Dallas doesn’t have a great many French restaurants, which is part of what makes the ones it has worth paying attention to. When a French kitchen works in this city, it works because someone decided that the cuisine was worth doing correctly rather than approximately. The following restaurants have all made that decision and kept it.
Lavendou Bistro Provençal
19009 Preston Road, Suite 200 | Tue–Sat 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. | Closed Sunday and Monday | Phone: (972) 248-1911
Pascal Cayet’s first job in food was at the Tour d’Argent in Paris — a restaurant overlooking Notre Dame that has been in operation since 1582, which is the kind of opening act that shapes everything that comes after. He came to Dallas in the 1980s, opened Chez Gerard on McKinney Avenue, turned it into one of Stanley Marcus’s favorite restaurants, and eventually moved north to Preston Road, where Lavendou has been his second chapter since 1996. Thirty years of the same hospitality, the same sourcing philosophy, and the same conviction that Provençal cooking — the lighter, herb-forward, olive-oil-driven cuisine of southern France — is what this city should have access to…