Vegan News
Major vegan restaurant with celebrity ties in downtown Dallas closes
Scrumptious "chicken" piccata with mashed potatoes and capers.
A major Dallas vegan restaurant that was a spinoff from Los Angeles has closed: Belse Restaurant, which had been serving plant-based food in downtown Dallas for more than two years, closed its doors at 1910 Pacific Ave. #1400, next to the Majestic Theatre.
A spokesperson from Boxer Retail, which manages the property and at one time also oversaw the restaurant, confirmed it was closing, but said that the future of the space and the restaurant were in flux.
"We're not directly involved in the day-to-day of the restaurant, and there are talks internally about the future," the Boxer Retail spokesperson said. "There's been some talk about another chef taking over the space and we have people in executive positions who are deciding what to do — but for now it is closed."
Belse was an offshoot of Little Pine, the highly acclaimed Los Angeles restaurant founded in 2015 by musician and dance music pioneer Moby, a vegan who wanted to open a restaurant with an entirely plant-based menu. Moby departed the restaurant in 2020, but Little Pine remained open and Belse continued its mission.
The Dallas restaurant opened in early 2021, in what was previously a lunch spot called Pacific Deck. Ambitously, they were open for dinner, with a selection of vegan-friendly wines and beers, and hosted a weekend brunch.
The menu drew inspiration from the original Little Pine, but with new dishes such as sushi made with watermelon in place of fish, a Belse Burger with a quarter-pound Impossible patty, flatbreads with fennel & Italian sausage, and a showpiece "chicken piccata" made with compressed tofu.
Despite its national presence, the restaurant never seemed to get on the radar of Dallas vegans. The downtown location also represented a challenge for diners who won't stop at a restaurant if there are not five drive-up spots at the front door. (There was on-street parking.) Its location was in a particularly offbeat spot: a glassine cube on the ground floor of a high-rise without great visibility.
The closure seemed sudden, coming one day after the restaurant sportingly stayed open for brunch all day on July 4. They'd also recently added new dishes to the menu.
But it was not just Dallas: A second location in New York opened with great fanfare and its own brewing operation in June 2022; alas, that location closed abruptly in January.
The restaurant brought an elegant version of vegan dining to Dallas-Fort Worth where most vegan restaurants are lower-priced diners, Mexican, fried "chik'n", or Asian buffet style places, and surely helped inspire Maiden, a fine-dining restaurant that recently opened in Fort Worth, where much of the vegan restaurant activity around DFW has shifted these days.
Belse also helped put Dallas on a list of top cities in the U.S. for vegan dining, and also earned spots on lists such as the 5 Most Hyped Restaurant in Dallas, Best New Restaurants in 2021, and Best Restaurants to Take Holiday Guests.
