New restaurant Bobbie’s Airway Grill opens at Dallas’ Preston-Royal

Take a look at the swooshy B, for Bobbie’s, on the door of Preston Hollow’s newest restaurant. Bobbie’s Airway Grill is named for the CEO’s mom Bobbie Quick, but that’s not her handwriting. It’s a fake.

“In high school, I used to forge her signature,” says Blair Bepko, Bobbie’s daughter and the marketing director for the restaurant.

A few months back, Bepko’s brother, restaurant CEO Robert Quick, asked if she could still pen their mom’s name — this time for a restaurant. “Of course I can,” she answered.

The logo was made in house, you could say, just like everything else. Bobbie’s opened June 2, 2023 and is one of the most exciting new restaurants of the year in Dallas.

Bobbie’s food is a sophomore album, of sorts, for CEO Quick and COO Matt Gottlieb. They opened Italian restaurant il Bracco to great success in Dallas’ Preston Center in 2019. Bobbie’s is decidedly different, and its operators purposefully left pasta off the menu, but they continue with their obsessive attention to detail. Quick and Gottlieb learned that at Houston’s; it’s part of their restaurant DNA.

Example: Quick’s favorite menu item is the Turf Club ($17), a lunch sandwich. It’s a BLT on the top, which is “the world’s best sandwich,” he says. Swiss cheese, pickles, shaved turkey and Dijon mustard are stacked on the bottom. There’s a slice of bread in the middle, like all club sandwiches have, but this one’s sliced precisely at 3/16 of an inch. That’s the right bread-to-meat ratio, Quick says. He tried it lots of other ways.

That same workshopping was done on all the lunch and dinner items: the salads, sandwiches, mains and sides.

The dining room has a dark wood bar and familiar navy- and emerald-colored booths. Quick’s wife Mary Lucille Quick helped design the room alongside Michael Hsu Architecture, and she donated a few art pieces from their home.

Inside Bobbie’s Airway Grill in Dallas

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Five framed pop art pieces, splashed with bright color, “bring a little levity, a little humor” to the room, the CEO says. And, yes: It’s quite a family affair here, with namesake Bobbie, her son, daughter and daughter-in-law involved.

Bobbie’s essence lives on throughout the restaurant — sometimes literally, other times as an homage. The carrot cake on the dessert menu is her recipe, unchanged, the one she makes year-round for family birthdays and other celebrations. The Bobbie’s Caesar ($19 at lunch, $21 at dinner) shows that Mom’s always right. Bobbie loves a Caesar salad with crispy oysters, but as Quick and Gottlieb were drafting the restaurant version, they didn’t include fried bivalves. “What did you do to my Caesar?” Bobbie asked her son. So they reverted back to what they know is good, and Mom got her salad.

The Bobbie’s menu is dotted with other family stories. A shredded cheddar appetizer called Oaks Dip ($10) is a longtime recipe from Mary Lucille’s family. The Bobbie’s team classed it up with horseradish, serrano and scallions, but after months of R-and-D, it’s still served with Frito’s Scoops. “They just work,” Robert Quick says.

Crispy Oysters ($22 at lunch, $24 at dinner) are another zippy, shareable appetizer. They’re served on the half shell in a smear of garlic aioli. The crab cake ($38 at lunch, $39 at dinner) is simple, with big lumps of crab sitting atop lemon-dill sauce. It comes with house-made French fries, so customers can drag them through the sauce.

“Our philosophy is, buy the best ingredients and just don’t mess them up,” Gottlieb says.

His family tribute is the Oaks Burger ($17 at lunch, $18 at dinner), a cheffier version of his favorite hickory burger from Los Angeles joint The Apple Pan.

“It’s tangy and smoky and crisp,” he says of the pickles and iceberg lettuce atop a cheeseburger with house-made sauce. “My mother had it for the first time and she said, ‘Oh my god, it’s Apple Pan.’”

A crowd-pleaser might be the the Italian Beef sandwich ($22 at lunch, $23 at dinner). Quick and Gottlieb tested it out at il Bracco in Houston and declared it a winner, but they won’t sell it at the Dallas restaurant out of respect for the Hillstone (former Houston’s) on the same corner. French dip fans should drive 2.5 miles north to Bobbie’s, where they’ll find a shaved tri-tip sandwich with provolone, sautéed broccolini and giardinara, jus on the side.

Nothing inside the restaurant will remind guests of the business that was once here for more than 50 years, Dougherty’s pharmacy. Bobbie’s has an eye-catching, new exterior and a newly installed patio shaded by a live oak tree, uprooted from South Texas and planted in Preston Hollow. But there’s one respectful touch: The pharmacy’s “Airway” neon sign that once hung outside and has been refurbished. It lives above kitchen windows, where passersby can see rotisserie chickens and the bread-baking operation inside.

Because of the money and time put into the building and the menu, Quick says, “I don’t think anybody has done anything this ambitious in this neighborhood. Our philosophy is: Don’t be cute.”

Bobbie’s Airway Grill is at 5959 Royal Lane, Dallas. Open seven days a week for lunch and dinner. Bobbie’s opened June 2, 2023.

For more food news, follow Sarah Blaskovich on Twitter at @sblaskovich.