Austin Wood
Audio By Carbonatix
There’s something going on at the dive bar Rising Tides on Garland Road.
Alex Fletcher took over the former Royal Pour space in mid-August and relaunched it as Rising Tides, which he describes as modeled after “a 2010s Deep Ellum dive bar that everybody used to love to go to.” True to form, there’s cheap Coors Light, a backroom pool table and Bob Ross playing on a TV behind the bar 24/7, for some reason. It feels like a bar owned by someone who knows what works in hospitality, and that’s not a coincidence.
Fletcher has led drink programs at The Quarter Bar, Bread Winners, Victor Tangos and the original Henry’s Majestic, in addition to previously working as a national beverage director for Hospitality Alliance, a food and beverage consulting firm that counts the MGM Grand in Las Vegas among its clients.
Cocktail Dive Vibes
Billed as a cocktail dive, things start to diverge from the usual shot-’n-a-beer playbook the more you look at the drink menu. The old-fashioned ($12) comes with an IPA reduction; salted agave goes into each espresso martini (also $12), and something called the “Police and Thieves” is made with celery-infused gin. Perhaps most outlandish of all, the house dirty martini (again, $12) is made with pimento cheese fat-washed vodka and garnished with panko-crusted fried olives, which are also stuffed with pimento.
When he took over the bar in late summer, Fletcher brought another former Hospitality Alliance employee, Wadell Hodges, with him to serve as the bar’s culinary director. Hodges has worked at Mot Hai Ba and Hibiscus in Dallas, as well as staging at the Spotted Pig in New York.
“The whole premise behind Rising Tides was that I’ve worked at the fanciest bars in the country, he’s worked at the fanciest restaurants in the country,” Fletcher says. “There’s no reason we can’t give that quality to the average consumer at a reasonable price point.”
The Menu Theme: ‘What if…’
Fletcher said the driving ethos for the food offering was originally international street food, but has since morphed into “international dive food.” It’s unclear what that is, but, like the drinks and even the decor itself, the menu reads like two service industry veterans playing an ongoing game of “What if?”
“I can spit out an idea like that, and I’ll know how it’s supposed to taste like in my head, but I have no idea how to make it,” Fletcher says. “And he’s like, ‘Oh,’ and he speaks the rest of it [into existence]. And it’s like, ‘Well, that’s better than I thought it was gonna be.”
Bar snacks include three flavors of wings ($10 for 6, or 10 cauliflower), fried olives ($7) and katsu chicken tenders ($11). The umami pretzel ($8) lives up to its name with a compound ponzu butter made with coconut aminos and honey lathered on top, and a Furikake-based spice blend to dust it off. “It’s like this flavor bomb in your mouth,’ Hodges says.
Hodges has a mini smoker in the back where he makes cornbread for a true Texas-style chili combining beef, lamb and chorizo ($12). He also uses it to smoke a whole block of cream cheese for about an hour at high heat, before topping it with onion jam and sesame seeds ($10, served with crackers).
The cream cheese is applied to the inside of a split demi baguette for Rising Tide’s banh mi ($12). Filled with sous vide chicken, the sandwich is garnished with cucumber slices and cilantro, with a runny egg placed on top to finish. Cream cheese was used as a substitute for pate, obviously.
“We were thinking, ‘Listen, we’re a dive bar, we don’t need to have pate for our bahn mi, so let’s figure out an alternative,’” Fletcher said. “And then we were eating the cream cheese. I was like, ‘Wait a minute, that kind of works.’ So we threw that on there, and it worked great.”
The bahn mi is served with thin-cut fries, as are Rising Tide’s other sandwiches, a Cuban ($12) and the open-faced Nashville hot chicken ($12), which comes on Texas Toast.
Austin Wood
Hodges says the ‘Ramyum’ ($13) is made with a base of Korean-style brisket braised with gochujang, soy and kimchi, before broth is added in. A marinated egg tops it off.
“[My style is] global soul food. I cook for my soul. I cook really good food and I like people to feel home-y,” Hodges said.
For dessert, Hodges prepares a different kind of pie each week. The week before we visited, it was whiskey-apple. Instead of starting from scratch next week, Hodges decided to put the filling inside shortcrusts to create a dessert empanada topped with a scoop of vanilla.
“It’s easier, trust me, just buying dessert and selling it to people, because it’s complex, but we decided we wanted to make whatever we were able to at the time and put care into it,” Fletcher says. “We don’t make a whole bunch of them. We might not have them all the time. If we’re out, we’re out.”
Fletcher said the food menu will rotate frequently, just not “every week,” and that the changes will exhibit some seasonality. He also teased a potential addition of house-smoked pastrami sliders on steamed buns sprinkled with chili powder.
Still, he insists it’s just another neighborhood dive.
“Our biggest goal here is for people to walk in and just feel at home. We’re not going to be the best at everything; it’s not going to be that, but we will try,” Fletcher says.
