Critic's Notebook: Dallas dining is on the rise

"We have good and decent restaurants aplenty," I wrote, "but surprisingly few great and truly interesting chefs who are putting their mark on the city's culinary culture. ... At the moment, Big D dining is more about commerce than art. Fresh ideas are just not spilling out of kitchens and onto plates. Still, this could mark an important moment for dining here: Dallas feels to me as though it may just be beginning to blossom into a serious food city."Looking back on what's happened since then, it seems to me that's exactly what's come to pass. Dallas dining is on an upswing, and our future looks pretty bright.

Chefs devoted to farm-to-table cooking have raised the bar significantly, and over the past year we've started to see a style of cooking here that's really Texas at its best. You find it at Smoke in Oak Cliff, with Tim Byres' cooking. And in Fort Worth, from the kitchens of Casey Thompson at Brownstone and Molly McCook at Ellerbe Fine Foods. Chefs Randall Copeland and Nathan Tate started doing it at Ava in Rockwall last year.

They're all chefs who anchor the farm-to-table (or even garden-to-table) sourcing of great ingredients in a compelling North Texas idiom. It goes beyond trendy farm-to-table for farm-to-table's sake. Texas chefs are starting to find their collective voice, and it's at once fresher and more soulful than the Southwest cuisine that Stephan Pyles and Dean Fearing helped create in the 1980s.

You even find it – with a dose of good fun – at the brand-new Whiskey Cake in Plano, where co-chefs T.J. Lengnick and John Franke are grilling mussels over mesquite, making can't-stop-eating-it beef jerky and dousing toffee cake with whiskey. OK, so the "farm-to-fork" part of it comes off as tangential. But it's original, the place has energy, and just out of the gate, it's a lot of fun.

The scene has really heated up in the last month or two. Suddenly the ideas aren't just spilling out of kitchens and onto plates; they're flying fast and furious. One of my favorite dishes of the year – Tim Byre's pork jowl bacon with house-pickled cucumber salad – was celebrated in the national press after I gushed about it a few times. Lately he's added something to Smoke's menu that sounds even more exciting: pit-roasted cabrito and fresh masa with tamarind goat's milk cajeta and green apple salsa verde. Dude!

Stephan Pyles is still an exciting restaurant, and chef Pyles continues to push the envelope, traveling and picking up ideas but never losing his Texas accent. He recently brought in a talented new executive chef, Christopher Short, to head the kitchen, and it will be fascinating to see what they do there together.

Turning out great food does not by any means require a Texas accent, though.

Nick Badovinus is wowing diners, too, with his ever-expanding collection of Neighborhood Services. Then there's Avner Samuel and his executive chef, Jon Stevens, at Nosh. The closing of Aurora – a formal, insanely expensive, exclusive restaurant that had plenty of pretension but (in its last year, anyway) few, if any, fresh ideas – is a sign that Dallas is moving in the right direction. What Samuel and Stevens are creating in the kitchen at their bistro – dishes like escargot fritters with mandarin-flavored tartar sauce or a deliciously deconstructed New England clam chowder – is playful, interesting, adventurous and not one bit pretentious.

Similarly, while I was sad to hear that chef Sharon Hage was closing her 9 ? -year-old restaurant York Street last month, I quickly came to feel the closing was a positive thing. Hage was, by all accounts, a pioneer in putting farm-fresh produce on the plates of Dallas diners. But although I loved her cooking at York Street (where I had by far the best sardines I've eaten in Dallas. Oh, wait – those were the only sardines I've eaten in Dallas), the restaurant – the cozy room, the decor, the china – felt tired. Hage closed York Street not, as she explained, for financial reasons; it was doing well. She closed because it was time to move on. I think everyone in this town who loves great cooking is excited and curious to find out what she'll do next. (Maybe that even includes Hage.)

Meanwhile, our Japanese dining scene, which was already strong, has gotten even better. Teiichi Sakurai is cooking at the top of his game at Tei-An, which I recently awarded five stars in a review (it's now one of only two five-star restaurants in Dallas). Sakurai's repertoire respects and celebrates tradition, as in a dish that presents San Diego sea urchin roe four ways. The chef also transcends tradition with, for instance, a bowl of sumptuous slow-braised pork over handmade, green-tea-scented soba noodles.

Yamato Yutaka's makeover of Sharaku Sake Lounge recently introduced Big D to dining izakaya-style. Sushi may not be Dallas' forte, but we have outstanding kushiyaki, impressive robata and world-class soba.

Italian cooking, which had been a weak link in Dallas, is suddenly having a great moment. A year ago, the food world was depressed that Lola had closed. Now its talented chef, David Uygur, has just opened Lucia in Oak Cliff's Bishop Arts District. There he's presenting house-cured salumi, house-baked bread, house-made pasta (whole wheat spaghetti with an incredible braised duck ragù) – and unusual dishes such as oyster risotto and seared beef tongue with roasted onions and salsa verde.

Alberto Lombardi just opened a proper Tuscan steakhouse in Uptown, La Fiorentina. Chef Julian Barsotti, pushing his considerable skills in the direction of focused regional cooking, recently presented an array of spectacular dishes from Emilia-Romagna during a three-night celebration of the region.

Finally, there's French, a cuisine beloved by Big D. Unfortunately, at the moment, creative Gallic energy is at a nadir, with the genre largely represented by tired standard dishes of the 1950s. Hotel sauce, my friends, is alive and well.

Of course, there are exceptions, and French-leaning Nosh is a promising step toward something délicieux.

The grand exception can be found at the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek. A few months after chef Bruno Davaillon arrived there in late 2009, I wrote my first five-star review for the paper. The review celebrated dishes such as a king crab and butternut squash soup with the texture of silk charmeuse; crisp-skinned squab with perfectly seared foie gras, earthy Jerusalem artichoke puree and petals of Brussels sprouts braised with bacon; and pork belly, unctuous within, crisp without, profoundly flavorful and paired with savoy cabbage and delicate braised daikon radish. It was showered with a flurry of shaved black truffles at the height of their season.

Perfectly attuned to the seasons and with exquisite taste, Davaillon's cooking dazzles even more brilliantly now than it did last spring. In the tradition of the best cooking in France, the chef has sought out and embraced great local ingredients, such as Broken Arrow Ranch venison from Ingram, Texas, and Homestead Gristmill grits from just north of Waco. Did you leave room for something sweet? The Mansion's pastry chef, David Collier, is a formidable talent, too.

In February, legions of football fans, celebrities, their entourages and more will descend upon Dallas, seeking not just a great game, but the best of everything our city has to offer. In terms of our restaurant scene, the timing couldn't be better, for what awaits them is some pretty compelling dining – and a creative spirit among our chefs that they would have been hard-put to find a year ago.

Hallelujah.