Downtown Dallas restaurant reinvented as Little Daisy, a bistro with Louisiana flavors (2024)

You may not remember Nine at the National, a stylish but neutral restaurant on the ninth floor of downtown Dallas’ Thompson hotel. Once a place for a quick breakfast or lunch on a business trip has been redesigned as a French bistro serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, and with a much more interesting menu.

Louisiana-born executive chef Jeramie Robison is serving gumbo made with duck fat and sausage. It’s just spicy enough, and served in a big bowl with “Jazzmen” rice. Alongside dishes like shrimp and white-cheddar grits and oysters Rockefeller, Little Daisy is now a place worth venturing off of busy Elm Street in downtown Dallas, even if you’re not staying in the hotel.

For a few years, the Thompson hotel’s food-and-beverage options have been anchored by the sexy co*cktail bar Catbird and by the sky-high views of Dallas from fine-dining restaurant Monarch and its upstairs sushi spot Kessaku. All these restaurants and bars are part of a $460 million renovation to the 1965-era First National Bank Tower building that was finished in 2020. Dallas business Todd Interests bought the building and renamed it The National, installing a hotel, 324 apartments, and restaurants both fine and not. Chick-fil-A and White Rhino Coffee, both on the ground floor, round out the options.

Building co-owner Philip Todd’s idea for the ninth-floor hotel restaurant was to amp up the style and change the food.

“We wanted a French bistro and cafe,” said Todd, who is president and managing partner of Todd Interests. “But we’re not French, and neither is our chef.”

So they looked for inspiration during a trip to Paris. Philip Todd’s sister Caroline Todd, the designer of Little Daisy and founder of her own company Todd Interiors, made quick work of changing the colors in the restaurant, making it warmer. The dining room is now half the size, with three private dining rooms tucked behind a wall covered in French art.

The French point of view worked for Robison, the Louisiana chef who hasn’t cooked food inspired by his family upbringing since he landed in Dallas a decade ago to work at Japanese-Texas restaurants Shinsei, then Uchi.

His oysters Rockefeller are inspired by Drago’s Seafood Restaurant in Louisiana. At Little Daisy, the oysters ($19) are served in an escargot plate, with scallion hush puppies.

The gumbo ($14) takes five and a half hours of gentle whisking to get that “peanut butter” colored roux, the chef says. Robison’s uncle used to cook gumbo on Thanksgiving, and it’s fun to think that the Thompson will do that, too. The hotel is open 365 days a year, and gumbo will be on the menu year-round.

Little Daisy is new enough that Robison is still figuring out how to share his home-grown recipes with the staff.

“There’s no recipe for the gumbo,” he says. “It’s just out of my head, out of my heart.”

The restaurant leans on an expat theme, as its hotel guests and Dallas customers could be from anywhere. Expat Eggs at breakfasttime ($18) are poached, served with a spicy tomato sauce and feta. Other breakfast items include bananas foster pancakes with Chantilly cream and rum caramel ($16); juices like the Raspberry Beret with raspberries, banana, apple, hibiscus and oat milk ($9); and house-made croissants and sticky buns ($5 each).

At lunch, Philip Todd likes the soup-and-salad options: French onion soup ($11) or gumbo ($14) and a wedge, bibb or Nicoise salad ($13 to $24). Heartier lunch options include a muffaletta ($21), tarte flambée with caramelized onions and bacon ($15), and the Hemingway Burger ($24), based off a recipe the author wrote himself.

Perhaps Ernest Hemingway is sitting in the corner of Little Daisy, in spirit. He also has a gin martini and a daiquiri named after him.

The Todds want the bar to be known for its margaritas, and there are two: the Little Daisy Rita, with Patron Reposado, Grand Marnier and lime cordial ($23), or the Clearly Skinny, a lower-cal option that has been clarified so that it looks like a cup of water ($17).

“You can’t come to Texas and not have a margarita,” he said.

Margaritas also inspired the restaurant name. The owners translated “petite Marguerite” — a nod to these boozy drinks — to Little Daisy.

Dinner here includes roasted veggie ratatouille ($14), trout amandine ($38) and steak frites ($54 to $68). A fun side is the roasted fingerling potatoes, cut in half to look like a tiny baked potato and topped with caviar. For those enjoying the trend of pricey one-bite appetizers at Dallas restaurants like Mister Charles, the baked potato and caviar at Little Daisy is similar, though for $12, they come with three to an order and are two bites each. Might as well share.

Robison’s barbecue shrimp and grits is a jazzy version of what the Todds eat on New Year’s Eve: peel-and-eat barbecue shrimp, splayed out on a table on newspaper. At Little Daisy, Robison’s dish is refined, with large shrimp atop white-cheddar grits and a sauce infused with Louisiana-based Abita beer ($36).

If you ride the elevator up to the ninth floor, the redesigned Little Daisy feels like it should have been this way all along. But you have to know it’s there to go.

“We want people to know they can always show up here,” Todd said.

Little Daisy is at 1401 Elm St. (on the ninth floor of the National building, which houses the Thompson Dallas hotel), Dallas. Reservations not required but available via Resy.

For more food news, follow Sarah Blaskovich on X (formerly Twitter) at @sblaskovich.