In a city of big, flashy restaurant openings and even bigger restaurant groups, two of Dallas’ youngest — and busiest — restaurateurs have taken a divergent approach.
Pasha Heidari, 31, and his brother Sina Heidari, 30, have inconspicuously carved out their corner of Dallas’ hospitality industry that includes both restaurants they’ve created and acquired. The collection spans Bowen House, Las Palmas, Mike’s Gemini Twin Lounge, St. Martin’s Wine Bistro, Sylvestro and a newly reimagined Urbano Cafe.
The Heidari brothers are rather elusive figures in the cohort of restaurateurs defining Dallas’ dining scene. They rarely give media interviews, and there is little to no pageantry when they open a new restaurant or, in the case of St. Martin’s Wine Bistro and Urbano Cafe, take one over. There’s no grand opening, no marketing rollout, no flood of social media posts.
Such an approach is antithetical to today’s norms, but it’s clearly worked for the Heidaris, who have crafted a portfolio from some of Dallas’ longest-standing and most beloved restaurants.
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(From left) Brothers Pasha and Sina Heidari pose for a photo in a dining area of Urbano Cafe. They bought the restaurant to save it from closure and are slowly putting their mark on it.
Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer
“We open things in a very safe way,” said Sina in a sit-down interview at Urbano Cafe, the Heidari brothers’ latest undertaking. “We are quiet about it. Even with Las Palmas, we didn’t tell people we were opening. We just kind of unlocked the door and prayed to God we’d figure it out.”
A family affair
Figuring it out looked a little different for the Heidari brothers than for most young restaurateurs. They were born with a front-row seat to the business and a model for how to navigate it. Their father, Mohsen Heidari, has owned and operated Arthur’s Steakhouse in Addison since the late 1990s. He also owned San Francisco Rose on Greenville Avenue and St. Martin’s Wine Bistro, before his sons took it over and relocated it to Old East Dallas in 2024. Their uncle, Al Heidari, has owned Old Warsaw since the 1980s.
Their childhoods, and ultimately their careers, were shaped by watching their father pour himself into his businesses. He did all the ordering for the restaurants, and he was there for every food and wine delivery, they said.
“It was a day job and a night job for him, and the idea of him needing to do that was understood by everybody in the family,” said Sina. “A 5-year-old probably doesn’t need to understand that, but I feel like Pasha and I did for whatever reason. It just made sense to us, and it’s probably why we’re doing what we’re doing today.”
“If our dad was a plumber, we would have been plumbers,” Pasha said. “I guess that’s an easy way of saying it.”
Pasha was especially enthralled by the restaurant industry from a young age.
“I just always wanted to be in the business so badly,” he said. “I would study it like it was a religion.”
Bowen House, which the brothers opened in 2014, was their first real taste of the industry and where much of their education took place. They used that concept, and the lessons they learned from it, to fuel their next project.
When asked about how they’ve funded their restaurants, Pasha said, “We started with one, and built on that.”
‘Yesterday’s Dallas’
The brothers are fastidious in how they run their restaurants. Clad in tailored suits and black cowboy boots, they visit each of their concepts daily. They spend 30 minutes “tasting the line” at each one, meaning they try the food that has been prepped for that day’s service. They do so, they said, for the sake of consistency.
Restaurants, as the Heidaris see it, are living, breathing organisms. They have their own identities, their own needs and their own formulas for what works and what doesn’t. They require time and patience, which is why the Heidaris are only just now rolling out a new menu for Urbano Cafe, which they bought two years ago.
The Old East Dallas restaurant, which has operated out of a little 1930s storefront next to Jimmy’s Food Store since 2009, has been the Heidaris’ most challenging undertaking yet, they said.
When they heard the small neighborhood restaurant was set to close, they decided to swoop in and buy it from Mitch and Kristen Kauffman.
“It really is a restaurant of yesterday’s Dallas,” Pasha said.
The Heidaris made sure to keep the slatted blinds at Urbano Cafe, the shadows of which became a core part of the restaurant’s identity over the years.
Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer
Urbano Cafe reminded them of being kids running around St. Martin’s Wine Bistro. The glass tabletops, the dappled light cast around the dining room from late afternoon sun streaming through Venetian blinds — it all held nostalgia. It was too important of a place to them, and to Dallas, to let it disappear, the brothers said.
The responsibility of refreshing a longtime restaurant with a loyal fanbase didn’t scare them. But it has tested them more than their first venture into the business with Bowen House; more than simultaneously opening Las Palmas and Mike’s Gemini Twin Lounge in 2019; and more than taking over and relocating St. Martin’s in 2024.
“When we took this on,” Sina said, “we knew it would be our hardest challenge because things had to change in some way.”
Slow and steady
But some things had to stay the same to preserve what made the restaurant loved. The toughest challenge, Pasha said, was earning the trust of the restaurant’s staff, nearly all of whom had been there for a decade or more.
The Heidaris worked to keep Urbano’s staff, including chef de cuisine Oseas Lopez and general manager Kevan LaTorre, both of whom have been with the restaurant since 2011. The brothers gave the interior a fresh coat of paint and hung up new art, but they kept the slatted blinds.
Last year, they opened an adjoining cocktail bar called Sylvestro in the space that housed Urbano’s sister cafe, Two Doors Down. In doing so, they did away with Urbano’s BYOB structure, but they said it’s a change that’s been well received.
The Stracci Con Pesto is one of the dishes on Urbano Cafe’s new menu.
Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer
This week, they unveiled a new menu at Urbano that maintains the restaurant’s Italian identity, but shifts it from red sauce Italian-American cuisine to a more southern Italian approach. Whole roasted artichoke with aioli and bright gremolata, stracci (a flat pasta) tossed in kale and walnut pesto, and duck with brothy borlotti beans and escarole are some of the new dishes on the menu. The dishes were designed with North Texas’ often hot climate in mind.
Change at Urbano has been slow, even by the Heidaris’ standards, but they want to be good stewards of the restaurant, they said. They also want to ensure it lasts.
That, essentially, is the crux of the Heidaris business plan: Build restaurants that will outlive them.
Sometimes that means painstakingly creating something from the ground up; sometimes it means shepherding a storied business into modernity. In both cases, it’s slow and steady wins the race for the Heidaris.
The Svizzerina from Urbano Cafe’s new menu.
Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer
Dishes like the Wild Shrimp Zafferano are shifting Urbano Cafe from a red sauce Italian-American restaurant to one with a more southern Italian lean.
Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer