There’s a version of Dallas dining that mostly disappeared decades ago, the kind with a chandelier the size of a compact car, a curtained room for the tables that want privacy, and a bandleader who knows when to bring the room down to a whisper. That Dallas still exists. You just have to drive to Addison to find it.
Arthur’s Steakhouse opened in 1948 on McKinney Avenue, back when Uptown was still just a stretch of Dallas nobody had branded yet. Arthur Bates and his wife ran it there for years, building the kind of reputation that gets a restaurant called Dallas’ first real steakhouse. Bates sold it in 1988 to Mohsen Heidari, a restaurateur who’d already run Farmer’s Grill and worked his way up through Dallas kitchens since the early ’70s. Heidari moved Arthur’s twice more, first to Central Expressway, before landing it at 15175 Quorum Drive in Addison in 2001, where it’s been ever since. Seventy-seven years, three addresses, one name that never changed.
Walk in and the first thing that hits you is the chandelier, 600 pounds of Baccarat crystal hanging over the main dining room like something rescued from a hotel ballroom. Then you notice the aquariums, 1,200 gallons of them wrapping the room, full of fish that have seen more first dates and anniversaries than most people. Dark wood, oil paintings, a red velvet room in back that seats a small private party behind actual curtains. Later in the evening a band sets up and the dance floor fills in, because Arthur’s has never treated dinner and a night out as two separate things.
The menu reads like a steakhouse that’s had seventy-plus years to get comfortable with itself. Escargot comes sizzling in garlic butter, still on the menu because nobody’s ever asked them to take it off. The jumbo lump crab cake gets a Chardonnay sauce and a Southern slaw on the side. Oysters Rockefeller arrive under spinach and a Pernod-spiked Hollandaise. The seared bacon-wrapped scallops sit on creamy polenta with a mango jalapeño butter, an odd pairing on paper that works fine on the plate…