How Marcello Andres Started Dallas’s Coolest Underground Dinner Series

Forget ordering a tasting menu or even going to a restaurant. Some of the best and most interesting dinners in Dallas, cooked by award-winning chefs, are happening in the showroom of a local ceramics artist. Marcello Andres Ortega started making ceramics in high school and returned to it decades later, parlaying a passion into notable restaurants in Texas and beyond, where his dishware is now featured. If you’ve eaten at Georgie, Beverly’s, or Jose lately, you’ve eaten off of Ortega’s work, which he describes as sculptural work made using traditional methods, and designed with the idea of family-style eating in mind. Attendees at the Kiln to Table dinners also get the chance to eat from Ortega’s work, with chefs choosing the ceramicware they would like to serve on from his collection.

Along the way, Ortega and his team created Kiln to Table, a farm-to-table inspired dinner party with extremely limited seating held monthly in the Marcello Andres showroom. This summer, the series kicks off in May, giving diners a chance to meet and try the food by Austin chefs Megan Brijalba and Paul Wensel of Hestia (Sunday, May 25) and San Antonio chefs Ian Lanphear and Danny Grant of Isidore (Sunday, June 1) — both restaurants are part of the critically lauded Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group.

Eater Dallas caught up with Ortega to learn more about these underground dinner parties — how they originated, how the chefs pull off these lavish meals without a kitchen, and how ceramics factor into it all. By the way, the event is invite-only. Sign up for the Marcello Andres mailing list for first dibs, or hope a seat is still available when they post the dinner on Instagram.

Eater: What inspired you to put a dinner series together?

Marcello Andres Ortega: I moved into the [ceramics studio] in the summer of 2020. During our evolution, the Cedars Open Studios had a tour once a year in November. Businesses open their doors to the public on a Saturday, and the neighborhood gets flooded with pedestrians. It would be our best sales day of the year, and a light bulb went off. I asked myself, Hey, why don’t I try to do this once a month? I set my sights on building a showroom. I designed the room to be music-centric with a Bose sound system to make it a listening space. I wanted a long, skinny table to display plates and ceramics. We added a bar area for the staff to make coffee and for bartenders to come in to work during sales. We opened that space in conjunction with one of the neighborhood tours and hosted a Chilean dinner party for friends prepared by Rosin [Saez, creative director and events]. After that, when chefs came by to buy plates and do studio visits, the room piqued their interest, and they started asking about doing more formal dinners here. I didn’t think it would be an option, because we don’t have a proper kitchen.

Dan Padgett

So, chefs were like, “Whatever equipment you’ve got, we’ll figure it out?”

Every chef we talked to, it was no hindrance whatsoever to them. Every chef has some story about cooking for 30 in an elevator shaft. We got a couple of induction burners for the Chilean dinner. We have a toaster oven for staff to be able to make avocado toast, things like that, that get used in every dinner. We’ve had so many different types of cuisine, from sushi to Kent Rathbun using a flat iron grill in the main part of the warehouse that someone left here. We’ve had chefs bring in additional induction burners, sous vide, and finishing dishes with fire or torches for a final sear. It depends on the chef — we’ve had some do a lot of prep before coming, while others set it all up here. The biggest addition we’ve had is adding more electricity to the room. After the first few dinners, I realized we kept flipping the breakers. We went from renting to buying a generator for the dinners, and now we’ve had more electricity installed. It is a huge leap of faith for diners to find this warehouse in the Cedars and walk through to a back room. And now that we’ve worked through the wrinkles, it feels like a smoother experience. But having that rawness and feeling like you’re in someone’s home where you can see the hustle and food being made through a window, all adds to the charm.

Kathy Tran

How have you been finding chefs to partner with?

It started organically with chefs wanting to have events in the space. Our first dinner was with Justin Box [formerly of Cafe Momentum, the Market Cafe at Bonton Farms, and Lockwood Distilling]. Then, we brought in Gigi Zimmerman [private chef] and chef Marsia Taha [Gustu], who flew in from Bolivia. The second dinner, we held in our main production room instead of the showroom, where we hosted dinners for 28 and 30 people. We learned the pros and cons of that quantity versus being in our showroom with eight or 10. As we started thinking about which chefs made sense to invite to do the dinner series, I felt it was important to give our clients and people who have supported the studio dibs. There was no exact science to that, just timing. We started to get feedback from repeat attendees, too. RJ Yoakum from Georgie, Anastacia Quiñones-Pittman and her team, Misti Norris, Olivia Lopez from Molino Olōyō, and Shine Tamaoki from Pearl.

Kathy Tran

This summer, you’re kicking things off with some Austin and San Antonio chefs. How are folks coming from out of town going to pull it off?

Everyone who agrees to be involved with this is drawn to the excitement of doing something different, where you get to be creative and are pulled out of your normal setting. Even though traveling from out of town adds an extra element of labor to it, I think that excites the chefs with whom we collaborate. When Gab Erales [Top Chef: Portland winner and formerly of Comedor] came in from Austin to do a dinner, a lot of the prep happened in Austin, then got packed and iced up. It made sense, as we do more ceramics with Isidore and Pullman Market, and in the past few months, I connected with Hestia and started making ceramics with them. Generally, the chefs bring it up, asking how it works or how they could be considered after seeing it on social media.