There is a restaurant in Denton called Osteria Il Muro with 22 seats, a backyard garden, and a menu that changes every single day. It is one of the hardest reservations in North Texas. People set calendar alarms for the last Monday of each month — the one morning the next month’s tables are released — and still don’t always get in.
The chef who runs it is a James Beard finalist for Best Chef: Texas. His name is Scott Girling. Most of Dallas has never heard of him.
That’s the whole story right there, and it’s a good one.
Girling grew up with Sicilian roots. His maternal grandparents were from Sicily, and the restaurant is named for them — il muro means the wall in Italian, a nod to the family name. Food was always there in the background, but cooking professionally was something he came to on his own terms. He graduated from the Culinary School of Fort Worth, then did something most American culinary students don’t bother to do: he actually went to Italy. Six months in Calabria at the Italian Culinary Institute, full immersion in regional cooking — the kind of food that doesn’t translate well to menus because it’s rooted in place and season and the specific way someone’s grandmother did it. He ate his way through it, learned it from the inside, and came home…