Thursday, May 2, 2024

What is Due Cucina? 3 things to know about the Italian restaurant moving into Dallas

dunston's steak house dallas

It's a vestige of simpler times, and a stark contrast to what you'll see in its modern counterparts. Walking through the front door of Dunston's on Lovers Lane is like stepping through a tear in the yellowed fabric of time. Outside, Pathfinders, Civics and other modern cars fill the parking lot, pointing at something close to present day happenings. But just paces away, walnut-stained wood paneling and drop ceiling tiles frame a restaurant that hasn't been updated since the Ford Pinto was America's best selling ride. Nixon was president the last time this dining room with burgundy patterned carpet got a facelift, and if you're wearing a burgundy jacket you can blend in perfectly with the tufted pleather booths in the main dining room.

dunston's steak house dallas

Food

They come for the grilled chicken served with a baked potato, and they come for that bacon-wrapped filet that's been on the menu from the very beginning. (It will set you back $14.95 these days.) They come for the Key lime pie dyed a shade of sea green, and they come for the daily cobbler that's offered in blueberry and peach. He has big dreams for Due’ Cucina, which is part restaurant, part food-tech startup.

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The Culpepper Cattle Co. will serve lunch, brunch, and dinner, with a menu based on it’s original Rockwall location. Pope’s career includes a stint at Saltgrass Steakhouse, and he cites the chain’s ethos of quality ingredients at approachable prices as an inspiration for the menu at Culpepper. Chad Dunston says not a week goes by that a customer begs him to not change a thing in the restaurant. And for better and worse, that's exactly what his family has done, because it's that sense of nostalgia that keeps regular customers coming back week after week.

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Lakewood will be the first location.

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He has two kids, ages 2 and 4, and he said he wants to open a restaurant where his kids — and others — can eat the Italian food he grew up with. The short rib ragù and bolognese ragù are two of Macchi’s favorites, and pasta is clearly the star here, with all of it made in-house. All three of those Texas restaurants will be in Dallas-Fort Worth, Macchi said. Two Italian entrepreneurs with Seattle roots will open fast-casual pasta shop Due’ Cucina in Dallas.

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Follow @sblaskovich on Twitter and ask her what to do, where to eat or where to drink in your area. Delivery and to-go will be a significant portion of the business — 40% on average at the other locations, Macchi said. Prices don’t change from lunch to dinner, and the priciest dish will be less than $15, he said. Those who dine in might start with appetizers like arancini or burrata. The restaurant has grown to four locations in Seattle, with one more under construction now in Redmond, Wash. The renovation in Lakewood will convert the former Unleavened Fresh Kitchen, which closed in late 2022, into an Italian restaurant with an $250,000 upgrade.

What is Due’ Cucina? 3 things to know about the Italian restaurant moving into Dallas

Walk through the front door for the first time and the throw-back appeal smacks you just as firmly as the smell of smoldering mesquite. Chad Dunston, Gene's son and a manager at the restaurants, says the steakhouse invasion started when the Palm, an import from New York City, opened downtown. Over the course of a decade, steakhouses grew to become power restaurants packed with massive dry-aged cuts priced at more than $100 each. Wine lists ballooned until a customer could spend more than his mortgage payment on a bottle of cabernet, and then the restaurant paradigm that was built on meat and a baked potato went so far as to offer a caviar bar. The steakhouse had become synonymous with deep pockets, and its more pedestrian predecessor was largely incinerated from our memories. The Dunston family didn't get the memo -- or, more likely, got it and blew it off.

"What we are is not by intention, we're just maintaining something," Chad says, describing what amounts to a restaurant museum, or that time capsule you taped shut in elementary school. Only in this time capsule, there is no wistfulness or sadness, only happiness, and fullness, and whatever that feeling is when you walk back to the salad bar for one more glob of ranch and don't look back. This is not the place you come for a steak cooked exactly how you requested. A strip steak ordered medium rare arrived closer to medium well one night.

They offer cuts of beef, in prime and choice grades, alongside pork chops and fish, all of them cooked over a hickory-fired wood pit you smell as soon as you walk in the door. It's a scent that captures all of your childhood campfires and wraps them up in the smell of your uncle Charlie's basement. Dunston's is a feast for all your senses, but you should know to not expect three-star dining when you open your menu. Back at the start of the year, we reported that it would open a space called Let’s Ask Keith, named after UNCO head Elias Pope’s father, and it would be a sit-down dinner restaurant, but the kind of food was undecided. Well, the plans changed, and by March of this year the company had decided to open a second location of the Culpepper Cattle Co.

Eater Dallas main menu

Once they’re up to eight or nine restaurants, they’ll raise more money to expand. The menu includes a slew of Texas-style favorite dishes, including a double-bone pork chop, a steakhouse burger, chicken fried lobster, and fried green tomatoes. It will also serve Tex-Mex classics, including fajitas, enchiladas, nachos, flautas, and a house queso. French fries and Saltine crumbs fall to the floor around high chairs, and a bottle of A-1 can be spotted on a table in the corner.

It will feature a covered patio outdoors that seats 60 and is ideal for having a margarita. And in a win for the neighborhood, it offers valet but also has four-hour free on-site parking.

On another evening, when two steaks were ordered rare to compensate, the strip arrived pink while the rib-eye was so unscathed by heat the red flesh jiggled when the plate hit the table. Why the servers ask how you want your pork chop cooked is a mystery; they're so thin they can only be cooked well done. It's as if the servers are using their tickets to stoke the fire.

Many of the customers are dining at Dunston's simply because they've been dining at Dunston's for as long as they remember. The regulars get table reservations marked with their names hand-scrawled in plastic placards. They know the best seats in the house are the art deco captains chairs and black leather booths in the back bar. But they've been here so long they can't see the history as clearly as a newcomer.

There are many steakhouses in Dallas -- places where you can order a thick cut of beef with potatoes gratin and spinach as a side, and places that serve plenty of overpriced bottles of red wine. There are plenty of steakhouses that boast a valet service, too. But the ones that tout a self-service salad bar complete with bacon bits and wooden bowls -- those are firmly in the margin.

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