Chef Graham Dodds’s Much-Anticipated Deep Ellum Restaurant Opens This Week

Chef Graham Dodds, the Dallas chef known for his longtime obsession with locally grown produce, is ready to open his brand new restaurant in Deep Ellum.

Called Elm & Good, the restaurant is set to make its debut at 2551 Elm Street on Wednesday, August 12. According to a press release, Elm & Good occupies 5,525 of square feet inside the Pittman Kimpton hotel, and will serve a broad menu of dishes made with local produce and proteins, along with Dodds’s famed vegetarian charcuterie, a meat-free riff on the classic French preservation technique.

Before this venture, Dodds helmed the kitchen at now-shuttered favorites like Hibiscus and his short-lived Greenville Avenue restaurant Wayward Sons, which won Eater Dallas’s Restaurant of the Year award in 2016 and closed the following year. In the years following Wayward Sons’s closure, Dodds has bounced across the city’s culinary scene hosting pop-up events. Originally, he was set to work at the forthcoming Mayor’s House restaurant in the Bishop Arts District, but parted ways with its owners at the end of 2019.

As far as the food is concerned, look forward to options like whipped ricotta toast and yogurt parfait for breakfast. Smoked tomato tartare, rabbit agnolotti, and a burger made with beef from Battle Creek Farms are on the dinner menu, along with the iconic cream of mushroom soup from legendary Greenville Avenue restaurant The Grape, which closed in 2019.

On the restaurant’s website, diners will also find Elm & Good’s “approach to clean,” or how staff is handling sanitation during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to frequent handwashing and providing face masks to diners, the restaurant also says that it is conducting “daily health screenings” on all workers, and “arranging pick-up entrances and exits to support social distancing.” It will also offer a contact-free way to pay that doesn’t involve handing a credit card over to the server.

A rep for the restaurant tells Eater that Elm & Good will not offer takeout and delivery when it opens. Starting tomorrow, it will open daily for dine-in breakfast from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. and dinner service from 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Note: Elm & Good is only open for dine-in service, and there are still safety concerns surrounding indoor dining in Dallas. Please visit Dallas County’s website for more details on the novel coronavirus pandemic. Studies indicate that there is a lower exposure risk when dining outdoors, but the level of risk involved with patio dining is contingent on restaurants following strict social distancing and other safety guidelines.