One Arts Plaza, Downtown’s daring development in the Arts District, finally arrives — like gangbusters — with Screen Door Dali

aHE’S A LITTLE BIT COUNTRY: Screen Door chef Fitzgerald Dodd, left, and proprietor Scott Jones, both Southern boys, bring their concept of upscale comfort food to One Arts Plaza.

As Dallas continues in earnest its bid for international recognition — and why shouldn’t it? — the beneficiaries aren’t just the conventioneers and travel experts the city hopes to attract. For a while, residents have been able to dip their toes in the water of Downtown development, from restaurants like Stephan Pyles, Charlie Palmer and Fuse to living quarters like the Mosaic and the Merc.

But part of the largest renewal project, the Arts District, is a finally coming on line. And if what it has to offer already is any indicator, Dallas might actually achieve what it has always thought it deserved.

The first thing you notice about Screen Door as you enter through a standard glass-and-steel barrier that greets you is: “This is not a screen door.”

In fact, you won’t find the mosquito-blocking mesh hinged anywhere in this upscale-but-down-home eatery, which looks out on the plaza of the mixed-use facility that anchors Downtown’s Arts District. The closest you will come are the menus, printed with a fine weave of metal that makes you feel as if you’re glancing through a rural Southern kitchen circa 1959.

But that’s enough. Screen Door is largely about recreating that idea of running in from after-school horseplay to a plate of mom’s best cooking.

Confession: When I first learned of the concept, I worried that it might settle on being a high-end Black-eyed Pea with prices to match. After all, how do you reinvent comfort food? Isn’t familiarity the point?

But Screen Door has exceeded my expectations. There’s comfort food, yes, but that’s only half of it — maybe less than half. Proprietor Scott Jones and executive chef Fitzgerald Dodd haven’t stopped at a country kitchen’s backdoor; they’ve jiggered classics with contemporary techniques and ingredients.

Small touches magnify the theme of mossy gentility. The breadbasket includes sugar-cinnamon scones, cheesy biscuits and cornbread, all with a smear of homemade apple butter (the scent of cloves and allspice evoking a cold Carolina morning). A pickled okra amuse and choice of Coke or RC Cola suggest Sheriff Andy and Gomer might be arriving any minute, while simple syrups of ginger-peach and lemon-mint are delivered with an order of iced tea (which also comes pre-sweetened).

The updating of dishes is most evident in the dinner menu’s division: “Then” on the left, “Now” on the right, seemingly declaring the rift between old school and new. Among the “Thens:” fried green tomatoes, catfish, meat loaf — indeed, items you would expect to see at Good Eats.

But look closer. The fried green tomatoes approach something like cooked caprese, with mozzarella melting over the corn-meal-breaded tomatoes and red pepper jam. And mixed in with the meat loaf are bits of foie gras. If mom really wanted you to eat liver, this would have been the way to do it.

On the “Now” side, dishes are decidedly more modern, but still mostly rooted in Southern tradition: cornbread croutons on the Caesar; brisket sliders with horseradish mayo; spoon bread served with the breast of duck.

The menu here is not, as a first glance might suggest, schizophrenically trying to be all things to all people, but a unified and unusually well-tailored deconstruction of Southern cuisine with enough lively ideas to appeal to most palates.

The sweet potato bisque is an excellent example. It is a dish for people who don’t like sweet potatoes. Liquefied to the consistency of cream (and without the stringiness of many yams), it draws spicy power from andouille sausage and green apples.

Even spicier is the gazpacho with peekytoe (a sweet, pink rock crab) that we loved. Milder is another bisque, served as part of the “crab three ways” dish, with blue crab in a dark, rich emulsion. The other two ways include peekytoe in the crab salad and a cake of jumbo lump crab thickly ensconced in a crust of corn meal. The caking was perhaps too heavy, but so authentic we didn’t mind.

Screen Door toys with expectations. We assumed the summer pea soup would be of the green-and-creamy variety, but no: The version here is of hulled purple peas in a briny broth — extremely salty, but wonderfully fresh.

High-quality ingredients are evident in almost every dish.

“This tastes like a tomato,” I said to one dining companion as I bit into a forkful of salad. “It is a tomato,“ he replied. “Exactly,” I said. “When was the last time you could say that?”

Instead of the mealy, pale cardboard that passes for a tomato these days, this was juicy and gorgeous.

The turkey pot-pie was likewise emblematic of the freshness. As the fork pierced the fluffy house-made crust, releasing steam and an aroma that shouted “fourth grade,” we could peer into a cavity as brazen with color as a Faberge egg. The carrots were vibrantly orange and, to our astonishment, still crunchy, as was the celery. A diner at a neighboring table, who was having the same, agreed that it was perhaps the best pot-pie she — or we — had ever had.

Somewhat surprisingly, the one dish we expected to be great was merely good: Mama’s fried chicken, which arrived slightly overcooked. The batter, though, was delicious, as was the comforting bitterness of the collard greens that accompanied it. Best on the plate, though, was a casserole that Granny would call macaroni and cheese, but here was gusseted with peas and bits of cured ham.

A TOAST: Joel Harloff, Dali executive chef, left, and wine director Rudy Mikula show off the wine country platter, an ideal accompaniment to one of the hundreds of well-priced wines.

Our primary complaint about the watermelon salad was the size of the plate it came on: It barely allowed room to enjoy the big squares of stacked melon topped with baby arugula, carpaccio of cucumber and doused in citrus vinaigrette with course salt. Salt plus watermelon is a no-brainer, but here the combination worked especially well.

Smart combos predominate. An excellent slab of Scottish salmon was well-cooked, but what made the dish was the red onion marmalade, caramelized in sugar with a tang that evinced the full flavor profile of the fish. It came perched on red bean and ham succotash that was exception: beans plump and al dente, the ham dense and meaty.

The filet with creamed spinach on a bed of Yukon gold potatoes was as well-seasoned and cooked as I’ve had in most steakhouses. The pork chop with a spicy barbecue sauce was elevated by the fruity sweetness of sarsaparilla and smoked apples.

You pay for such elegance. Screen Door isn’t cheap, especially at dinner, which has grown exponentially in popularity since its May opening. Certainly you’re paying in part for what stirred one dining companion to comment that “this is one of the easiest-to-look-at restaurants in Dallas.” The décor — sisal-like fabrics on the chairs and placemats, comforting damask curtains, bronze light fixtures that resemble the branches of a tree, lawn-like panels I have dubbed “Plexigrass” — is suitably swanky, but also reassuringly cozy. Feels like home.

If Screen Door represents family dinner in the plantation’s great hall, then Dali Wine Bar is the intimate get-together of adults in the parlor.

Tightly nuzzled across the fountains from Screen Door, Dali breathes a clubby whimsicality. Inspired by the Spanish painter (who was himself a great wine lover), it’s crowded with quasi-surrealist touches, almost in-jokes for Dali fans.

The chairs are curvaceous and abstract, like melting pocketwatches frozen in seated form; the tabletops of enamel-coated copper are colorful but muted, as if raindrops refracting light off a prism had been transferred to an artist’s palette. Forks and knives have the swoop of paintbrushes.

The Lucite bar — underlit and imbedded with hundreds of corks — fronts the small cellar, filled with a honeycomb of white PVC piping that hold bottles of wine. Bathroom doors, cleverly imprinted with vintage photographs masking the hint of a Dali painting, open into rooms where mirror, basin and light fixture seem almost disorientingly playful.

Despite its intense, artsy décor and heady moniker, Dali isn’t a haven for wine snobs — at least not exclusively. The proprietor, Paul Pinnell, certainly knows his stuff (honed after decades as manager of Nana), and his wine director, Rudy Mikula, has poured more than his share of vino. (He created the wine list for Nove.) But both are as interested in staking a claim as a unique cellar of varied and drinkable quaffs as much as finding snooty bottles for oenophiles.

Indeed, one of Dali’s impressive feats is its wine pricing. The by-the-bottle menu of course includes some budget-busters — Cristal rosé for half a grand pops out — but most bottles are terrifically affordable. For example, the subcategory of “Super Tuscans” on most restaurant wine lists signals bold, high-priced Italian reds; Dali lists one for $25, and the costliest on the current list (selections are swapped out regularly) is $79. All of that is in addition to a panoply of by-the-glass wines, all but a few under $20 and many of those in the single digits.

Man cannot live by fermented grape alone, of course, which is what executive chef Joel Harloff is for. He and his kitchen staff create wine-friendly dishes that complement a rangy wine list.

The Scottish salmon with succotash at Screen Door is perfected with the addition of red onion marmalade on top.

Designing a fairly fixed menu with the versatility to pair effortlessly with a huge selections of wines — reds, whites, rosés, sparkling, fortified — can’t be easy, especially when drink is the draw. But Harloff has ginned up a series of small plates in the style of a Provence bistro to accompany almost anything.

The wine country platter ($16) is a safe bet for nearly any wine. A cross-section of seasonal meats and cheeses, breads and spreads, ours included black truffle pate, salami and pancetta; a pale tapenade and pesto; and mimolette and dolcelatta cheeses (the later, an especially pungent blue, was intoxicatingly yummy on its own). Even marinated artichoke hearts didn’t spoil the chardonnay or the rich red we sipped with it. A similar dish, the artisan cheese plate ($12–$20) that included balsamic-infused figs and nuts, also served as good munchies with wine.

Dali serves a small dinner menu that builds on the appetizer plates. Probably our favorite starter was the feuille-wrapped mozzarella ($6), a tender brick of semi-soft cow’s milk cheese covered in thin ply of phyllo pastry, then scorched. If there’s anything better than the crispness of fried cheese, I’ve never tried it, and here it comes with a drizzle of hibiscus honey and pecans, which bring out the nutty-sweet flavor of the mozzarella.

For entrees, halibut ($21) proved a winner. The fish, crunch on the edges but tenderly cooked inside, sat atop fregola (a large-pearl pasta) with blood oranges, zucchini and celery in a champagne-dill sauce. The potent sun-dried tomato vinaigrette on the well-prepared Tasmanian salmon ($25) tied the dish together.

Desserts ($7–$8) were pleasant if unexceptional. Like crème brulee, molten chocolate cake with a berry coulis has become a staple, and though well-executed here, it doesn’t stand out. The napoleon was another matter: the tartness from a balsamic reduction combined with the fragrant herbaceousness of the strawberry-basil and orange cream delightfully.

We couldn’t resist trying the butterscotch pudding, a dish that would seem at odds with the other sophisticated, wine-minded items. More than a week later, I still couldn’t decide about it. Certainly a the whisper of sherry gave it wine cred, but the graham cracker crumble turned the pudding into edible quicksand — I was never sure whether my spoon would actually emerge each time I plumbed it in for another bite, but it says something that I kept going back for more.

As One Arts Plaza continues to grow — three more restaurants should open by the end of the year — I’ll keep going back there for more, too.






This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition July 11, 2008.