“Can I get you anything?” Chas Martin asks. It’s a bright morning, mid-week, perfect patio weather, and we’re at Sister, an Italian-Mediterranean-inspired eatery on Greenville Avenue. Martin brings polenta with meatballs, tomatoes and jalapeños, and his business partner Benji Homsey is asking how I take my coffee. Milk, no sugar.
Right away, it’s clear: both men bleed hospitality. Sure, the same is true for so many in restaurants. This is etched in their brains and encoded in their DNA. The behavior isn’t simply learned. It’s perfected. “Hospitality all the time,” says Homsey, setting down the coffee.
Martin is from Fort Worth, and he effortlessly pulls off a madras blazer, a giant belt buckle, Stan Smiths and an Audemars Piguet. At first glance, Homsey looks more reserved in a smart jacket, but the colorful vintage Swatch on his wrist hints at the Oklahoma native’s love of art and design. But these two aren’t just any restaurateurs: they, along with architectural designers Corbin See and Ross See, are the co-founders of Duro Hospitality, one of North Texas’ most exciting food and beverage groups, with establishments like The Charles, Mister Charles and El Carlos Elegante.
“Carlos,” of course, is Spanish for Charles. I notice a theme. “Are all these restaurants named after Chas?” I ask.
“Ish,” says Martin. “I like to say, ‘ish.’ Everyone else says, ‘yes.’” Homsey nods his head and mouths a quick affirmation. This is the first time I’ve met Martin, but it’s not the first time I’ve met Homsey.
This might be my first time at Sister, but it isn’t my first time in this space: for 40-plus years, this was the home of The Grape, a Dallas dining icon that closed in 2019. (Prior to that, it was home to the non-shuttered Pietro’s, at one time Dallas’ most popular Italian restaurant, before it moved down the street.) While The Grape looked to France, Sister — so dubbed because it’s The Charles’ sister restaurant — takes its cue from Mediterranean cuisine, particularly Italian. “Unlike a lot of restaurateurs here, we have not chased ideas,” says Martin. “We chase deals.” The Grape deal came at the onset of COVID, and at that time, Duro wasn’t looking to do anything small. “But,” continues Martin, “it was The Grape — how could we not do that?” I went to The Grape, and my parents went on dates at Pietro’s. This is a space with history. With pedigree. And meaning. Sister is the latest chapter in that history — and a worthy heir.
Sister is one of Duro’s two non-Charles-monikered establishments, the other being the neighboring Cafe Duro, which serves coffee and pastries and sells wine. “I think we spent $800,000 on that buckaroo,” says Martin about renovating the little space and turning it into Cafe Duro. And a beautiful space it is, marble counter and all, looking like it was plucked right out of Europe and plopped onto Greenville Avenue in Dallas.
“We don’t know any other way,” Martin continues. If he and Homsey are going to stick their brand on something, it needs to feel as good today as it will in the future. "Mister Charles, for example, will feel as good as it does in fifty years," he tells me.
____
What about this place makes it so good? The question rolls around my head. It’s a month earlier, and my wife and I are at Mister Charles. Soft Cell’s 1980s synth-pop hit “Tainted Love” plays as guys in popped collars nurse Highland Park Pharmacy penicillins, the house cocktail made with Highland Park 12, ginger and honey, as well as a nod to the building’s former occupant, the Highland Park Pharmacy, which called the building home for over one hundred years. I remember the pharmacy’s soda counter, now long gone. Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson made their debut film Bottle Rocket here with Wes Anderson. This is a place with history.
Course after course, from the canapes to the prime beef carpaccio, from the cipollini onion tarte tatin to the uni shells carbonara with pancetta and egg yolk bottarga and the 16-ounce Bar N Ranch wagyu New York strip, the restaurant dazzles with class. But it’s not stuffy: the waitstaff is in ascots, yacht-inspired blazers and sneakers.
Plus, the place is fun. Even the menu agrees, proudly proclaiming, “An irreverent play on the classics.” But there’s more — endless details, like the intricate patterns on the glassware, the Mister Charles monogram on the plates and that monogram’s angel-and-devil motif echoed throughout the restaurant, tastefully, subtly and playfully.
This was the night I met Homsey — a mutual acquaintance, Josh Irving of Socorro Tequila, was at Mister Charles the same night and made the introduction. “Why is this place so good?” I asked, repeating the question rattling around my brain.
“We should talk more,” replied Homsey.
____
Chas Martin didn’t plan to go into the restaurant business. Then again, neither did Homsey.
“I went to SMU to study opera and musical theater,” says Martin. He felt his true passion was elsewhere, and he ended up in culinary school. An internship at the legendary Dallas steakhouse Nick & Sam’s was Martin’s first restaurant gig — one that turned into a full-time job for the next five years, working in a variety of different positions and ultimately running all of the restaurant’s front-of-house operations.
“Chas is the most talented front-of-house man I’ve ever seen,” says Homsey, who hired Martin to run all the food and beverage at Hotel ZaZa, the boutique hotel Homsey had been hired to set up. “He’s so well known and so well regarded.”
In restaurants, generally speaking, there are two big parts of the business: the front of the house, which is what the customers see, and the back of the house, which is where the food is made. The front of the house is service-driven — what customers experience. The back of the house is flavor-driven — what customers taste.
“People will tell you that there are a bunch of innate qualities for the front of the house,” says Martin. “Charisma helps.” And Martin has no shortage of that. He’s charming and instantly likable.
“I truly enjoy people,” Martin continues, “and I think that helps me, but in our world, if you have the right playbook, you can do anything.”
Like Martin’s, Homsey’s path was anything but orthodox. He arrived at TCU to play Division 1 soccer and study real estate finance before working at a startup in San Francisco and Dallas. The future was limitless, and things were going great until they weren’t. The startup went pear-shaped, and Homsey had started looking for real estate gigs when a close friend called, asking if he wanted to interview with her dad, real estate developer Charlie Givens. “Maybe I had met him once, and she said he was building a hotel in Dallas,” says Homsey. They met, and he recounts that Givens said, “Listen, I’m going to hire you, even though everyone is telling me not to because you have zero experience.” But, Givens continued, he would give it a shot. “If it works, great. If it doesn’t, no hard feelings.” It certainly did work, and Hotel ZaZa became Dallas’ hippest boutique hotel. For Homsey, the journey into hospitality made sense: “I grew up in a big Lebanese community in Oklahoma City, and I think that’s where my innate hospitality comes from.”
But neither Martin nor Homsey was content to merely run establishments for others. They wanted to make a run at it for themselves and began work on what would become their first restaurant, The Charles.
“We bought that property in 2015,” says Martin — as in, they bought the building kit and caboodle, thereby sidestepping an issue that can plague restaurants: leases and rent increases. “But that also made it much more challenging and much more time-consuming,” explains Homsey. They needed to get the space ready, handling all the permits themselves. Three years later, The Charles opened.
“It shouldn’t have taken that long,” says Martin. “But we thought we’d help pioneer the neighborhood.” Homsey was still working at Hotel ZaZa as the hotel’s president, moonlighting at The Charles, while the restaurant was Martin’s second home. “I was there every day, man,” he says. “I ran the restaurant, I ran the wine program and I tasted everything we put out.”
It’s that attention to detail that makes The Charles and Mister Charles great. “There are 100, 200, 300 little details that make you better than everyone else,” says Martin. “We have to take all those details and systematize them and organize them for our team to execute that playbook in a fun way.” Duro Hospitality, Martin says, is in the people business. It’s people making the food, serving the guests and running the restaurants.
“The majority of restaurants rely on people’s innate talents too much,” Martin adds. Being a good cook, he continues, doesn’t equate to running a good kitchen. That, he says, is too much jazz — too much freestyling. Instead, Duro Hospitality uses a series of systems and processes throughout the restaurant to ensure that things run smoothly instead of relying purely on talent and instinct. But Duro doesn’t want overly calculated, cold, even service — and the service it offers is anything but. Remember, they’re in the people business.
“At a restaurant like Mister Charles, it can feel almost unapproachable, and the service can feel programmed,” says Homsey. “We want our teams to use their personality at the tables — to have fun. There are guardrails, but that way, the guests can feel it, and in turn, have more fun.”
Another plate of food comes out. “Here’s for you boys,” says Martin. “I just snacked.”
We’re talking plans. What’s next? Where? “Fort Worth is next,” says Martin — a new idea for a restaurant, he adds. The location makes sense: this is where he’s from, and where Homsey went to university. But Duro isn’t stopping there. “This concept specifically,” Homsey says, gesturing to Sister, “we think is very scalable. It would be fun to put one of these in Fort Worth, one of these in Frisco and, maybe, one in Southlake.”
“We’re poking around way up north,” says Martin, referring to Collin County. “Frisco is on fire.”
“It’s amazing what is happening,” says Homsey. “We toured the Fields development — the amount of infrastructure they’re putting in, the amount of money they’re spending, and already, the single-family home sales are off the charts.
“Fehmi [Karahan] is a world-class real estate developer, oozing with charisma,” Homsey continues. “He gets it. Fields, to us, will be a very successful development.” But the success of Collin County won’t stop there, Homsey believes, adding that what is happening in Prosper and Celina keeps going and going.
That, I say, will push development even further north, right into Oklahoma.
“I hope,” says Homsey, adding that he’s tired of taking 35 to visit his family in Oklahoma because of constant construction and wishes for the day that he can just zip up the tollway. An easier flow between North Texas and Oklahoma will only benefit Collin County — something that Homsey points out. When he was a kid, his family would drive down to Dallas several times a year to eat and shop.
“That is a big demand generator coming from Oklahoma to this market,” he says. “And by the way, now, they’re not coming downtown: they’re stopping in Frisco and not going anywhere else. There’s plenty to do, eat and shop in Frisco and Plano.”
“We haven’t got anything done there yet, but that’s obviously going to be the third arm of this Metroplex, right?” says Martin. “It’s going to be Dallas-Fort Worth, then Plano and Frisco — if it’s not already how the Metroplex is viewed. That’s obviously a place we want to be.”
But the goal isn’t just expansion, it’s staying power. These guys want their restaurants to last decades. “We have incredible concepts that I think are going to be around for thirty years — or longer,” says Homsey. A whole host of places like The Grape or Pietro’s, restaurants that existed in this neighborhood for decades.
Homsey and Martin ask if I’m still hungry, offering pastries and coffee. I politely decline, but even as they talk business and real estate, hospitality continues to course through their veins.
“We got into this because we love restaurants,” says Martin. They most certainly do.
This article was previously published in Local Profile magazine.
