Before Dallas had a food identity, it had Stephan Pyles. And before Stephan Pyles had Star Canyon or Stampede 66 or Flora Street Cafe, he had a restaurant on Routh Street in Uptown that opened on November 27, 1983, and quietly changed everything about what this city thought it was capable of doing in a kitchen.
Pyles grew up in Big Spring, Texas — fifth generation, as deep in the state as roots go — where his family ran the Phillips 66 Truck Stop Café on the outskirts of town. He bussed tables as a kid, watched his mother turn flour and sugar into cobblers and cream pies, and absorbed the West Texas roadside food that would eventually become the foundation of his cooking philosophy even after he’d gone to Paris, studied at the Great Chefs of France Cooking School under Michel Guérard and Paul Bocuse and the Troisgros brothers, and become the kind of chef that serious food magazines started paying attention to. He came back to Dallas. He always came back to Dallas.
Routh Street Cafe was the result of all of it — the truck stop childhood and the French training and the Texas ingredients and a conviction that the two things were not in conflict. The building itself was a converted dilapidated art gallery at 3005 Routh Street, originally a home, sitting on a foundation of bois d’arc tree stumps. Pyles nearly walked away when he found out. He called the restaurant New American Cuisine at first, because that was the language the industry had at the time, but what it was becoming was something more specific: a Texas kitchen that took its own pantry as seriously as any European kitchen took its terroir…