The Duchess at the Nobelman in Fort Worth Makes Hotel Dining Compelling

There has been an influx of hotels with destination restaurants in Fort Worth since Hotel Drover opened, although I wouldn’t count its restaurant 97 West among those. The building of great boutique hotels came first, and the addition of restaurants that mattered inside the hotels followed. Top of mind are Bricks and Horses inside Bowie House and Emilia and the Blue Room inside the Crescent. 

The Duchess at the Nobleman has entered the ring as a third contender worth making a reservation at. The menu is by chef Casey Thompson, who cut her teeth in fine dining under Dean Fearing at the Mansion. She’s also known for her turn on season 3 of Top Chef, where she was a fan favorite, and her now-closed Sonoma, CA restaurant Folktable, which Michelin awarded a Bib Gourmand. The man executing it is chef Marcus Kopplin, who most recently did a stint at Clay Pigeon under From Scratch Hospitality, a restaurant and group both arguably at the forefront of Fort Worth’s dining scene. 

In the up-and-coming Main South, the Nobleman is a Marriott hotel masquerading as a boutique. From the renovation that keeps in tact elements of the firehouse that once rested there (it was not the most recent inhabitant, but it does have the best story) to the somewhat generic hipness that corporations tend to bring to these spaces, it’s kind of unremarkable and veers a tad into cheesy. The smartest design element of this space is that the dining room and bar, which are of equal size, are split into two different rooms across the hall from each other — and the dining room has a wall and a door offering separation so the noise from the bar doesn’t spill over. Neither does the crowd of hotel guests who want to grab a drink before heading out for the night. It sets the space up to be singular. 

Hotel restaurants are not guaranteed any relevance, as Helen Rosner of the New Yorker wrote in a recent review of the latest restaurant inside the Waldorf Astoria. These spaces serve a purpose: to feed hotel guests in dining rooms and offer room service. Most hotel restaurant money comes from on-site catering events, and a majority of hotel chefs would prioritize crafting a menu to service what the Dell group holding their conference in town likes over the restaurant dining experience any day of the week. Only with intention, a hotel hires a team like this to craft a menu of the style found in the Nobleman — the intention to make it a destination unto itself. 

My meal at the end of July started with a Golden Pina, an aperol glass filled with Prosecco, Aperol, pineapple puree, and Fever Tree club soda. It looked like a sunset, with the orange Aperol at the bottom of the glass, transitioning into yellow and clear as it went to the top, and garnished with a slice of dried pineapple. The appetizer, a large serving of charred eggplant and fried onion dip, was so visually compelling that the table next to me also ordered it. It has an eggplant dip topped with fried onions and chile crisp that is surrounded by a plethora of local vegetables (in season and served that day were snap peas, sliced carrots, cucumbers, purple daikon radishes, small red radishes with the stem on, baby carrots with the stem on, and housemade potato chips. Thanks to the onions, the savory and pungent dip beautifully performed the trick of working well on every vegetable and the fried chips, each crudite eliciting a different note of flavor from it. 

Next came a summer salad of cubed watermelon with whipped feta, mint, and salted plum vinaigrette. Chef Kopplin told me that the deep magenta color of his watermelon comes from pressing the cubes, injecting them with the seeping watermelon juice, and storing them for a day. You will never find this juicy or dark watermelon in stores or even a field. The whipped feta sits in the middle of the plate, gated by watermelon cubes, each dotted with halved mini green tomatoes, then topped with pickled red onion, mint, and crispy bread crumbs.

Then, a corn-stuffed farfalle in a sungold tomato sauce was easily the most challenging dish of the evening. The pasta was stuffed with a creamy corn mixture and served in a highly acidic sauce — the pair was oil and water for the palette. Pulling the plate together were chunks of smoked pork that Kopplin walked to the nearby barbecue spot, Panther City, to cook in its smokers. The meat was glazed in a sweet sauce, and each bite of pasta with the ultra-rich, smoky pork was quite the trifecta of flavors. 

A restaurant is only as good as its roast chicken, so that was the main course I chose. This chicken was excellent, but the au jus that came with it was liquid gold. The chicken is buttermilk-brined, and the au jus (simply gravy on the menu) is beyond decadent, despite its thin appearance. The deep flavor of the pan scrapings and chicken flavors shine through magnificently. On the side are crispy layered potatoes that are perfectly fine, but an au jus this special cries for whipped or mashed potatoes. The chef sent out a side of macaroni and cheese with the plate, and it was an experiment that didn’t quite work. The dish is served brulee style, with a smattering of brown sugar on top of the noodles that gets caramelized. The idea is bold, and the cheese in the dish should have been sharper, richer, and more intense to provide a more profound counterpoint to the sweetness. 

I went home with a slice of chocolate Basque cheesecake, a dessert I haven’t seen elsewhere in DFW. It made for an appropriately hedonistic breakfast the next morning.

Not many dining rooms in hotels are worth the effort to visit, but the Duchess is one. I look forward to returning as the menu shifts to autumn.