Fort Worth has been waiting on this one for a while. Hao Tran — the chef behind Hao’s Grocery & Café on the Near Southside and the closest thing Fort Worth has to a dumpling institution — is building her first full restaurant. It’s called Duong DeVille, and if the five-month construction timeline holds, it should open sometime this summer.
The name comes from a Cadillac her father owned when she and her siblings were young. “Duong” means sweet street in Vietnamese. The restaurant is a tribute to him — her late father, Ky Dinh Tran — and to the food she grew up eating. Tran was born in Vietnam and came to the U.S. with her family after the fall of Saigon. She spent summers as a young woman working at her aunt’s Vietnamese restaurant in Montreal. That’s the lineage behind this place.
Duong DeVille will be at 405 Jim Wright Freeway in White Settlement, inside Entrepreneur Park — a new development from siblings Will Churchill and Corrie Fletcher, the Frank Kent Cadillac heirs. Churchill also co-owns Heim Barbecue. The space runs about 4,000 square feet with seating for roughly 124 inside and another 34 on a courtyard patio, plus a full bar, a private dining room, and a dedicated dumpling-making shop…