Alison McLean
Audio By Carbonatix
When James Beard-nominated chef Misti Norris closed her beloved restaurant Petra and the Beast late last year, Dallas lost a good one.
Norris’ restaurant received many accolades: Esquire’s Best New Restaurant list in 2018; Bon Appétit Top 50 Restaurants in 2019; several James Beard nominations, including Best New Restaurant, Best Chef Texas in 2022 and a finalist for that same award in 2024.
At the time of the closure, Norris explained on Instagram that there were moments when she felt “stuck” after they moved from the original quaint space to a larger restaurant. She wrote she was “torn between my desire to be in the kitchen, creating and connecting and the reality of having to make compromises to the restaurant to meet the demands of a bigger audience.”
Since then, she’s taken on two new projects: one as food director at the new restaurant Far Out, where she’s the culinary director and leads on bigger projects. But she also found a permanent home for her long-time side project pop-up, Rainbow Cat. The kitchen in the Old East Dallas cocktail lounge, Saint Valentine — which is one of our favorite bars — is now a new home for Rainbow Cat.
The everyday menu here includes the soul of the Rainbow Cat project: refined nostalgia on a plate. Think glossed-up TV dinners, chicken nuggets that are much better than they have any business being, and Cosmic Brownies made from scratch and topped with fancy house-made potato chips. The signature piece is the Unicorn Dog: a from-scratch sausage served atop crispy rice shaped like a bun.
In addition to this fun menu that is available daily at Saint Valentine, Norris is reviving a bit of Petra and the Beast with a new monthly wine dinner.
The New Dinner Series
“I’m super excited because, honestly, fine dining is my love,” Norris says. “That’s my soul.”
While Rainbow Cat has a playful and nostalgic chef-driven menu, the new monthly wine-tasting dinner series will channel the fine dining Dallasites experienced at Petra and the Beast. On these nights, Saint Valentine will transform into a fine-dining restaurant for about 40 diners.
The complete menu is online, but a few highlights from the five-course dinner are Koji-butter-roasted Millbrook black king mushrooms, sweetbread and Texas chevre manti and amazake-roasted Berkshire pork shank with buttered field peas. Finish things off with a Texas pecan chocolate tart.
This inaugural dinner on Oct. 16 is $250 per seat all-in, including wine pairings, tax, and tip.
The wine pairings are from winemaker Giovanna Bagnasco from the Barolo region and Piemonte, Italy.
Dallas is beginning to embrace the tasting menu at a perfect time for Norris, who prefers to create dishes hyper-seasonally. “For me, this is the way I cook,” Norris says about the tasting menu.
