Dallas Chef With a Pedigree Puts His Mark on the Menu at Restaurant Beatrice

North Oak Cliff’s small Cajun and Creole food spot that got a James Beard nod for Best New Restaurant in 2023, Restaurant Beatrice, is adding a new chef to its kitchen. Colin Younce, who has worked at several notable Dallas restaurants, including the now-defunct Homewood and Cry Wolf, as well as at Petra and the Beast, has joined the restaurant as its chef de cuisine.

Younce joins owner and executive chef Michelle Carpenter, who also owns Zen Sushi in Bishop Arts. “Their approach to everything is what appealed to me most,” Younce says. “I was already very farm-to-table, but their composting program and everything they’ve been doing drew me in because I have those values myself. To be blunt, they didn’t just talk the talk.” Beatrice has been composting food in a program with Turn Compost that finds the waste recycled into soil donated to local farms, including Joppy Mama’s Farm, which supplies some of its produce.

Working exclusively within the confines of Louisiana food will be a new challenge for Younce, who says he is working to find his footing. “[I am] embracing the challenge of staying within certain bounds, but also have the opportunity to push them,” Younce says. “I can utilize the skills and techniques I’ve learned over the years and apply them to the cuisine.” To those ends, the restaurant is starting Boucherie Beatrice, a retail sausage program that will sell Cajun and Creole smoked and cured meats, in August. It implements smoking, dry-aging, and butchering techniques that highlight Younce’s interests, including whole animal utilization. It also speaks to the story of Carpenter’s family and the grandmother for whom the restaurant is named.

Kate Voskova

Her family’s ranch is located in Central Louisiana, which she notes didn’t always have access to seafood from the Gulf, but it did hold a smokehouse where she says meats including hog, quail, rabbits, ducks, and even squirrel were smoked and cured. “When I first met my grandmother, I came from Japan, and they had stopped using the smokehouse — it was the ‘70s and refrigeration had become accessible to everyone. I was always so fascinated with the smokehouse... That’s how they would feed everyone in the winter, with all the canned stuff from the garden and meat hanging there.”

Carpenter also notes that the restaurant will expand its 30-some menus per year to feature dishes beyond the New Orleans-inspired Creole food it previously focused on. Expect more Cajun dishes, she says, as well as food inspired by the German, Afro-Caribbean, and Indigenous people who settled the state.

“We’re not going to abandon the food we’ve served before, but we are trying to come up with different ways and ideas to present our new menu items.” Carpenter says. “We are looking at all the food we have access to from Texas, Louisiana, and the Gulf, and level up using these techniques.”

Kate Voskova

On the restaurant’s July menu are new dishes including a Gulf shrimp appetizer that sees the whole shrimp used in the dish, from recognizable pickled shrimp with Cajun spices on top to poached and pressed hidden beneath. The cold consomme it is served in uses the shrimp shells to derive flavor, along with a dill herb oil and makrut lime topped with marigolds.

It also features a braised maitake appetizer that layers mushrooms, watermelon radish, and canary melons under a sauce that is one part salsa macha and one part Chinese chili oil. It is perhaps the most aggressively vegan dish the restaurant has ever put on its menu and the most visually different from anything it has served before. The plate is a rainbow of brown, vibrant red, off-white, orange, and black colors but also layered textures. Younce says the mouthfeel of the dish was one of the primary elements he worked on, working the pickled soft toughness of the mushrooms next to the soft sweetness of the melons, the oil with its peppery bite, and the crunch of the radishes.

Finally, there is a new main dish of pork cheek from JC Carpenter Ranch, owned by Michelle’s family in Louisiana, served with lady creamer peas and herbed rice, which sounds like a simple dish — and it is, for the most part. But for Younce, showcasing a piece of less used meat, the jowl, but still fatty, delicious, and approachable, is what drives his ethos in the kitchen. It eats like a tender piece of pastrami, and the meat takes the backseat to the peas, infused with a rich bacon flavor, from pork bits also from the Carpenter Ranch, using bacon and pickled Fresno chiles.

Carpenter and Younce are ready to take diners on a new adventure and are enjoying the ride themselves.