That former Dallas Cowboys head coach, Jason Garrett, is a co-owner of Caffe Lucca has garnered it a lot of attention, but I don’t like sports and don’t care about that. I’m here because the other owner, Julian Barsotti, has two Michelin-recognized Italian restaurants in the city, the eponymous Barsotti’s and Nonna, the latter of which earned a Bib Gourmand distinction. By any measure, Barsotti knows Italian food. 

Caffe Lucca does something different than Barsotti’s other ventures by focusing on Sicilian food, and drawing on the island’s exposure to the Mediterranean. There are North African, Greek, French and Turkish influences, even stretching as far as Lebanon for wine and the Spanish phenomenon Picasso for its artistic influence. That tracks not just for its southerly location, but because every clan in Europe conquered Sicily at least twice before Italy finally drew it into the fold for good. 

Meanwhile, in Dallas, I was trying to conquer the host stand at this restaurant. The small dining room was packed out when I arrived at around 7:30 on a Wednesday night, with a couple of parties waiting to be seated. I checked for reservations earlier in the evening and saw that several bar seats were open, so despite this being a hot spot after its relatively recent opening, I opted to go in cold. This seemed to stump one of the hosts, who simply shrugged as she told me the bar was full. 

Another host swooped in quickly to give me a much fuller update on the seating situation and an estimate of how long the wait would be. It gave me a chance to watch the dichotomy of how these two worked, one running around the room, assisting the staff, juggling reservations — all while the other stood unmoving behind the computer, frozen. 

The Cocktails

The bar staff was happily more engaging and informative, working in lockstep together to tell the story of the menu, proffering drinks and avidly checking on guests. I started with a White Lotus ($16), a refreshing gin cocktail with hints of laurel leaves. In Sicily, it’s typically served as a digestive after meals rather than as a cocktail mix, but it works beautifully in either situation.

Insalate

I started with a Sicilian Caesar salad ($18), made Italian by virtue of its inclusion of Colatura di alici, an ancient fish sauce from the Amalfi Coast, which is mixed with tahini. This type of salad is often mistaken for Italian, but it was created in Tijuana, Mexico — safe to assume it’s on the menu to satisfy the expectations of Highland Park diners who flock to the Knox Street district.

From the Fried Section

Along with that, I tried a dish from what was described to me as the “fried” section of the menu: seasonal fiori di zucca (fried squash blossoms with ricotta) for $22. Whatever fryer they bought is paying for itself by turning out perfectly browned crusts, but there seems to be an issue with the actual vegetable. It’s squished into one end of the fried stick, giving a big bite of squash blossom, followed by three bites of cheese stick. Not that I’ve ever had a problem with fried cheese, simply that the frying technique for making these needs to be ironed out. At the same time, the bread course appeared with saffron butter. It was excellent, though try as I might, I could detect no saffron.

Origins of Busiate

The menu makes a great show of highlighting busiate, the durum-wheat-and-water pasta invented in Sicily, which is one of the region’s oldest pasta styles. Though the menu tells diners that this pasta dates back to the 11th century, it doesn’t acknowledge that the country was under Arab rule at the time. No mention that the name of this pasta is thought to derive from the Arabic word bus, and no acknowledgment that it was all happening as the capital city of Palermo became a central Islamic center. All of this because the menu gives space to debunking the myth that Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy from China. Especially given the current political climate, it feels worth the time to share, even if only through the servers, that this pasta is the result of the intermingling and peaceful co-existence of two vastly different cultures. 

The pasta is meant to be thick and chewy, and the shape comes from wrapping it around a skewer to create a twirl that makes it particularly good at capturing thick sauces. I had the al ragu della nonna Siciliane ($30), a version served with slow-cooked Berkshire pork and plum tomatoes for a Roman-style dish. 

Eating the shredded meat and fresh pasta took me back to the experience of eating wild game slow-cooked in a tomato sauce in Italy, in some small restaurant buried in the countryside. It’s rustic, and this treatment of the meat leans into that. The pasta is cooked a bit beyond al dente, which is proper to give it a chewier texture. 

Unfortunately, my trip down memory lane was marred when I bit down on a bone with some cartilage just a bit smaller than the tip of my pinkie finger. In rustic cooking, I can forgive a lot. But when being charged $30 for a plate of rustic pasta sized to fit one person, I cannot forgive a bone that is the perfect size to choke on. I paired the otherwise enjoyable dish with a Lebanese red wine ($15), at the suggestion of the bartender, that was precisely the medium-bodied, floral wine I requested. 

Gelato

The trio of gelatos ($10) was the best value of the evening. Sicilian pistachio was the best of them, with the light-as-air quality gelato demands. Vanilla is deep and heady with flavor, offering a nice complement. There was, inexplicably, Mexican chocolate, which was too vibrantly flavored in comparison. It’s too bad that a $10 dessert had to do all the heavy lifting to save a $30 entree.

Caffe Lucca, 4445 Travis St., Sunday – Wednesday 5 – 9:30 p.m.; Thursday 5 – 10 p.m.; Friday – Saturday 5 – 10:30 p.m.

As the warm sun rises over the Dallas skyline, SUVs and pickup trucks whiz past an unassuming construction site that is helping cement the city’s Texas-sized financial ambitions.

Nestled between towers claimed by Bank of America and JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs has cordoned off 800,000 sq ft for a new Dallas campus able to host more than 5,000 staff. But the $700m (£530m) project is more than a regional expansion plan by one of America’s largest banks. It is another win for the lobbyists behind Dallas’s “Y’all Street” – the Texan city’s aggressive push to steal New York’s financial crown.

The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, once a fly-in, fly-out stopover for bankers, has seen its financial sector workforce boom over the past decade, surging 40% to 386,000 staff. Banks and investment houses – already keen to sidle up to Texas’s fossil-fuel industry and growing tech and AI sectors – have been lured by multimillion-dollar subsidies and new fast-track business courts, as well as Texas’s complete lack of corporation and income tax.

In the past 12 months alone, a 10-year property tax break and $2.7m worth of grants helped convinced the Canadian lender Scotiabank to relocate from North Carolina, bringing 1,000 jobs to the state. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq and the NYSE, keen to score potential listings, both launched branches of their stock exchanges in Dallas.

That followed news of a homegrown Texas stock exchange (TXSE), launching later this year, that has tried to undercut its rivals with looser listing rules likely to appeal to right-leaning executives. That includes an explicit absence of diversity requirements, once used by Nasdaq to bring more women and minorities into American boardrooms. Now, the more liberal Big Apple is in TXSE’s crosshairs, with a recently launched TV ad showing a Texas longhorn shattering Wall Street’s famous bull statue. “Welcome to the real bull market,” the TXSE declares.

Marketing efforts aside, how serious is Dallas about stealing finance jobs from New York? “We’re very serious about it,” says Dallas’s mayor, Eric Johnson, “and we think the way the country, politically, seems to be shaping up, we’re really standing out as a place that embraces business.”

His team are specifically targeting firms allegedly put off by left-leaning policies by the likes of Zohran Mamdani, New York’s social democratic mayor. Johnson said Mamdani’s plans, which include government-subsidized childcare and groceries, as well as a possible 9.5% increase on property taxes, would harm corporations that he said were crucial employers. “Those are the types of policy differences that are getting people to look at places like Dallas, where we’re doing the exact opposite,” Johnson said.

And Dallas’s pitches are intensifying, with Johnson sending a 10-person delegation to New York this month to meet and lure Wall Street executives southward. “My office, certainly, is in touch with folks across the country about relocating their corporate headquarters here, or expanding operations. And we don’t plan to stop any time soon.”

Even London, typically worried about losing business to New York, may have a new rival. “We travel internationally and we talk to international companies,” said Mike Rosa, a senior vice-president of business lobby group the Dallas Regional Chambers. “The idea of an international bank … completely moving their headquarters to Dallas, that happens. The idea of establishing Dallas as a hub for that bank so it can be more successful, that’s very real,” he said. “And we’ve got the makeup, we’ve the ingredients to continue to push and grow our international footprint.”

Part of the pitch is being closer to big business clients and major tech firms, that have been increasingly shifting their centre of gravity to the Lone Star state.

Over the course of the 2020s, Texas surpassed California and became host to the largest number of NYSE-listed and Fortune 500 company headquarters of any American state. That includes Oracle, which moved from Silicon Valley to Austin in 2020, and three of Elon Musk’s ventures – Tesla, X and SpaceX – all of which moved from California in recent years. ExxonMobil is the most recent win, with the oil company announcing last month it would shift its base to Texas from New Jersey.

Dallas-Fort Worth’s population has also boomed, growing at the fastest rate among the United States’ 385 metro areas since 2010, to 8.5 million people.

“The big story has been people moving from other parts of the United States,” said Cullum Clark, an economist at the George W Bush Presidential Centre at Dallas’s South Methodist University (SMU). It comes as New York, LA, Chicago and San Francisco experienced net outflows. Some of that has been political self-selection, Clark said, noting there was “suggestive data” showing conservative-leaning people are fleeing liberal-leaning states.

Politics aside, businesses are now finding it easier to recruit staff. The head of Goldman Sachs’s Dallas office, Aasem Khalil, still remembers getting a call from now-chief executive David Solomon in 2016, asking him to move his career and family to a then-900-person office in Dallas. Khalil, a lifelong New Yorker who had known Dallas as a temporary stopover for meetings, said “it was a head-scratcher”.

But Dallas proved well-connected, becoming a convenient launch pad to serve businesses in Latin America, while a series of non-stop flights to locales as diverse as Fargo, North Dakota, and Seoul helped ferry executives to meetings around the world. Meanwhile, growing demand for bankers eventually meant SMU and the University of Texas started churning out business and finance grads fit for hire at firms like Goldman.

Ultimately, “not everyone wants to be in New York”, Khalil said, adding it can be a “hard place to live”, even for wealthy bankers. “For a lot of people, Dallas is more their cup of tea.”

But while the boom of high-paid jobs is welcomed across the political spectrum, it is not clear whether the flood of wealthy bankers stands to lift all boats. And some experts are warning that Y’all Street may be putting pressure on poorer families, particularly when it comes to rental prices.

“Growth is a good problem to have,” Clark said. “But that said, nothing comes without side-effects.”

“A growing population – and particularly a growing population of highly compensated people – does impose strains and it puts new stresses on the system,” Clark explained. “And somebody winds up the net loser through those changes, unless those people are adequately provided for.”

A surge in rental prices over the past 15 years has disproportionately hurt lower-income families, for whom rent is now eating up more than half their wages. “That is a extreme hardship and we’ve had a great many people experiencing that. And that is not just the poorest of the poor; that is several hundred thousand people who are very housing-cost-burdened,” Clark said.

Figures collected by Dallas research group Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL) show that while the number of households earning more than $100,000 in the city of Dallas jumped by 87,000 in the decade to 2023, those earning less than $35,000 fell by 61,000. Some of that may be explained by wage growth, but it is more likely that low-income workers are being pushed out of city limits and into more remote suburbs.

With limited public transport, traffic congestion and commuting times are rising. That has forced some workers to take lower-paying jobs closer to where they can afford to live, putting further pressure on household finances. “For people who are already living on the financial edge, [the population boom] creates more competition for housing, for resources, and so the salaries that they were making just don’t go as far as they used to,” Ann Baddour, director of the Fair Financial Services Project at advocacy group Texas Appleseed, said.

That is bearing out in financial statistics, including an 81% surge in debt-collection claims in Dallas between 2022 and 2025. “That’s always a leading indicator because people will take out debt to try to sustain their life and then at some point it all falls apart,” Baddour said.

The city has also been grappling with chronic homelessness, which has involved clearing camps from visible areas including the former central business district downtown. The non-profit group Housing Forward insisted that Dallas had committed to not just move people from “block to block”, and had connected 22,939 people to housing since 2021. While it remains a visible problem, including in the downtown core, the group said homeless numbers had been falling for four consecutive years.

Still, Dallas, and its Y’all Street lobbyists, are racing to keep up with growth that they helped spur. “If you believe you’re gonna be in a high growth environment, you’d better have a plan around housing and be ready to absorb it,” Clark said. “I don’t think, actually, that the city of Dallas has that at present, so therefore, we’re underprepared.”

Dallas is now trying to rapidly tackle the problem. Last year, it slashed parking requirements for new developments and rewrote building regulations to make it easier to push through smaller-scale developments for multi-family buildings.

But even Dallas’s wealthy bankers are facing fierce competition at the top end of the housing market.

Linda McMahon, a former JP Morgan banker, and head of the Dallas Economic Development Corporation, recalls one private equity boss who recently made a generous private offer for a home in Dallas’s well-to-do Highland Park, before tearing it down to start from scratch. “He probably spent twice as much, but that’s not unheard of,” McMahon said. “For people from California, the prices here are so much less, that they can come in and do that. So the high-end real estate market is pretty competitive.”

Campaigners like Baddour are now warning that, without targeted support, inequality across Dallas, and its sprawling Forth Worth metro area, is likely to grow.

“There has to be a deliberate choice, and deliberate effort, to ensure that this doesn’t just reinforce some of the dynamics that have created a little bit of a two-tiered economy: those who have access to money, to markets, to resources, and those who don’t.” Baddour said. “There here has to be a deliberate effort to bridge that gap.”

A federal judge in Dallas ordered rapper Pooh Shiesty to remain in custody on kidnapping charges after allegedly pulling a gun during a contract dispute involving rapper Gucci Mane’s record label.

Pooh Shiesty, whose legal name is Lontrell Williams Jr., appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Renee Harris Toliver for a hearing on Wednesday. Prosecutors have also charged eight others over the alleged January confrontation at a music studio, where the victims were allegedly robbed at gunpoint.

Prosecutors have declined to name the victims, and an FBI affidavit attached to a criminal complaint only refers to them by their initials. One victim, R.D., is described as the owner of 1017 Records, the label belonging to Gucci Mane, whose legal name is Radric Delantic Davis.

“I find that the weight of the evidence against you is strong,” Toliver told Pooh Shiesty during the hearing.

She noted that the rapper had a criminal history and had violated a home confinement order following a prior firearms conspiracy conviction in Florida.

As of Thursday morning, no other hearings are scheduled in the case.

Affidavit details alleged gun threat, robbery during Dallas studio meeting

During the hearing, Bradford Cohen, the rapper’s attorney, raised questions about much of the prosecution’s evidence. “The FBI doesn’t take three months to arrest someone if they believe everything that was said on the night that it occurred,” Cohen said.

Prosecutors have accused the rapper, who was arrested last week, of arranging the music studio meeting in Dallas to discuss the terms of his contract with 1017 Records.

According to an affidavit attached to a criminal complaint, Pooh Shiesty had asked to speak with the record label owner in a recording room. He then allegedly produced contract termination paperwork and pulled out what appeared to be an AK-style pistol while forcing the label owner to sign.

The rapper then took the victim’s wedding ring, watch, earrings and cash, according to the affidavit.

Pooh Shiesty is from Memphis, Tennessee, but he is believed to have been recently living in a high-rise apartment in Frisco, according to the affidavit. Several of the defendants traveled from Memphis to Dallas ahead of the meeting, according to the affidavit.

Gucci Mane is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of trap music alongside fellow Atlanta rappers T.I. and Jeezy. He emerged in the mid-2000s with his breakout single “Icy” and went on to build a vast catalog.