He introduced Cuban food to the State Fair of Texas. He brought craft beer to the Fair. He created cotton candy-covered bacon on a stick, which became a staple fair food. For his next trick, Isaac Rousso plans to get you to eat at a sit-down restaurant right in the heart of the fairgrounds at the Old Mill Inn. It is Dallas’s second-oldest restaurant, trailing only El Fenix for the title. It is also one of the prime pieces of real estate on the Fairgrounds, where air conditioning and tables reign supreme — which experienced fairgoers know are in short supply. The space has been closed to the public since COVID, and Rousso says he’s been looking at it from across Main Street, in his Magnolia Beer Garden, thinking about what he could do with it. “I stared at this place, I’m not kidding, for 10 years,” Rousso says.
Starting conversations during last year’s Fair, Rousso talked the City into letting him take over the property. Now, the Old Mill Inn will ride again, this time christened as Rousso’s at the Mill. It will offer a full menu, a place to sit and eat in the air conditioning, and a liquor license, which means it will offer a robust menu of whiskeys, bourbons, tequilas, and wines. It doesn’t quite have all the hallmarks of a restaurant — you can’t make a reservation (this year), and it uses disposables rather than proper plates and utensils (also this year), but the menu offers appetizers, salads, tacos, sandwiches, burgers, and flatbreads that Rousso bought a pizza oven to be able to make. The cocktails stick to classics, but there is a wine you will only be able to drink at the Old Mill Inn. Rousso opens a bottle as we sit down to talk, telling me it’s a surprise. It turns out to be a Sauvignon Blanc infused with pickle juice — he has the only 20 cases in Dallas — combining the two is this year’s wine trend. Honestly, and to my surprise, it makes for a very nice glass.
Getting the place back into shape was a balancing act, Rousso says. The inside needed a facelift, which it certainly got, and the outside needed a good dusting off. The Fair helped with the decor, and the inside is a museum-quality curation of Fair ephemera, much of which has been sitting in storage for who knows how long. There are Art Deco-style posters from the 1936 Fair, the year the Old Mill Inn opened, by the front door. A photo of the massive crowds from Garth Brooks’s record-setting performance in 1991. And Rousso pulls out a cookbook developed by Ida Chitwood, who you can think of as a celebrity chef in her day, who did cooking exhibitions in the Old Mill Inn during the Texas Centennial World Fair of 1936. “We’re gonna make some of her most famous dishes, and we’re going to incorporate it into the Old Mill,” Rousso says. That’s another future project for the space. This year, Rousso and his team, which includes his wife and son, are figuring out what people want from the restaurant…