Coffee News
Downtown Dallas gets a suave new neighborhood coffee shop-cocktail bar
If you've run out of coffee beans today, hustle on over to Parterre, a new coffee shop-combo-cocktail bar in downtown Dallas from a longtime veteran of Dallas' coffee scene.
Parterre will officially open on November 8 at 1601 Elm St., #120, AKA the former Ascension Coffee on the ground floor of the Thanksgiving Tower building, with a limited slow-opening menu.
However, they're hosting previews, starting November 4.
Parterre is from Mike Mettendorf, who currently owns State Street Coffee in State Thomas and La Reunion in Bishop Arts, with which it shares many similarities in profile and mission.
Mettendorf describes Parterre very poetically as:
"a coffee date with a view, a lunch spot for the fastidious executive, or late drinks after a show at The Majestic. It is our living room for the city dweller, the urban explorer, and the downtown proletarian. Originally the namesake of ornamental French gardens and later adopted to describe the standing room found abreast of vintage theatre stages, a Parterre by any name is often filled by social and interactive users creating and driving the public sphere."
He says the name was chosen to reflect the historic theaters that once lined Elm street in downtown Dallas, as well as to highlight their love of our plants. Parterre gardens are those gardens where they cut hedges with sharp edges to transform them into hyper-symmetrical walkways and such — which is perhaps a wee bit more "Man Over Nature" than it is "love of nature," but we digress.
Parterre will follow the upwardly trending coffee-cocktail combo, serve coffee by day and cocktails at night.
They'll also serve food: breakfast to-go, lunch for the office, and date night appetizers: brisket and house-made bacon tacos, jambon beurre and smoked salmon for lunch, apps, entrees, and charcuterie at night.
They'll be curing and smoking their own meats, roasting coffee on-site, and making craft cocktails from scratch.
The coffee bar features a La Marzocco espresso machine, and coffee beans will be single-origin, both roasted in house and by Dallas-based Novel Coffee Roasters.
Environment is "casual upscale," and service staff will be more like concierges, available for tips that go beyond dining suggestions, with baristas whose pedigrees include national championship accolades.
Ascension had been in that space since 2017, with a similar mission of coffee-and-more, but closed during the height of the pandemic in August 2020.
Parterre's hours will be 7 am-10 pm weekdays, and 10 am-10 pm weekends. For the preview, they'll be open November 4-5 from 7 am-6 pm, and November 6 from 7 pm-12 am with DJ Smoove.
A variety of dishes at Luna Roja.Photo courtesy of Luna Roja
The bar area, which looks out to the patio.Photo courtesy of Luna Roja