At Halff Culinaire, chef Phillip Halff transforms a seasonal tasting menu into a two- to three-hour culinary show
It starts with tomato nectar whipped with egg whites, transforming into a delicate, stark-white bun placed gently on a ceramic plate. Next comes a dollop of lettuce mayonnaise, made from lettuce oil and whipped egg yolk. Finally, the heirloom tomato tuiles sandwich is topped with a patty of bacon jam pate. A playful take on a BLT, it’s both comfort food and high art — and that’s just the beginning.
We’re in a quiet, Richardson home, where a bite-sized macaron merges French technique with American nostalgia, turning a humble sandwich into an edible jewel, almost too beautiful to eat.
Behind us, shelves brim with books of all genres. Children’s toys are scattered about, and artwork made with tiny fingers clings to the walls. Sunlight pours through the window onto the backyard garden, the very one that supplies the herbs and vegetables for Frisco’s most intricate tasting menus. This is the home of Halff Culinaire, a tasting-menu dining experience by Chef Phillip Halff.
This first course is the hallmark of Chef’s Table at Halff Culinaire, a bimonthly, seasonal, multi-course dinner hosted twice a month at Main Street’s culinary studio, Cibo Kitchens in Frisco. “The macaron, it changes the diners’ perspective after they eat it, showing that what the menu says is not what you’re probably going to get,” Halff says from his familial kitchen. The first taste is jolting with contrast: savory when you expect sweet. Tomatoes are crisp instead of soft and juicy. The lettuce is rebellious: doused with oil, taking on a creamy, indulgent alter ego. It’s playful and whimsical.
“Growing up, for me, tasting menus were always suit jacket stuff. You have to wear a tie, and you’re like, ‘All right. Yes, sir. No, sir. Can I have my jacket to go walk to the bathroom?’ And just so stale and so uninviting,” Halff says. “That’s what my wife and I really want to instill into Halff Culinaire — that it’s inviting, because it’s not a chef cooking. It’s not a chef cooking at a restaurant where you’re one of millions or hundreds. It’s a chef cooking with a mentality that he’s at home cooking for guests and not customers.”
Home Is Where the Kitchen Is
The artisanal chef didn’t always intend to be such. He was an aspiring marine biologist with an ocean phobia and a penchant for grandma-made, Paula Deen-instructed gluttony. At the Culinary Institute of America, Halff eagerly accepted the lifestyle that came with culinary passion: 80-hour weeks, 14-hour days, egos, sharp knives and hot flames.
With Michelin stars in his eyes, Halff quietly made his way around the Dallas culinary circuit after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America. He joined the 2013 opening team behind Lower Greenville’s now-closed Blind Butcher, where, under the watchful eye of sausage connoisseur Oliver Sitrin, Halff graduated from dishwasher to sous chef.
“Oliver really was my mentor, guiding me towards common sense,” Halff says in all seriousness, as he eyes his version of shrimp toast, an East-meets-West blend of ground shrimp with buttery toast. “Just because it’s in a book doesn’t mean it needs to be done that way.”
In 2015, a skip and a hop away from Blind Butcher, Halff met his wife, Ann, in a beer-fueled happenstance at The Old Crow. “Four weeks into dating, I just knew he was the one,” Ann Halff says. Think of them as two halves finally coming together, a push and pull that, when directed right, creates magic.
Phillip’s Table
Frisco can thank world-renowned chef Massimo Bottura for the culinary ingenuity behind Halff Culinaire. From three-Michelin-starred Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, Bottura planted the seed for Halff’s culinary experience via the debut episode of Netflix’s Chef’s Table.
“My wife and I were watching it, and she said, ‘Why don’t you do a dinner like this?’ And that immediately sparked, and like, ‘Why the hell am I not cooking my food? Why am I cooking other people’s food?’”
Named after the inspirational show, the first Chef’s Table went as most firsts go. A small collection of family and friends gathered for a three-course meal while Halff sweated bullets over a humbling baked Alaska.
“We called them family meals, and so we’d have friends come over to his house, and he would just start working through recipes in his head; he would just say, ‘I want to make these things. Come eat them and just help me pay for groceries,” Ann Halff says. The experimental phase in the Halffs’ home swelled to include up to 20 gut-busting courses.
Photo: Jackie Loubriel
From 2018 to 2020, North Carolina was home for the couple. They returned to Texas in 2020. The global consensus is that 2020 was hard. For the Halffs, it was indescribably hard.
Haff lost his job at Mirador. Eight-months-pregnant Ann Halff was diagnosed with cancer, and she gave birth to their firstborn in September. She notes that many women who receive a cancer diagnosis end up getting divorced or leaving their partners. “That was never even a blip on my radar,” she says.
“I went from pregnant to postpartum to medically induced ovulation to medically induced menopause for cancer treatment in five weeks,” Ann Halff recalls. Over the course of the next two years, she underwent six months of chemotherapy and 13 surgeries.
Through it all, Chef’s Table allowed Halff to host donation-based dinners in their home. Twice a month, guests would walk through the backyard garden, filled with herbs and vegetables, to spaced-out dining tables where they enjoyed an under-the-radar culinary journey.
Photo: Jackie Loubriel
Undefined
It’s hard to put Chef’s Table in a box. Each dish begins with an idea, then a sketch. The visualization is a blueprint that takes the chef to his hydroponic garden, where he plants and nurtures fresh ingredients, like anise hyssop, lemon verbena, acmella oleracea and Vietnamese cilantro, to create visual wonders.
Those polishing years pared the ever-changing menu down to 12 to 15 courses. “That’s 15 composed dishes, that’s 15 composed ideas with how many ingredients they put into it, with how many hands have touched it to prepare the food, how many ceramic artists have made these plates designed just for that food, plus definitely including the front of house … [turning] what usually is a 30-minute to an hour dinner with three courses to a two- to three-hour show,” Halff says.
His technique: razor sharp.
Chef Belal Kattan, who often collaborates with Halff, puts it simply: “[Phillip] Halff is the most technical chef I know. I don’t think anybody really comes close in that sense. Even if I tried and I practiced to match what he does, I couldn’t do it. It’s just something that comes to him by default; this is his style.”
In North Texas, chefs like Halff and Kattan have leaned on the pop-up, predetermined menu concept to refine their crafts. The low overhead allows creativity while cultivating collaboration. Halff regularly partners with Kattan and Chef Mollie Guerra, a former contestant on Chopped and MasterChef, to bring Chef’s Table to life. Pop-ups and satellite kitchens demand more, mentally and physically, than cooking at a restaurant.
“Every event is a lot heavier, both in prep and service,” Kattan says. Kattan, who runs his own pop-up concept fueled by his Syrian heritage, says that a single event requires at least 20 hours of work. That doesn’t include the anxiety and stress of transporting hand-selected ceramics and temperature-sensitive ingredients across town.
“Every plate is intentional, every ingredient is intentionally prepped,” Halff details. “Every plate is sanitized, wiped down, finessed.”
The 12-plus-course spread has no piece de resistance. Not for lack of a crowning glory, but instead due to fierce competition. Chef’s Table is unrestrained.
“It’s new American, eclectic, if you will,” Kattan says. “It’s just a mix of everything. You never know what you’re gonna get, and it’s really, really exciting.”
Photo: Jackie Loubriel
Wandertaste
Each service is a gastronomic journey seen through Halff’s eyes. You might try a shrimp toast inspired by childhood memories of dim sum at the former Maxim’s Restaurant in Richardson. There may be a pillowy carbonara amuse-bouche or a corn curd that looks like corn on the cob. Other courses take influence from the Halffs’ travels, including Thailand, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Bali, Canada, Iceland and Singapore.
“He gets very inspired by the textures, the flavors and the technique, into putting the dish together, physically. What does it look like? Not just what it tastes like,” Ann Halff says.
Take, for instance, the hami melon and summer tomato salad: it combines a meticulously composed, fennel-cured lonza crisp with a house ricotta, crowned with basil seeds soaked in gazpacho — aptly named garden caviar — and sparkling whey aspic. The final step: a vibrant herbal bouquet of purple opal basil, anise hyssop, yellow oxalis and green salad burnet, placed compositionally with surgical precision.
Since 2023, Chef’s Table has been served out of the glossy Cibo Kitchens. The clean white kitchen seats up to 15, serving as a blank canvas for the Halff Culinaire team. The polished space is both a laboratory and a stage.
The Halffs, who welcomed their second child this year, are aiming to open a brick-and-mortar Chef’s Table that can take the stage more often. Until then, word-of-mouth has made Halff Culinaire a quietly coveted experience in Frisco, an intimate corner of North Texas filled with warmth, artistry and exploration.
“I hope [diners] remember a dish fondly, that it was so unique, so flavorful, so soul-feeding that they’re like, I’m gonna be thinking about that dish for two weeks past. That they remember the food and they enjoy the experience of being plated and poured from tableside, the experience of being served water and wine and being told a story behind a dish.”
To find the next date for Halff Culinaire, visit www.halffculinaire.net/reservations.
This article originally appeared in Local Profile Magazine. Read more here.
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Dining and Cooking