Photography by Lauren Allen.
The thing about running a hospitality group is you’re going to need hospitality.
“The food is the easy part,” says Justo Blanco, director of food and beverage at Boxwood Hospitality.
It’s ironic.
For years, co-founder and Oak Cliff neighbor Thomas Bain “wanted no part of food,” since it was complicated.
Bain, who graduated with a journalism degree at Texas A&M University in 2002, began investing in real estate with a “group of guys” in the aftermath of 2008. He ended up buying a wedding venue in Houston.
“We’re just really intrigued by it and fascinated, and it was kind of going gangbusters at the time everything else was burning down,” Bain says.
It was eventually sold back to the original owners, but Bain had latched on to the idea of owning a wedding venue.
This time, Bain decided to make one from scratch. During initial construction in 2014, his wife Lynn, a health care consultant at that time, decided to quit her job, take a couple of months off and then perhaps look for something else. She had been commuting to Fort Worth for several years and the Bains were thinking it was about time to start a family.
“Can I just have you for 60 days,” he asked her. Bain had plenty of real estate development experience, but Lynn’s strength is operations.
“Lynn is the talent of us all. I think her process level is higher than anyone I’ve ever met,” Blanco says. “It’s impressive to watch and yet somehow not intimidating.”
“And a decade later, I’ve still got her for 60 days on this project,” Bain says.
The Laurel, designed by Richard Drummond Davis, is a Texas Hill Country-inspired property which opened in Grapevine, of all places. In 2016, they tackled the restoration of The Cliff House on Tyler Street. Then in 2017, they began working with Four Corners Brewing Company to build out and manage the brewery’s event services.
At that point, there wasn’t a Boxwood Hospitality company. And the thing about running a company is you’re going to need a company.
“There was just enough folks moving around that it became kind of an opportunity to put them all in one group,” Bain says.
When they were looking for a brand name, Bain wanted something that was neutral, that was everywhere but didn’t have a strong correlation with anything specifically.
“I think boxwoods are really interesting,” Bain says. “You can drive through all sorts of different places, Kensington Palace to single family homes that are in Oak Cliff, there’s boxwood everywhere and they work on a large variety of spaces.”
So, what does Boxwood Hospitality Group do exactly?
The company outright owns two venues: The Laurel and The Cliff House. They manage event services at other venues. They offer development services — from concepting to construction administration — for renovating or building hospitality-centered spaces. There’s a consulting arm for brands that already offer hospitality services but need a little, or a lot, of extra help.
Oh, they plan events too.
But Boxwood Hospitality avoided food and beverages services for years, partnering with different companies to stay out of catering.
“But we struggled to find the right one, and so we really started trying to figure out how can we do this internally,” Bain says.
As the story goes with anything that happened during the pandemic; it was time to pivot.
Bain and Justo Blanco ran in similar circles. Blanco’s company, Familia Events, had catered at The Cliff House, which incidentally he lives within walking distance of. And he had launched the event program with Trinity River Audubon Center as it began its partnership with Boxwood Hospitality.
“We reconnected at the playground, like dads taking care of their kids,” Blanco says.
“I remember walking home that day, thinking ‘I need to give Justo a call,’” Bain says.
Blanco has nearly 20 years of experience working in food and beverage.
A Dallas native, Blanco was studying chemistry at the University of Texas when he started cooking as a hobby before starting at the Texas Culinary Academy in 2003.
He was getting ready to leave the kitchen for front-of-house duties when he got an offer to spend six months in Belgium working at Les Pecheries, a brasserie. It turned out to be a job interview for a new restaurant, Brussels Bistro in Laguna Beach. Blanco worked six days a week and all shifts, he says. Then he was offered the executive chef role, and he took along one of his colleagues to be his sous chef.
“And I was extremely under qualified to be running the kitchen,” he says.
After a brief stint in San Francisco, he ended up traveling through Southeast Asia, learning at a Bangkok cooking school and training at an Indian restaurant.
He eventually made his way back to Dallas, working at the Las Colinas’ Four Seasons, the now shuttered Bolsa Mercado and The Statler. Blanco had figured he’d go back to living in North Dallas, but when he discovered Oak Cliff, he fell in love.
“Probably, because it felt the most like Austin to me at the time,” he says. “Obviously, this is where I needed to be.”
He was right. Otherwise, he might not have been at that playground talking to Bain on that day.
Now, the hospitality group also works with Downtown’s historic 400 North Ervay and an actual Hill Country venue, Walden Retreats. The newest arm of the company features Blanco, who runs Boxwood’s catering business that provides in-house and external services.
A lot of questions get asked at Boxwood.
Especially when clients walk into the new Design District space, which the company moved into after outgrowing their former Bishop Arts spot.
When I walked in, I was seated in the room where clients first meet the team. Off the bat, Blanco wanted to ask me a few questions.
First, “Can you tell me about yourself?” Which I answered with a brief synopsis of how I got from Ethiopia to Dallas and how I got from Southern Methodist University to the Advocate.
His second question was: “Where’s your favorite place to get a margarita?”
“At home,” I responded. Fresh lemon, lime and orange juice, a tequila like Patrón, Grand Marnier and skip the simple syrup.
Any meeting with the Boxwood team starts from the lens of hospitality.
“That’s why I wanted to start today with a conversation, not an introduction,” Blanco told me. “The majority of our work, 99% of it, it’s about understanding what the client is actually asking for. The food is just the tool that we’re using to deliver the message back to them.”
Clients are presented with sample menus of a plated dinner or a buffet. Then they make modifications to incorporate elements of the client’s personality or history.
“It’s not like I have an Ethiopian menu and this is the way I make my margaritas,” Blanco references his initial questions. “It’s much more about ‘what is it that you value?’ And ‘how can I make sure that you experience that?’”
A big part of building event menus is private tastings, but when a company is doing 300-400 events a year, primarily in Dallas’ busiest social seasons, it gets pretty expensive.
That’s when, yet another aspect of Boxwood, was born. The Supper Club is a sit-down dinner hosted at The Cliff House.
“It became a way for us to show hospitality to our clients,” Bain says. “It gives them a date night. Lets them experience Boxwood food. Lets them experience Boxwood service.”
The concept worked, so they decided to launch a public spinoff called The Jazz Supper Club, featuring live music and three courses. One event included a heirloom tomato tart with caramelized fennel and arugula pesto, cast iron-seared Tai snapper with forbidden rice, green papaya ceviche and coconut broth, and a Texas olive oil cake with grilled stone fruit, lemon curd and crispy basil.
For either suppers, you can hear and smell meat on a grill in a makeshift kitchen on the back porch of The Cliff House.
“I call it sizzle flair,” Blanco says.
The standard of catering is that food is produced in a centralized location and then shipped off hot. But Boxwood has a policy of making as much of it on site at any event as possible, building and tearing down kitchens, usually at “great expense.”
“We do everything we can to shorten the time from when it last leaves a chef’s hands to when it is being consumed by a guest,” Blanco says.
That’s the complicated part of food.
“The phrase, the food is the easy part was said early, and it actually initially scared me a little bit,” Bain says. “Almost like he’s riding on terms of the hospitality portion, but then obviously the [culinary] skill set is there.”
Hospitality isn’t just external.
Every Thursday, there’s a family meal prepared in the Boxwood kitchen.
“We’re huggers and feelers, especially from the kitchen side,” Blanco says. “So this is all of their love language: to prepare.”
Every Friday, before hitting the slew of events scheduled, Blanco grabs a margarita with his wife and his son, blessed with the chef’s curse of being a picky eater, consumes chickenless kids quesadilla at Mi Cocina.
“A margarita is a good pathway between my personal life and my professional life,” Blanco says. “It’s how I transition out of my day. It’s how I connect with my wife. It’s in a place that my son loves to be in.”
Bain says the way he and his wife decompress is at a concert or a quick trip out of Dallas. Blanco says sometimes for Bain, it’s spinning vinyls and drinking bourbon, preferably Eagle Rare.
He’s comfortable answering that question. For Bain’s birthday, Blanco cooked a dinner featuring some of Bain’s favorite things, testing his knowledge of how well he knew him.
“If you’re signing up for events, you’re gonna spend a lot of time with people,” Bain says. “Events are hard. We try to be in a place that you’re supported. And we know where each other is coming from.”
After all, food is the easy part.
