OSO Coming Soon
Dallas restaurant veteran Michael Cox fulfills dream with Oso Food and Wine
Longtime Dallas restaurateur Michael Cox is about to realize a life-long dream of owning his own place. The new restaurant, called OSO (pronounced "oh so"), will open this fall, at Preston and Forest.
The menu is, loosely, Mediterranean. The restaurant should be open by the end of October.
Cox is the former CEO of MCrowd Restaurant Group, parent of Mi Cocina, but he has been around the Dallas restaurant scene since the '80s, as co-owner with chef Stephan Pyles of iconic Southwestern restaurant Star Canyon. Cox resigned from MCrowd in January 2014, in order to assess what he wants to do with the next 15 years of his career.
"I left MCrowd to do this, to open a small restaurant company," Cox says. "There'll probably be at least one more in the future. I wanted to get back on a more personal level with guests and especially with my staff.
"It's going to be a very personal restaurant for the neighborhood, focusing on people who live in that area," he says. "I hope people will drive to visit it, but it's really a neighborhood restaurant."
He's still looking for a chef and general manager; he emphasizes the personal nature of the venture.
"I just want to have a personal restaurant where I take great care of my staff, and my staff takes great care of the customer," he says."We're not talking about sustainable, no craft bartender, no farm to table; we're going to do that but not talk about it. And I don't think there's a stick of reclaimed wood in America.
"We will be focused on the food, value-driven, since it is a neighborhood place."
Cox says the restaurant is going to open for dinner, and it will be closed on Sundays. "We're not trying to burn the doors down or make every single dime we can."
