Destination dining

Austin chef decamps to Texas Hill Country to open luxe all-day restaurant

Tillie's will add another feather to Camp Lucy's hat.

If you want to find Austin’s hottest new restaurant district, you might have to drive past the city limits. With the recent openings of The League Kitchen & Tavern, Stiles Switch BBQ offshoot The Switch, and a new and improved Pieous, Dripping Springs is a destination all its own.

Now catering and event company Whim Hospitality is joining the merry band with the announcement of Tillie's, a new all-day fine dining restaurant on the grounds of luxury resort and popular wedding venue Camp Lucy. Opening October 1 at 3509 Creek Rd., Tillie’s will give Austinites one more reason to escape to the Texas Hill Country.

“Our goal behind creating Tillie’s is to evoke emotion,” Whim Hospitality co-founder Kim Hanks (along with husband Whit) said in a release. “It’s that emotion that you feel when you step into someplace new. Whether it’s a new city or a foreign land, how a new surrounding impacts your experience and changes the fabric of who you are when you are a part of something new, exciting, and different.”

To help craft that experience, the couple drafted Austin chef Brandon Martin. A veteran of such acclaimed restaurants as Foreign & Domestic, Lenoir, Odd Duck, and Barley Swine, Martin will bring the seasonal and local approach of those local mainstays to a menu that will add international flavors to traditional American cuisine,

“I’ve worked in a lot of restaurants and have a lot of influences from the great chefs and cuisines that I’ve been exposed to,” Martin said. “I really love experiencing new flavors and techniques, and I’ve tried to do a little bit of everything with our menu.”

Highlights from his introductory menu include fried Brussels sprouts with chili jam, crispy shallot, and orange supremes; crispy pork belly served with masa gnocchi, seasoned corn, chard, red-eye butter, and carrot puree; and a Wagyu sirloin with grilled cabbage, corn relish, beet-infused pesto, and black garlic jus.

Since the property is located on the gateway to the Texas wine country, the restaurant will feature a large selection with more than 100 wines. There will also be a full bar serving craft cocktails.

Fittingly for a resort that includes a restored 19th century French colonial chapel, the dining environment will be one of the the most unique in the Austin area. The Hanks imported an almost 200-year-old town hall from Vietnam’s Ninh Binh to serve as the main space. A Vietnamese family home has also been restored to provide a separate space for private parties and meetings.

Tillie’s won’t be the only new addition to the Camp Lucy grounds. Work is also completing on a pool that will have a separate swim-up bar and an outdoor brick oven. The team hopes to have that ready to debut at the same time as the restaurant.

openings

Whoops

Michelin goofs on a few restaurants honored in first Texas guide

Kau Ba/Facebook

Houston's Kau Ba has been removed from the Michelin Guide.

Texans' reactions to the first Michelin Guide in the state have ranged from glowing to unimpressed, but a few notable mix-ups are more concrete than differences in taste. The November 11 ceremony honored more than 100 restaurants across the state, but at least two were in error. In Dallas the guide confused two restaurants with each other, and in Houston one of them had closed.

Starting in Dallas: The Guide's release announcing the list of restaurants who'd won awards included The Charles, an award-winning Italian restaurant in Dallas' Design District, as one of 57 restaurants that earned a "Recommended" rating.

The Charles is a surely deserving restaurant that opened in 2018, the first concept from acclaimed food & beverage group Duro Hospitality, which has since gone on to open other restaurants such as El Carlos Elegante, Sister, and Cafe Duro.

But the Guide got the wrong Charles: The real recipient was Mister Charles, a sibling Duro Hospitality restaurant that opened at 3219 Knox St. in early 2024.

The Charles specializes in Italian and Texas-inspired dishes.

Mister Charles features French and Italian-influenced dishes.

It wasn't just an incorrect name; it listed the accompanying (incorrect) address.

A spokesperson for Michelin Guide verified that Mister Charles was the winner and said that the listing of The Charles was a mistake.

“This was an internal error caused by our geolocation process. The problem will be corrected in the most expeditious manner,” the spokesperson said. The Guide website has since updated the list and replaced The Charles with Mister Charles.

Having a difference of opinion about a critic's choices is one thing — but having an error of this magnitude is something else entirely.

And blaming "geolocation" as the source of the error is a curious excuse. Geolocation refers to the ability to track the whereabouts of an electronic device using GPS, cell phone towers, WiFi access points or a combination of these.

The Houston mix-up was also disappointing, but only involved one restaurant: In a press release issued Thursday, November 14, the Guide announced that it had removed Montrose Vietnamese restaurant Kau Ba from the list of Bib Gourmand recipients.

The reason: "Upon further investigation, our team has discovered the restaurant has been permanently closed since our Inspection team's visits occurred," the statement reads.

As has been widely noted in local media, Kau Ba closed earlier this month. The restaurant’s Instagram account now belongs to Alora, which is described as “a fresh Peruvian-Vietnamese fusion concept inspired by travels to Saigon.” It is expected to open soon.

Open since 2018, Kau Ba served an innovative take on Vietnamese fare created by Nikki Tran. The restaurant built on the notoriety Tran had achieved after being featured in two Netflix series: Somebody Feed Phil and Ugly Delicious. It earned considerable acclaim, including a spot in the Houston Chronicle’s top 100 restaurants as recently as 2023 and a nomination for Best Neighborhood Restaurant in the 2021 CultureMap Tastemaker Awards.

The restaurant went through a number of iterations during its tenure. For three-and-a-half years, Tran partnered with Aya Sushi owners Minette Corpuz and Bruce Kish to oversee operations, but they parted ways in February 2023.

In an email sent to Houston Public Media, Tran expressed regret over Michelin's decision.

“But we understand and respect Michelin’s decision to remove Kau Ba from its selection,” Tran said to HPM. “Exercising an abundance of caution from a legal position, I am not able currently to share further details of our situation but I do hope to follow up soon with more information.”

“Until then, on behalf of the entire Kau Ba team, we want to thank the entire culinary community for the recognition and support,” Tran added. “Kau Ba is proud of the dishes we created and look forward to sharing very soon what’s next.”

Thankfully in Austin, things seem to be going okay. The capital city swept the competition with seven stars (one more than Houston now that the change has been made), and two green stars for sustainability — in fact, the only green stars in the state.

Austin also had four of the first-ever barbecue restaurants to be awarded stars. Houston also had one.

Austin's winning restaurants were Barley Swine, Craft Omakase, Hestia, Olamaie, InterStellar BBQ, John Bates, La Barbecue, Alison Clem, and LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue.

michelin guide awards