‘Country club for gearheads’ in Dallas gets green light from restaurateur Nick Badovinus
If you want to geek out on cars in Dallas, Derby will be your place.
Matt Bell (left), founder of The Shop, is working with Dallas restaurateur Nick Badovinus for a restaurant named Derby that will open in Dallas in April 2021.(Ben Torres)
When Seattle native Matt Bell made plans to expand his car-focused restaurant Derby to Dallas, he turned to his high school buddy Nick Badovinus for advice.
It was a good move: Badovinus operates six popular restaurants in town, including New American restaurant Neighborhood Services, Design District steakhouse Town Hearth and Lowest Greenville hangout Desert Racer. Plus, Badovinus loves car culture. Badovinus famously parked several motorcycles and even a full-size Volkswagen Beetle at Desert Racer a fun part of the restaurant’s funky decor.
She Came to Fix the Parking
It has been 60 years since Dallas updated its parking ordinance. A woman from Bucharest wants to help.
Andreea Udrea isn’t your typical Dallas city staffer. The Romanian-born urban planner studied for her Ph.D. at the University of Turin, in Italy, and spent the first half of her career working in Europe. She taught at the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest; helped draft a plan at Bucharest City Hall to remove cars from the historic city center; and founded a research initiative into the life and work of Cincinat Sfintescu, the founding father of Romanian urban planning. Then, in 2015, Udrea made the unlikeliest of career changes: spurred partly by family concerns, she took a job with the city of Farmers Branch.
Dallas’ most exciting new restaurants and bars opening in 2021
These 16 restaurants will help define the Dallas dining scene in 2021.
Dallas chef Jimmy Park is opening a sushi restaurant on Greenville Avenue in Dallas in 2021.(Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer)
After a tumultuous 2020, Dallas diners seem hungry for hope. Luckily and amazingly the future of our dining scene appears as vibrant as ever.
2021 will bring a delicious bite of nostalgia to the pie-shaped building at Commerce and Cesar Chavez Boulevard in Dallas. Restaurateur Nick Badovinus (Town Hearth, Neighborhood Services) is fascinated with the 100-year-old structure, which opened as a service station in the 1920s. It was home to KLIF-AM radio in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And in 2021, it’ll become National Anthem, a 10,000-square-foot restaurant with a rock ‘n’ roll identity.