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Dallas' Inwood Village mints an elegant new Thai restaurant lunch spot

Dallas' Inwood Village is about to get very minty.

The Mint

One of Dallas' most elegant Thai restaurants will open a new location in a neighborhood that seems destined to love it. Asian Mint, the popular North Dallas Asian-fusion dining destination, will open its third outlet in Inwood Village, in the space long occupied by Cafe Istanbul.

Set to open in the fall, it will follow the same combination of New Bangkok-style cuisine, sweet service, and tasteful interior design as the other two locations on Forest Lane and Oak Lawn Avenue.

Asian Mint has accumulated many awards since founder Nikky Phinyawatana opened the first branch in 2005, including a spot on CultureMap Dallas' list of the top 100 restaurants. The restaurant will also be at the James Beard House in New York on November 8, to celebrate the Asian Full Moon festival of Loy Kratong with traditional Thai dishes and wine pairings.

It offers well-executed classics such as pad Thai, tom yum soup, and pad kee maw, and also has an amazing dessert program, with signature sweets such as the green tea ice cream cake. It's a favorite for vegetarian diners and earned a nod from USA Today as a top Dallas restaurant featuring gluten-free options.

It's also known for its stunning modernistic interiors, with eye-catching pastel colors and cool, minimalist design.

Located across from Medical City, the Forest Lane location is not only a favorite lunch spot for the hospital community, it's also an oasis in an intersection with few upscale alternatives. Its Oak Lawn location opened in 2009 and quickly developed a following among the Park Cities lunch crowd.

At Inwood Village, renovating the Cafe Istanbul space turned out to be an unpredictable but fascinating excavation. It was a makeshift space with three different levels of flooring, and 20 years worth of funky add-ons.

"We found a thick brick wall in the middle, with a window all covered up that had to be 50 years old," Phinyawatana says.

They've transformed it into their prototypical clean style, with 65-70 seats plus a 7-seat bar where customers can also pick up orders to-go.

Phinyawatana says she's perfectly happy with two branches, but is doing a third for a couple of very specific reasons.

"We have a lot of customers from this neighborhood who come into the Oak Lawn location and say they'd come in more often if we were closer," she says. The only other options for Asian food in the immediate area are Shinsei and Sushi House.

But Phinyawatana's main motivation is offering staff members who've worked at Asian Mint for many years a platform for personal growth.

"I've had those guys come in who've made offers to turn the restaurant into a franchise, but I'm not there right now," she says. "I'm not just doing this to make money. If we're not having fun, we're not doing it. I love my staff so much, and want to give them the experience of opening a new restaurant. My restaurants are a medium for people to grow."

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restaurant boom

Texas to lead nation in culinary job growth by 2032, report predicts

Chef preparing multiple plates at a restaurant

Photo by John Fornander on Unsplash

With all the booming restaurant scenes in major cities like Dallas, Texas' overall culinary industry will grow faster than the rest of the country within the next six years, Escoffier found.

A new analysis of the states that will have the most culinary industry job growth has revealed that Texas is expected to lead the nation with the fastest growth in the country by 2032.

The nationally recognized Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts' study, published December 30, 2025, compared all 50 states to determine their job prospects for chefs and head cooks, restaurant cooks, and food service managers based on three key metrics: projected growth rates from 2022-2032; "absolute job creation" (the total number of projected new positions) during the same 10-year span, and actual job growth rates from 2022-2024.

Texas' culinary industry is expected to grow by 24.88 percent by 2032, the report found, which is the highest projected growth rate nationwide. That translates to more than 52,000 culinary jobs created within the next six years.

Escoffier also broke down individual projections across all three metrics:

45,150 new restaurant cook jobs, a 39.72 percent increase
3,580 new chef and head cook jobs, a 19.76 percent increase
3,340 new food service manager jobs, a 15.17 percent increase

"The top three states alone — Texas, California, and Florida — will add nearly 130,000 culinary jobs, almost 45 percent of all jobs created in this industry (despite those states making up about 28 percent of the nation’s population)," the report said. "This demonstrates an extraordinary scale of opportunity for job seekers willing to relocate to states with booming restaurant scenes."

Major Texas cities, including Dallas, are bursting with highly esteemed award-winning chefs that are defining the local restaurant scenes. And there are just as many up-and-coming chefs rising through the culinary pipeline.

As Escoffier notes, projections are just one factor among many that determine the strength of the national culinary industry. Texas' combined actual culinary job growth from 2022-2024 is down 0.28 percent when compared to expectations.

"This simply means that, over the past few years, the state appears to have underperformed growth projections; the industry still grew in that state, but perhaps not as much as anticipated," the report's author clarifies. "Given the short timeframe (2022-2024), this category plays a small role in our rankings relative to the ten-year projections."

Washington led the U.S. with the most new culinary jobs added from 2022-2024, with 5,800 positions created during that time. Escoffier said Washington handily beat expectations that only 1,300 jobs would be added, representing a 348 percent "overperformance."

The top 10 states with the fastest-growing culinary industry are:

No. 1 – Texas
No. 2 – California
No. 3 – Georgia
No. 4 – Florida
No. 5 – Washington
No. 6 – North Carolina
No. 7 – Utah
No. 8 – Arizona
No. 9 – Nevada
No. 10 – Alabama

texas culinary job market reports