Can food revitalize an ailing neighborhood? In Dallas, Tex., global flavors seem to be playing a pretty big part in one area's transformation.
For decades, West Dallas was a ramshackle place: a Superfund site with a cement plant, some crime-ridden warehouses and a modest Latino neighborhood known as La Bajada across a potholed two-lane bridge from the glittery downtown.
Today, the riverfront is packed with springtime revelers, dog walkers and families. The engines of all this change are restaurants.
Stuart Fitts and his buddies, Phil Romano, owner of the Fuddruckers restaurant chain, and Butch McGregor, a Dallas developer, started buying property here ten years ago. They now own 80 acres of West Dallas, but their baby is Trinity Groves, a 15-acre restaurant incubator that's designed to attract diverse chefs whose creations might be worth taking national or international. "The Trinity Groves concept has never been done anywhere before," Fitts says. "We knew that we wanted to change the perception from old Dallas that this is a dangerous place. It's not." Nearly a dozen restaurants have filled the renovated warehouse, from a Moroccan place with hookahs and belly dancers to a Chinese-Latin mash-up. It's all just three minutes from downtown. "I was driving through the area, and I had already heard about some of the redevelopment," says Mike Casas, who grew up just four blocks from the area. "I came out here at night one day, and I did not recognize the area at all."
Excited, he invited his extended clan back to the old neighborhood to celebrate his 44th birthday. The Casas family queued up at a joint called Hofmann Hots to eat gluten-free New York wieners, some topped with bruschetta, avocado or Asian slaw. "The food was really great," he says. "And I thought it was nice to be able to bring my kids back to experience this part of Dallas."
But what's unique about this project, says Jeff Herrington with the West Dallas Chamber of Commerce, is the nearby La Bajada community wasn't forced out to make room for Trinity Groves. "The number one priority of this area was to preserve La Bajada as a neighborhood," Herrington says. "And [the residents] were understandably worried, because another neighborhood, which is colloquially referred to as Little Mexico, was basically obliterated back in the 90s by development."
Lester and Michelle Hunter — who live in nearby Oak Cliff, which has seen its' own revitalization — eat out at Trinity Groves often.
People who live in Dallas now have to start changing their perception of the neighborhood, Michelle Hunter says. "They just say, 'Oh, that's in West Dallas,'" she says, and the avoid the area. "No, you need to go to West Dallas!" she says, laughing. And that's exactly what investors are banking on. Copyright 2014 KERA Unlimited. To see more, visit http://www.kera.org/.
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