The Design District, a dust-swept canyon of old warehouses, is not Dallas’ prettiest place. Trees are as rare as pedestrians. The neighborhood’s most successful restaurants understand the landscape, concealing a spectacular interior in drab packaging. Town Hearth and El Carlos Elegante are near-windowless brick boxes, while Tango Room, tucked into an office plaza, is almost unmarked. Google Street View’s look at private club Graileys is obstructed by a dumpster. Their packages suggest none of what the diner will find inside: Town Hearth’s yellow submarine in a fish tank, El Carlos Elegante’s cheeky modern hacienda, Tango Room’s quiet confidence and fine art, Graileys’ renowned wine cellar. After you’ve dined across the neighborhood, you may start to imagine that every nondescript gray box could be another oasis. What if that roofing tile store is really a cocktail speakeasy?
At the corner of Riverfront Boulevard and Payne Street, a brand-new windowless brick box has risen over the last two years. Newly built on the site of a former beer-and-wine store, the cube is as nondescript as its neighbors but taller and less worn by time. It conceals not one but two new restaurants: Chinese American kitchen Night Rooster on the ground floor and, upstairs, steakhouse The Saint.
You’ll tug open the heavy front door and tell the hosts which restaurant you’re visiting. Ask for The Saint and you’ll be escorted up a grand staircase. Night Rooster is easier: past the lobby bar and through the curtain. But Night Rooster’s design is not like the other restaurants in the Design District. On the outside, it’s a plain box. On the inside, it’s very nearly the same.
The dining room is a black cube with a black tile floor and an industrial ceiling of exposed beams and ducts, all painted black. Two walls are black, lined by circular mirrors, while the other two feature red booths under ornate red-and-black wallpaper patterned with birds. It’s not enough. The space is too big to be properly claustrophobic, but it’s too generic to be anything else, either, an emotionless, charmless void. One of my guests quipped, “It feels like they could film Love Is Blind here.”…