{"id":207338,"date":"2026-03-16T21:42:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T21:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/207338\/"},"modified":"2026-03-16T21:42:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T21:42:06","slug":"fort-worth-chef-tim-love-goes-mediterranean-at-new-meraki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/207338\/","title":{"rendered":"Fort Worth chef Tim Love goes Mediterranean at new Meraki"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fort Worth chef Tim Love is taking on a brand new cuisine with Meraki<\/a>, a new restaurant spotlighting dishes from Greece and other Mediterranean regions, opening at 1615 Rogers Rd.<\/p>\n

The restaurant is taking over the dining room at Courtside Kitchen, the pickleball facility that opened<\/a> in the former Mopac Event Center in 2021. According to Love, the restaurant will open Tuesday, March 17.<\/p>\n

Love’s lengthy portfolio of restaurants covers pretty much every other cuisine: Lonesome Dove Western Bistro, Gemelle (Italian), Queenie’s Steakhouse, Woodshed Smokehouse, \u00c1tico, Love Shack (burgers), Caterina’s (more Italian), Paloma Suerte (Mexican), along with Tannahill’s Tavern & Music Hall, White Elephant Saloon, and Hotel Otto.<\/p>\n

So now it’s hummus. Love is nothing if not timely, as Mediterranean is trending locally, with out-of-town concepts such as Avra<\/a> and Aba<\/a> making their debut in DFW, joining longtime local favorites such as Chadra Mezze Grill<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a video<\/a>, Love said Meraki was inspired by what seemed to be a shortage of Mediterranean restaurants in that neighborhood.<\/p>\n

“I was thinking that we don’t have any Mediterranean restaurants in the near central Fort Worth area,” he says. “There’s a couple places \u2014 I don’t want to make anyone upset here \u2014 but we don’t really have a dedicated, sit-down, polished Mediterranean restaurant.”<\/p>\n

He and his culinary team were already talking Mediterranean when “all of a sudden this opportunity came up at Courtside Kitchen right down the street from Woodshed.”<\/p>\n

After looking at the space, he determined it would be perfect for “a bad-ass Mediterranean restaurant with a killer bar menu, some very vibrant music and a DJ playing that whole Mediterranean vibe \u2014 [as if you just] walked off some giant yacht onto the beach.”<\/p>\n

The proximity to Woodshed was a plus, and Love also has history with the space, when he briefly became involved<\/a> with the Mopac Event Center in pre-pandemic 2018 before it was taken over by the pickleball space.<\/p>\n

The pickleball will remain intact under the name “Courtside Pickleball,”<\/a> and there’ll still be a limited menu of snacks available from the outdoor canteen, along with a full bar, a spokesperson says.<\/p>\n

“We were a pickleball facility with a restaurant, but now we’ll no longer have a restaurant,” the spokesperson says.<\/p>\n

But the main dining room will now be all Love and all Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

“There’ll be a lot of meze,” Love says. “Beautiful hummus puree, and tepete, tzatziki, and then on to some crazy meats like lamb kofta, chicken kohlrabi kebabs, a pressed beef short rib, muchimora \u2014 very Greek with this Texas point of view.”<\/p>\n

“On the seafood side, I’m very excited about the shrimp,” he says. “I really don’t want to eplain it too much but it comes with the shells that are super crispy and you can eat the shell and the shrimp, served in a beautiful lemon butter garlic sauce.”<\/p>\n

Other seafood specials include scallops \u2014 seared “super crispy” on the outside and served with pureed fava beans and roasted morel mushrooms.”<\/p>\n

Meraki will also accommodate these days of interactivity and spectacle, Love says.<\/p>\n

“We’ll have a group tasting menu with whole halibut salt-crusted and flamed tableside, and pasta made tableside, and amazing desserts made tableside,” he says. “And our Greek salad will be unlike anything you’ve tasted in the city.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fort Worth chef Tim Love is taking on a brand new cuisine with Meraki, a new restaurant spotlighting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207339,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[2808,116,118,117,423,22583,78289],"class_list":["post-207338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-worth","tag-chefs","tag-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth-headlines","tag-fort-worth-news","tag-openings","tag-pickleball","tag-tim-love"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}