When The Mont opened its doors at 4729 Saint Amand Circle on August 7, 2025, the built-in audience was obvious enough: a few thousand people behind two guardhouses on Team Ranch Road with nowhere closer than Clearfork or downtown for a proper dinner. A year later, the same ownership group is opening a second restaurant six miles east, underground in a historic downtown building. That is not how a neighborhood restaurant usually behaves. Neighborhood restaurants stay put. This one became a pilot program.
If you live in Montserrat or Montrachet, you have probably already eaten at The Mont, or at least heard someone at the pool talk about the duck. What you may not have pieced together yet is how much has happened to that restaurant in twelve months, and what it signals about the stretch of road just outside your gate.
What Actually Opened at the Gate
The Mont came from an unlikely pairing: Jeff Payne, the owner of Cousin's BBQ, and his longtime partner Jason Cross, stepping away from forty years of slow-smoked brisket to open a mid-century supper club. Payne put it simply when the project was announced, saying he'd wanted to open an upscale, chef-driven concept in Fort Worth for a long time and that the Montserrat corner was the spot the moment he saw it.
The kitchen went to Michael Duff, who spent more than a decade at Eddie V's Fort Worth, starting as a prep cook in 2010 and rising to executive chef three years in. He built the menu alongside culinary director Michael Arlt, a Johnson & Wales graduate whose résumé runs through Watercolor Inn and Resort in Florida, Emeril Lagasse's E2 Eatery in Charlotte, Cindy's Rooftop in Chicago, and Fort Worth's short-lived but well-regarded Beast & Company. The 7,400-square-foot space, designed by Fort Worth's Maven Interior Design, leans hard into mahogany wood, leather booths, and a centerpiece bar under chandeliers built locally by Stage Works. Regulars order the black garlic-glazed duck, the fried chicken with sorghum molasses, and the crab hushpuppies, according to CultureMap's own rundown of the city's newest restaurants.
None of that is news if you have already had dinner there. What happened next is.
The Awards Season Verdict
In April 2026, The Mont landed in CultureMap Fort Worth's Tastemaker Awards bracket for Best New Restaurant, one of sixteen contenders that included buzzed-about names like NADC Burger and Brooklyn's. The format is a head-to-head tournament with daily public voting, running through April 28 and culminating in a ceremony at Social Space in the Near Southside on April 30.
That alone would be a solid showing for a restaurant a few miles past Loop 820. But The Mont also picked up a second, arguably more meaningful nomination: culinary director Michael Arlt for Chef of the Year, alongside Jon Bonnell of Bonnell's, Molly McCook of Ellerbe, and Rodrigo Cárdenas of Dos Mares. Those are not soft categories. Chef of the Year at the Tastemaker Awards typically goes to someone anchoring a restaurant the entire city already talks about, not a spot tucked outside a gated neighborhood most of Fort Worth has never driven past.
Jason Cross had described the restaurant's ambition early on: "This menu is a love letter to timeless cuisine." A year in, the city's own food press seems to agree it earned the compliment.
The Sequel Nobody Expected in a Basement Downtown
Here is the part that actually changes what The Mont means for the neighborhood. Instead of treating Montserrat as their only stage, Payne and Cross are opening a second restaurant, Beverly's Downtown, below ground in the historic Hogan Building at 901 Houston Street, with an opening month originally targeted for August 2026. Kellye Raughton, the same Maven designer who built The Mont's mid-century interior, is behind Beverly's look as well, though the concept itself pivots toward Mexican flavors in a subterranean setting.
Restaurant groups do not usually build their second location downtown right after their first succeeds in a residential pocket west of the loop, unless the first location proved something. In this case, it proved that a restaurant built for a gated community could compete for the city's top culinary honors against kitchens with a decade-long head start downtown. That is the kind of proof of concept that changes how a company invests, and it is happening because of what opened at your front gate, not despite it.
What's Actually Changing on Team Ranch Road
The Mont was never going to be the last new restaurant on this stretch. Chef Felipe Armenta's Far Out Hospitality Group, the company behind Tavern, Pacific Table, and Press Cafe, has an Italian concept called il Capo slated for 9300 Team Ranch Road, named on Fort Worth's restaurants-to-watch list for 2026. That address sits in the same corridor as The Mont, a few minutes from the same guardhouse.
Earlier reporting had floated a second project for that corner too, a Cowboy Prime steakhouse from the same company. That plan appears to have moved. Armenta's second Cowboy Prime location has since been placed in the Fort Worth Stockyards rather than Team Ranch Road, based on the most recent restaurant lists for the area, which mention il Capo alone at that address. If you were expecting two big openings on that corner, you are more likely to get one, at least for now.
Either way, the corridor is not slowing down. As one local write-up on The Mont's debut put it, the restaurant landed in "the fast growing West Fort Worth sector," serving not just Montserrat and Montrachet but also Walsh Ranch, Ventana, and the Maverick Golf & Ranch Club currently under construction nearby, according to Fort Worth Digital Diary's coverage of the opening. That is a bigger built-in customer base than most people assume when they picture a single restaurant next to a gate.
What This Looks Like on a Tuesday Night
For residents, the practical shift is straightforward. The Mont runs dinner Tuesday through Saturday, with Sunday brunch from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the restaurant also books private events in a room built for exactly that kind of gathering. A few things worth knowing if you have not been recently:
- Reservations are the smart move on weekends. The bar seating stays first-come, first-served if you want the burger without a wait.
- The cocktail list leans mid-century on purpose, built around classics like a Freezer Martini and a bourbon old fashioned with the restaurant's own bitters blend.
- If you are hosting something, ask about the private event space before you default to a hotel ballroom downtown. It is closer than you think.
None of that requires a drive past the loop anymore. That was the entire point of opening here in the first place, and it is the reason a restaurant built for a few thousand rooftops is now confident enough to bet on downtown too.
If you are new to the neighborhood or still getting oriented, our own guide to life inside Montserrat's gates covers the rest of what makes this corner of west Fort Worth work day to day. And if a year like this one, an award-nominated restaurant expanding downtown, a second concept confirmed for the same road, has you thinking about where else on this stretch of Fort Worth is worth watching, Duwe-Olsen Group has spent years tracking exactly this kind of shift in Montserrat and the neighborhoods around it. Reach out any time you want to talk about what a year like this one means for the block you live on.
