Crystal Wise
There’s often a vein of familiarity that runs through independent restaurants owned by the same restaurateur or family. In Fort Worth, Felipe Armenta and Tim Love, both of whom own more than a half-dozen restaurants in the city and beyond, offer visual and culinary calling cards that let you know who’s the boss, whether it’s a recurring dish or an architectural easter egg.
Those similarities are more difficult to spot at the restaurants owned by Marcus Paslay, the city’s low key but nonetheless productive restaurateur who is celebrating two milestones this year: the recent opening of a new restaurant, Walloon’s, and the tenth anniversary of his first restaurant, the still-going-strong Clay Pigeon.
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Over the years and the course of four restaurant openings, Paslay has told us, time and again, that he strives to make each of his restaurants unique — and so far, he and his From Scratch Hospitality restaurant group have made good on that promise.
With its romantic vibe and small, carefully curated menu, Clay Pigeon is a far cry from Provender Hall, Paslay and company’s rambunctious, two-story Americana restaurant and bar located in the heart of the Fort Worth Stockyards.
In between is Piattello, Paslay’s ode to modern Italian cooking, whose stately atmosphere goes against the grain of everyday Italian restaurants and their humdrum checkerboard tablecloths. Of this triplet of restaurants, Piattello has made the greatest culinary impact, igniting a local foodie trend: scratch-made pasta. Before Piattello opened in 2017, it was hard to find in Fort Worth.
Since then, several new Italian restaurants in Fort Worth have opted to make their pastas, such as Tre Mogli, il Modo, and Caterina’s.
Paslay’s latest effort, Walloon’s, fits right in with his others, mainly because it’s incongruent with its siblings. Paslay describes it as his thank-you letter to the food of New Orleans, Chicago, and the Gulf Coast — food he hasn’t had the platform to spotlight, until now.
“It’s seafood but a lot more than that,” says Paslay, a graduate of the hallowed Culinary Institute of America. “I feel like this menu started out as a clean slate, no expectations. I knew it would be seafood — that’s a genre of food we had yet to take on, and we wanted to tackle it. But it’s far from just a seafood restaurant.”
Here, the menu is playful, full of surprises. An Italian beef sandwich, piled with paper-thin, braised sirloin and crowned with crunchy and spicy giardiniera, resides side by side with show-stopping redfish, its skin expertly seared, its texture appropriately buttery and smooth. A seafood tower, jammed with poached shrimp, cold-water oysters, and tuna crudo, shares the same menu space as a big plate of steak and fries. Grilled trout here, braised short rib there.
Appetizers include oysters Rockefeller, steak tartare, French onion dip, Louisiana BBQ shrimp, and deviled eggs.
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To Paslay’s point, though, seafood is the thrust of what Walloon’s serves, in both traditional forms and not. There’s a pan-roasted salmon for conversative diners and beer-battered redfish beignets for adventure-seekers. One of the restaurant’s focal points is its stool-lined raw bar, offering oysters, shrimp cocktail, and spicy tuna crudo, along with the aforementioned seafood tower.
In addition, there’s a New England-style lobster roll and nearly a half-dozen salads, one punctuated with pan-roasted salmon, the other with crispy bites of calamari.
One of the restaurant’s must-try dishes combines the land and sea: the supremely rich seafood mac and cheese, an addicting collision of lobster, shrimp, breadcrumbs, and a trio of cheeses. At most restaurants, this is served as an app; here, it’s an entrée, a behemoth that’ll take two to topple.
Walloon’s is part of a new, 68,000-square-foot, mixed-use development called The 701, so named because of its address: 701 W. Magnolia Ave. Walloon’s takes over an historic building best known as the former headquarters of Fort Worth National Bank.
Paslay says he was adamant about maintaining the building’s historical significance. As a result, guests can dine within feet of the bank’s original vault, which Paslay says will be turned into a tasting room or wine cellar. Other architectural elements include the original tin ceiling tiles and the inlaid terrazzo flooring that encircles the raw bar.
The restaurant’s centerpiece is its horseshoe-shaped bar, lined with milk glass lights that cast a sepia-tone glow, like an old picture from the 1920s.
Walloon’s not only marks Paslay’s foray into seafood, but also into the Near Southside neighborhood.
“We’ve had our eye on this area for a long time,” says Paslay, whose From Scratch Hospitality team is made up of executive chef Scott Lewis, who’ll be doing most of the heavy culinary lifting at Walloon’s, and director of operations Kellen Hamrah. “But the time was never right, or the space was never right. We didn’t want to force anything.”
Paslay says he didn’t mind taking his time before going into the area, one of the city’s most popular and fastest-growing communities.
“We never begin with a restaurant concept and then try to find it a home,” he says. “We do it the other way around — we find a neighborhood or area we want to be a part of and let the concept complement the area. There wasn’t anything like Walloon’s in the Near Southside, so to us, it was a perfect fit.”
701 W. Magnolia Ave., walloonsrestaurant.com
