The first to settle the area, creating this transformation, was the high-energy bar Bottled Blonde. When it opened, it was the only spot along this short strip (less than 400 yards long), and it was an instant hit. On weekends it's standing room only: upstairs, downstairs, inside and out. There’s an entire map on the website for bottle service, which is commoner lingo for “getting a table.” Want to sit in the middle of the bar? Cool, got a spare $1,000? Super parched? How about a $3,000 magnum of Aces of Spades brut? Oh, you’re a purist, a simple vodka guy? Then get a bottle of Tito’s for $375. Not a typo.
Soon after its opening, Bottled Blonde got new neighbors, similar clubstaurants also looking for a good time: Citizen (2019), Green Light Social (2020), Blum Sporting Club (2021), Harper’s (2021), The Saint (2023) and Saaya (2023). This year two more opened at the nearby Epic development: Miami-born hotspot Komodo and La Neta, from Las Vegas. All of these are within a quarter-mile of Good Latimer, ending with an exclamation point at The Epic.
In September 2023, Bottled Blonde pushed more than $835,000 in booze across the bar, making it the second-highest-grossing bar in Dallas, behind Baby Dolls. Its highest-grossing month ever was $1.57 million in October 2021. It is consistently one of the highest-grossing bars in liquor sales in Texas, all of this according to the state comptroller’s reports on mixed beverage gross receipts.
In September of this year, those eight restaurants plus Bottled Blonde — let's call them High Ellum — collectively pulled in just north of $3.6 million in liquor sales.
Les Corieri is the co-owner of Evening Entertainment Group, the parent company of Bottled Blonde, based in Scottsdale, Arizona. The company owns multiple bars and restaurants across the nation and will soon open a $50-million Bottled Blonde on the Las Vegas Strip. Everybody wants some.
Corieri says when he was looking for real estate for Bottled Blonde in Dallas, one of his business priorities was to own the land.
“With nothing suitable and for sale at the time, we honed in on this pocket, which offered a site perfect for us," says Corieri. "It was a similar situation in Old Town Scottsdale years earlier, where the Bottled Blonde concept was born. When we bought that building, the surrounding buildings were boarded up, and now it's a very successful entertainment district."
In a previous interview, Corieri imparted some advice to anyone wanting to get into the restaurant business: know your market. When asked what that looked like in Dallas, Corieri says, “You never really know until you know, really,” adding that at some point you have to take a gamble and go.
Sounds cheeky at $5.2 million in bar sales so far this year, but he adds that he looked at the site’s proximity to Deep Ellum, Uptown and Downtown, “Being close to all three just made a lot of sense to us,” he said. Clearly.
But as this area thrives, just a block away Dallas’ venerable 150-year-old entertainment and cultural district, Deep Ellum, is hurting. There’s been a shift, a clear downturn for many locally owned places, and while the reasons vary slightly from spot to spot, one thing is clear: a chokepoint created by the new neighbors that turns Good Latimer into a parking lot on the weekends isn’t helping.
Live music venues, dive bars and charismatic watering holes are taking a back seat to the bougie High Ellum with DJs and bottle service.
And while local bar owners in Deep Ellum don’t begrudge these newer spots their success, they can’t help but feel it’s hurting them.
More than anything, though, they want people to know: these new bars are not Deep Ellum.
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The Saint is a head-swivel spot. The high-end steakhouse out of Las Vegas is on Gaston Avenue, just a block from Deep Ellum proper. It has a doorman in a suit and a slick bar at the front with a portable speaker on top that plays a lot of Kanye’s Before Era.
The first item on the menu is a wagyu candle with housemade Parker rolls. The candle is made of the rendered fat from wagyu steaks. The off-white candle sits in the center of a small black plate. The idea is that the heat from the lit wick slowly melts the fat, creating a pool of opulence to dip your warm bread in.
That’s the idea anyway.
Like a pot of boiling water, a wagyu candle never melts when you watch it. We waited, our hands knotted in our laps, as the fat pooled on the plate, one drip at a time. After more than a few minutes, we waved down a server for another go with the mini-blowtorch they carry around to move things along; the 5-inch flame is aggressive and showy, like a bunch of sparklers held together. Once there was finally enough fat to run our rolls through, the bread was no longer warm and the candle didn’t have much flavor. The show was great, though.
A short walk down from The Saint — a long walk if you’re wearing red bottoms, which hopefully you are, you loaf — Komodo is dressed in Saturday-night hot pink. Two doormen stand between the velvet ropes here, inspecting everyone who walks up. Inside, at around 8:30 p.m., diners fill all the tables, but the bar has a few spots available; by 10 p.m., though, it’s three deep as bartenders sling drinks as quickly as they can.
The cocktails from Komodo’s menu are a bit overplayed. An $18 East Meets West has Tito’s, sparkling sake, ginger, passion fruit and yuzu. A chilled shot of Don Julio Blanco was a safe bet after a couple of misfires. We’ve written previously about the $16 water here. (On a previous visit we didn’t realize that sparkling water for one was served bottle-service style. Silly us.) Food we ordered at the bar hadn't arrived after an hour or so, probably lost in the shuffle, which was fine. Eager people behind us wanted (or needed) our bar seats more than we did. Plus, Brick & Bones down the road in Deep Ellum has this addictive fiery-hot fried chicken. And there, we could take our vice-like shoes off and no one would care or notice. Before we asked for the bill, one final sip of tequila left on the bar was swiped away by an over-eager barback; at $15 a shot, every sip counts. This very same thing happened with our food on a previous visit. Turn and burn.
Leaving Komodo and The Epic and heading toward Deep Ellum proper, we notice the manicured new spots that are seeping into the grungy neighborhood. Where the revered live music venue The Gypsy Tea Room once stood is now a Velvet Taco and Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, both fast-casual chains with a lot of bright lights.
A bit farther down, past Electric Shuffle (a fun shuffleboard bar from the UK that sometimes has a DJ), we arrive at Brick & Bones. Drinks are in front of us quickly, and we even get a free fried chicken leg as part of a late happy hour deal. We still ordered two more baskets, which arrived in a hurry. The bar is barely half full on a Saturday night.
The chicken at Brick & Bones is the hottest dish in Deep Ellum. The birds here are brined overnight in piquin peppers, cayenne and morita peppers, honey, salt and garlic. The extra-thick batter will turn your fingertips burnt red. Be careful with the bread at the bottom of the basket soaking up the chili oil; you never know what kind of day those peppers were having. Breathe in wrong while taking a bite and you could be in trouble, but you’ll still go back for more.
The blurred line between Deep Ellum and High Ellum is significant, not just in terms of what’s on offer, but historically.
“Elm Street to Good Latimer, all the way up to Malcolm X was — when I opened in 2015 and for a long time — the heart of the neighborhood. We were right dab in the center of what people would call Deep Ellum,” says Cliff Edgar, owner of Brick & Bones.
“Now Deep Ellum is a much broader area to new people’s understanding. Deep Ellum is Bottled Blonde and those nightclubs,” Edgar says, “That might as well be another neighborhood.”
The new people he’s referring to might not understand that Deep Ellum came about around 1873 as a confluence of culture, art and business. The neighborhood is dotted with historically significant buildings and was one of the first desegregated areas of the city. In the ‘20s it fostered a jazz and blues scene. More recently, in the ‘80s and ‘90s concerts here were epic; people who were running around the city at the time likely have a story about their first concert in Deep Ellum — jammed into Trees, witnessing a new era of rock with bands like the Old 97s or the Toadies. They may have even caught that Nirvana show, and those who know Deep Ellum know which show.
“I think it's important for people who aren't familiar with this area to understand the polar opposites of that line on Good Latimer. And to call it all Deep Ellum, I think you're touching on something important that there's a lot of people out there in Dallas aren't aware of,” Edgar says.
Additionally getting into Deep Ellum from the north part of the city is nightmarish on the weekends.
Pete Zotos owns St. Pete’s Dancing Marlin on Commerce Street; his Deep Ellum restaurant has taken a hit since office workers left downtown during the pandemic and many have yet to return. Their lunches helped prop his business up during the week, and the weekends were icing on the cake. Now, the weekdays are a problem and the weekends are worse.
“If you’re on my street, Commerce, and you’re some guy in Plano and you’re like, ‘I’d like to go down to DeepEllum.’ Well, you take 75 south or the tollway south when you get to Good Latimer, you got a parking lot,” Zotos says. “So as soon as you go through that you’re not going to come down here again.”
Edgar, at Brick & Bones, sees the same thing when it’s closing time. “There are serious jams. If you’re in town on a Saturday night at 1:30 and want to go home, it’s a nightmare.”
Safety is an ongoing issue in Deep Ellum. The Dallas Police Department's efforts to curtail crime, which are working to some degree, are having some unintended consequences. On weekends, DPD closes Elm Street, which runs in front of Brick & Bones.
“That kills my business because in 2020 we transitioned into getting with UberEats and DoorDash and third-party deliveries to survive,” Edgar says. “So when they close the streets down on the weekends, drivers can't get to us. So we lose all that business every Friday and Saturday night.”
When asked how much of a loss it is, Edgar draws out “thousands.” His delivery area includes not only the 3,000 living units in Deep Ellum but a full 10-mile radius — all cut off on the weekends because of street closures.
“I'm a little tired,” he says. “I've gone to so many business meetings, owner meetings, meetings with DPD. Their [DPD] thoughts are, ‘Hey, look, numbers are down in crime.’ Sure they are. Everything's down. Everything's down.”
Another problem is that when the streets are closed, there are fewer places to park and catch rideshares.
“When they block the neighborhood off, there's nowhere to park,” he says. “So then they can take an Uber, but they're getting dropped off four blocks away. And with the reputation that Deep Ellum has gotten with the crime, it's completely killed our weekend business.”
In fact, Edgar says business is better during the week than on the weekends, which isn’t how the bar business is supposed to go. “I have more butts in seats during the week because people know they can get to us,” he says.
Edgar isn’t bitter about the success of other businesses down the road, quite the opposite. He appreciates what a difficult industry it is. He just wants to be able to run his business as he did when he opened.
Driving down any street in Deep Ellum proper, it becomes clear that many restaurants haven’t been able to overcome the challenges the area has seen over the past few years. The building that housed BrainDead Brewing is still empty, as are the sites of Postino Wine Cafe, Anvil, Tiki Loco and The Green Room.
At the same time, other restaurants like Federales and Vidorra, the first from Chicago and the other locally owned by Milkshake Concepts (which also owns Harper’s), have moved into Deep Ellum proper. Federales has a retractable roof and customers can throw an ice shot glass at a bell to “ring the bell.” It’s very frat party. Both are doing well, but as clubstaurants, they serve a different customer than those at a quirky, dark bar. The upper floor of Vidorra actually turns into a club in the evenings with large shareable drinks served in small fishbowls.
There’s no harm in that fun, but how does the cultural soul of Dallas absorb these new places and also retain that unique confluence of history with progress?“I think it's important for people who aren't familiar with this area to understand the polar opposites of that line on Good Latimer. And to call it all Deep Ellum, I think you're touching on something important that there's a lot of people out there in Dallas aren't aware of." – Cliff Edgar, owner of Brick and Bones
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Stephanie Hudiburg is the executive director of the Deep Ellum Foundation. She hopes the area can tackle the challenges of growth while retaining Deep Ellum’s character simultaneously.
“Deep Ellum is dynamic and ever-evolving and ever-changing. And that's, I think, one of the wonderful things about it. It's diverse. It attracts all comers to it,” she says.
In terms of stitching the old and the new together, along with keeping the neighborhood safe, she sees a bright future.
“I do expect us to continue to attract concepts large and small, including from all over the country,” she says, adding that the Deep Ellum Foundation works with the city and local businesses to ensure they’re addressing challenges while also welcoming growth.
“We do want to continue to be the heart and soul of arts, music and culture in Dallas,” she says.
It’s hard to see it with local places closing, profits down and half-empty bars on a Saturday night.
Two businesses on either side of Brick & Bones have closed: The Green Room and Tiki Loco. “You've got us, but businesses are just going away,” Edgar says. “And they were local, small-owned businesses.”
