The Restaurant
Ospi opened on May 1, 2026 at 1621 Oak Lawn Avenue in the Dallas Design District — taking over the former home of the long-running Meddlesome Moth — as the first Texas restaurant from Memento Mori Hospitality, the Los Angeles-based group founded by chef Jackson Kalb and his wife and business partner Melissa Kalb. Jackson Kalb, a Top Chef season-19 contestant and an alumnus of New York's Maialino and Marea before moving west to open the Memento Mori restaurants in Brentwood and Manhattan Beach, has rebuilt Ospi for Texas with a kitchen team relocated from the Los Angeles flagship and a Dallas-led front-of-house team. The Oak Lawn building has been substantially renovated: a hundred-and-twenty-cover main dining room with terra-cotta-tile flooring, warm-wood banquettes, a long marble bar at the front taking walk-in dining, an open wood-fired oven along the back wall; a smaller back room with red-leather banquettes that takes private parties of up to twenty; and a covered side patio with citrus trees in planters that opens for the long Texas shoulder seasons.
The kitchen runs a southern-Italian programme with a Roman-pizza specialism. The pizza menu — thin-crust, naturally leavened, baked in the wood oven at high heat — runs about twelve options including the margherita, the bianca with crescenza and herb oil, the soppressata with calabrian chili and honey, and a clam-and-garlic pie that has been on the Memento Mori menus since 2018 and is among the most-ordered items in the group. The pasta programme — all hand-rolled in-house daily — includes the spicy rigatoni vodka that the California rooms are genuinely famous for, a hand-cut tagliatelle with brown butter and sage, a cacio-e-pepe handkerchief pasta with black pepper and pecorino, a lobster-cavatelli with brown butter and lemon, and a focaccia starter with cultured butter and chili crisp that the room sends out as an opening move with most tables. Larger plates include a wood-grilled branzino, a Berkshire pork chop with mostarda, and a forty-eight-hour braised short rib over polenta.
The bar is the Ospi-Memento-Mori signature — a tableside-shaken martini service that the bartender wheels to the table in a brass cart and prepares with chilled gin or vodka, a choice of vermouths, and a selection of olives, citrus peels, and pickled garnishes that the table builds together. The wine list is a careful Italian-and-natural format running about a hundred and forty references, with strong sections in Etna Rosso, Campania, and Friuli, plus a deliberate American natural-wine programme that supports the room's contemporary identity. Service is paced for a long evening; the Design District address attracts the city's creative-class crowd; and the room has rapidly become the spring 2026 reservation everyone in Dallas is trying to get.
Why This Is Dallas’s First Date Pick
For a Dallas first date — particularly the Design District creative-class date, a Dallas-young-professional date that wants a room genuinely buzzing with energy, or a visiting-from-out-of-town date with a partner familiar with the Memento Mori rooms in California — Ospi is precisely calibrated. The tableside martini service is itself a conversation opener (the two people building the cocktail together is a small but real ice-breaker). The pizza-and-pasta format is shared by design, which generates the kind of natural ordering rhythm that an entrée-led meal does not. The patio in pleasant weather is one of the most photogenic outdoor tables the Design District has produced. And the room's spring 2026 buzz means that having a reservation here is itself a signal of attentiveness — the kind of small detail that a thoughtful first date correctly notices.
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