Photo courtesy Julian Rodarte.
After a year and a half as Trinity Groves CEO, restaurateur Julian Rodarte has stepped down from the role. Rodarte started out with the West Dallas property seven years ago developing Beto & Son with his father, Beto Rodarte, and has since opened concepts Lexy’s, Nitro Burger and Temakeria.
In an interview with the Advocate, Rodarte said he is a “free agent,” although he is considering “opportunities outside of Dallas,” roles within Dallas and a potential TV project as possible career moves.
“I love restaurants, they are my first love, if you will. So doing anything restaurant related is always going to be first and foremost what I want to do,” Rodarte said. “There are some opportunities outside of Dallas that I’m entertaining, but ultimately, I would love to stay in Dallas. I would love to keep doing things here. It’s my home, it’s the people that I love.”
Also leaving Trinity Groves is Alexa Rodarte, who previously served as Director of Marketing. She said she will be helping her husband with “his personal PR, his marketing and focusing a lot on social (media),” while figuring out her next steps.
Rodarte said he will maintain ownership of his existing Trinity Groves restaurants, but will be more “behind the scenes” as he transitions out of day-to-day operations.
Any potential restaurant concepts that had been in the works before Rodarte’s departure are “definitely shelved” on his end, although Trinity Groves may choose to move forward with them without him, he said.
While he was unaware of Trinity Groves’ plans for naming a new CEO, there is a “whole team in place” that will continue running the restaurant group in the interim.
In the meantime, Rodarte has temporarily joined Exxir in running the Tipsy Elf pop-up bar.
“Right now, it’s purely Tipsy. We have talked about more and potentially making it more of a permanent thing. But I’ll be honest, we haven’t gotten into too much details just being in the full swing,” Rodarte said. “It’s really just been ‘Hey, let’s do this together. And we’ll talk in January after this is all said and done.'”
Rodarte has recently appeared in several Food Network projects, both solo and alongside his father. While he “can’t go into too much detail,” a TV project may be on the horizon.
“I also am kind of in the midst of a project, and we’ll see what happens with it. You know, I don’t have air dates or any kind of info yet,” Rodarte said. “It’s just a project that I’m working on that hopefully, you know, will eventually get aired.”
That said, Rodarte said the filming schedules of television would “pull (him) out of (restaurant) operations more than (he’d) like,” so anything TV related would be a part of the current “transitional limbo” rather than a career change.
For Rodarte, who started with Trinity Groves at only 23-years-old, he is filled with “100% gratitude” when thinking back on the last seven years of his career.
“(Beto & Son) was where I met Alexa, in those first few months of being opened. And who would have thought that from that moment, there would be a restaurant named after her a couple of years later,” Rodarte said. “So yeah, I think Trinity Groves very much launched my adult life in the restaurant industry. It was where I transitioned from being a young chef with ideas to a restaurateur.”
