Fernandez, was working out the last details with sous chef Liam Byres, the son of Dallas chef Tim Byres. Last December, Tim Byres departed his restaurant Smoke to join the Pyles restaurant group as a partner. A few weeks ago, Liam Byres left the acclaimed Oklahoma City restaurant Nonesuch to join Fernandez in the kitchen. It was just nine weeks ago that Fernandez himself departed Alinea, Grant Achatz's modernist restaurant in Chicago, to become Fauna's chef.
Meanwhile, just a few feet from Fernandez and the open kitchen, Jim Rimelspach, the designer behind the sleek, art-filled dining room at Flora Street and other Pyles projects, was teetering on a high ladder in the dining room, artfully tying dried branches to the contemporary metal chandeliers.
"Are those crape myrtle branches?" Pyles asked from below.
"No, they're some other branches," Rimelspach replied.
"Some expensive branches!" Pyles said.
He and Pyles want to transform the boxy little room into a space that feels mysterious and foresty. Elk antlers - "From Ted Turner's ranch" Rimelspach adds - are set along high shelves and tables. The walls are painted the soft shades of a tree trunk. There are plans to cover a support pillar in moss or cacti. Above the open kitchen, two flat screens will alternately project what the chefs are working on with footage of the ingredients at their source, say, oyster beds during prep for an oyster course. Several dishes have aromatic elements involving foraged desert sage or pine.
The tables are dressed up in Frette linens, Catalonian ceramics, sterling flatware and antique silver candelabras. Once the lights are darkened and the heavy curtains drawn, it should feel romantic and slightly rustic.
Though the prices will be expense-account high, it's hard to imagine conducting business in this room. The tasting menu will be one of the most expensive in the city: $150, with wine pairings at $125 and $250, and soon a third tier of rare wines priced at "the sky's the limit," Pyles says. The prices include tax and tip.
The original plan for Fauna included stripping away the white tablecloths at Flora Street and "casualizing" the larger restaurant. But the linens are still there and that plan seems to be on hold. (The regulars howled about it, Pyles said.)
Fernandez, who is now living downtown, says the 12 courses, "plus surprises," will change monthly and emphasize seasonal, local ingredients as well as game, produce and seafood. The cooking techniques will be unfettered and global.
For one course, snails are poached in Granny Smith apple juice and basil, dressed in garlicky brown butter and served with "stumps" of salsify hollowed and filled with salsify puree. The plate is finished with kale, green apple, fiddlehead fern and carrot. "All the things the snails eat," he says.
The uni course will be made with live Santa Barbara urchins, their shells holding an uni custard infused with star anise, kaffir lime and saffron, and topped with fresh favas, English peas, purple hull beans. A riff on Caesar salad is made with a single leaf, egg yolk jam, chicken, finger lime and a nugget encapsulating extracts of lemon and oil. "I grew up with these flavors," Fernandez says. "My father worked for Hyatt Hotels, and I grew up on room service Caesar salad."
Fernandez was born in Mexico City, and his father, Rene, cooked at resorts throughout Mexico before moving the family to San Antonio when Diego was 12 and opening Azuca, a pan-Latin restaurant that he still runs there. At Fauna, childhood dishes beyond room-service Caesar are reflected in a cocinita pibil made with pork cheek cured in achiote and kumquat, and a reinvention of chocolomo, a game stew reimagined as a "ravioli" made with blue corn masa and squab forcemeat, garnished with avocado puree and chile jam. A tiny porcelain hibachi will be delivered along with it, where a cured duck heart skewered with a rosemary branch will be grilled at table.
Instead of drawing from the Flora Street wine cellar, sommelier Aaron Benson has gone his own direction and chosen bottles from Italy, France, Austria, Spain, Greece, Slovenia, Mexico, Hungary, California, Oregon and Texas. And that's just for the first menu. The debut pairings are some of the most creative in Dallas, with the quality of the lower-price wines rivaling upper-tier selections, save for prestige and price point. Benson expects to add magnums, rare bottles and aged wines with the third-level pairings debut later on.
Back when Fernandez was hired, he said, "I'm really looking to set Dallas on a stage where perhaps it has never been before." Now his stage is set and it's time to start the show.
Updated on June 13, 2019, to reflect lowering the price of the menu to $150 from $175.
