There’s a martini for a dollar at Walloon’s next month, and the fine print is that you have to eat a dozen oysters to get there. Fair trade, honestly.
The restaurant is throwing its first Yacht Club Week starting Sunday, August 2, and the concept fits a room that was already halfway there. Chef Marcus Paslay opened Walloon’s in the summer of 2023 inside the old Fort Worth National Bank building on Magnolia Avenue, his fourth restaurant under the From Scratch Hospitality banner alongside Clay Pigeon, Piattello, and Provender Hall.
The name is a double borrow: Wallonia, the French-speaking half of Belgium, and Walloon Lake in Michigan, where a young Ernest Hemingway spent his boyhood summers. Paslay ran with the Hemingway thread, stacking the cocktail list with old-school classics and building the room around a horseshoe bar lit by milk glass sconces that throw everything into a sepia tint. The old bank vault survived the renovation too. It’s a wine room now, topped with an oyster shell where the door used to hang…