For Jane Liu, reimagining Sassetta, the Tuscan-inspired restaurant that recently opened at the Joule Hotel in Dallas, was a test not just of will but of memory.
She got the commission in 2020 – her first restaurant project – just as the pandemic was forcing us to stay, making a short five-star trip to the country of my Chianti impossible. “It made us nostalgic about trips to Italy, and relive those days with our design,” Liu says of her team. And it doesn’t mean the red checkered tablecloth, Billy Joel’s vision of an Italian restaurant inside. (Although, depending on your appetite, they will offer bottles of red or white.) Molto Italian.
There is warmth and invitingness in the main dining room of the Sassetta, which is to be expected in Texas, where Southern hospitality is a thing. The copper-clad bar—with its olive green painted surround, Joseph Hoffman bentwood seats, and Murano-glass votives—is an instant draw for patrons exploring the landscape. Dramatic azure curtains exude Leo’s pride and happiness, a custom mural covering the room depicting the Tuscan countryside. “We joke that the mural was the most frequently passed thing in our lives,” Liu says of the artwork, which took months to create. “De Gournay’s designers were in England, we were in Dallas, the panels were painted in China, and the embroidery was done in India.”
A key aspect of the redesign’s brief (the restaurant first opened its doors in 2017) was to create a separation between the bar and dining areas. Liu’s solution was a hidden walnut-clad wall to separate diners from the Negroni drinkers. She also defined spaces with a row of simple lighting fixtures above the bar and more dramatic pendants that light up black-spaghetti-paneled tables and cocktails served in goddess-winged pots.
This restaurant, for Liu, is a testament to her long and close relationship with Joule owner, oil magnate and real estate developer Tim Headington. It was that friendship—and her urgent need to feel relocated to Italy—that made her jump at the chance to work at Sassetta. But she had an ulterior motive that she was more than forthright in stating: Leo would be there—a lot. “My home will be far from my home,” she says.
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