Sitting on the patio of his newest restaurant, on Dallas’s bamboo-lined Katy Trail, Stephan Courseau beams like a new father. The founder of Travis Street Hospitality—established after he brought “white-tablecloth stalwart” Le Bilboquet from New York more than a decade ago and followed it with two of his own restaurants, Knox Bistro and Georgie—Courseau explains the raison d’être for Le PasSage, an Asian-French concept that opened October 18. “I could have done ten Le Bilboquets,” he says in a still discernible French accent, despite his fifteen years in Dallas. As the sole holder of rights to expand the Parisian-style bistro in Texas, Courseau says he “probably wouldn’t have to work anymore” if he had stuck with the one-hit wonder. “But that’s boring.”
Murmuring in a soft, even thicker French accent, chef-partner Bruno Davaillon, who oversees the kitchen at Le PasSage, says that since he’s no longer a 25-year-old chef, he won’t necessarily be on the line firing five-spice duck breasts during the dinner rush. Instead, he’ll focus on the more difficult task of orchestrating a symbiosis between the kitchen and the service team, a feat he calls “magical” when pulled off successfully. The restaurant is Davaillon’s first undertaking that veers away from the French cuisine he started cooking as a twelve-year-old in the Loire Valley on his great-aunt’s farm. Now a gray-templed, Michelin-recognized chef, he says his aim at Le PasSage is to apply French cooking techniques to dishes from Cambodia, China, Thailand, and Vietnam and plate them in a manner one would find in a traditional French restaurant. (Similar things have happened before: The banh mi and Vietnam’s enduring coffee culture came as a result of French colonization.)
Courseau and Davaillon’s vision is edgy. After working in the same circles for decades, eventually banding together after Davaillon’s Bullion closed, in 2020, the Frenchmen are circuitous when it comes to defining it. Le PasSage not pan-Asian, not fusion, and not focused on any one country or region in Asia. It’s more of an endeavor to emulate restaurants like the ones Courseau enjoyed visiting with his wife during their twenty years living in New York, where “all food is celebrated at the same level,” he says, referring to places such as Indochine, Le Colonial, and Mr Chow, and, in London, Hakkasan.
By presenting Asian food modified by French techniques, Le PasSage is an attempt at “honest food that has a twist and makes you travel,” Courseau says. The goal is to take recognizable dishes—shrimp toast, chicken satay, shaking beef—and tweak them into “the best you ever had. What drives us is to not repeat ourselves.”
To achieve a sense of travel and connection between worlds, developers Lindsay and Blake Shipp of Capital Peak Ventures tapped Austin-based architect Michael Hsu to design the luxury mixed-use playground known as the Terminal at Katy Trail, including its restaurants. The designer of the Uchi and Loro locations, along with scores of other impression-leaving projects, such as the P. Terry’s flagship and ATX Cocina, in Austin; M-K-T and Balboa Surf Club, in Houston; and Gulfpoint, in Padre Island, Hsu is also responsible for the design of Le PasSage’s all-day sister spot, Rose Café, on the first floor; the retail and office spaces on the second floor; and some residences above.
Boasting some of the only restaurants on the Katy Trail that aren’t open-air taprooms, the Terminal is a striking, omnidirectional building with equally stunning entry points from all facades, an effort to hark back to the Katy Trail’s origins as the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. The MKT, as it was called, became the first railroad to enter Texas from the north, in 1872, eleven years before the launch of the Orient Express—the theme Courseau knew he wanted for Le PasSage from the beginning.
When the project started, four years ago, Hsu says he was excited by Courseau and Davaillon’s “strong reputations for quality” and “thresholds for design.” As with the restaurant’s cuisine, the luxury-train design aims to invoke the turn-of-the-century romance of climbing aboard, with French and Asian influences.
To carry out the vision on the plate, Davaillon called in talents such as Hou Lam “Dicky” Fung, the corporate executive chef who oversaw all of Mr Chow’s flashy, celebrity-studded locations for fifteen years, and pastry chef Dyan Ng, who began working at a young age for substantial chefs like Alain Ducasse, Guy Savoy, and Davaillon himself. Ng has a sense of new horizons, calling Dallas “a breath of fresh air” that seems rife with opportunity, especially for chefs and bakers such as herself. “Everything seems new here,” she says. “We’re excited to showcase what we’ve learned throughout our careers.”
In the same way the Katy Trail forever changed Dallas and its economy, Le PasSage will further the city’s growing reputation as a destination for world-class restaurants, Courseau hopes. “Dallas, and Texas in general, is more and more cosmopolitan, year after year,” he says. Dallasites want more high-end offerings, as he sees it. “They have a desire to be recognized as a place where things matter.”
Evan Sung Photography
A peek through the large, discreet front door gives a glimpse of warm lighting and varying shades of high-gloss pink used throughout the restaurant’s interior. Daniele Garcia, creative director of Travis Street Hospitality and wife of Courseau, created a mood board for Hsu that included punchy colors ranging from flamingo pink to cerise.
Evan Sung Photography
In addition to congee and breakfast tacos served every morning and summer rolls and Cambodian lemongrass skewers for lunch, Rose Café will also serve as the restaurant’s bar. With a food menu created by chef Sotear Tep, the cafe is open daily from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. There are grab-and-go options, along with coffee, or “if you want to sit down, have a glass of wine and the best papaya salad in town, we have it,” says Davaillon.
Evan Sung Photography
Chef Fung’s Peking duck—a dish Davaillon says would have been a “crime to modify”—is served with enough carved meat, pancakes, and dressings for four. Fung, who previously worked at restaurants in Beirut, Dubai, and the Philippines, calls himself “a bird without a lake” that’s ready for a new challenge in Dallas.
Beckleyco Photography
Appetizers include steamed dumplings, such as shrimp ha gao and pork shumai, as well as Chinese baby back ribs, fried bitter greens with candied walnuts, and Cambodian ravioli filled with pork and wood ear mushrooms.
Beckleyco Photography
Evan Sung Photography
