Eduardo Osorio has a lot on his plate these days. The executive chef behind Meridian’s live-fire kitchen recently added culinary director of The Village to his title, giving him oversight of the sprawling Dallas development’s restaurant concepts. He’s also preparing to roll out a new menu at Meridian, experimenting with everything from the wood fueling the restaurant’s fire to new dishes that reflect his wide-ranging culinary background.
It’s the latest chapter in a career that has taken Osorio from Los Angeles to one of New York City’s most acclaimed kitchens and, eventually, to Dallas.
Like many chefs, Osorio discovered a passion for cooking at home in Los Angeles, where his father, a former chef, and grandparents welcomed him into the kitchen to help prepare meals. When his grandparents took him to visit family in Guatemala, his aunts, uncles, and cousins shared their recipes and techniques, too.
His official foray into the restaurant business began at 17, when he became a dishwasher at a restaurant in Marina del Rey. He found the energy and pace of restaurant work intriguing, so he worked his way through various restaurant roles at eateries around the city before landing a job at Café del Rey, where he says his culinary journey truly began.
That’s where he met chef Adrian Vela, who had recently moved from Las Vegas after working at Joël Robuchon. “He inspired me even more because he was really young, as well,” Osorio says. Vela’s style of cooking motivated him to dig deeper into the industry.
Osorio started buying books, doing research, and learning as much as he could about cooking before getting into a mentorship program at Ment’or BKB Foundation, a culinary nonprofit co-founded by chefs Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, and Paul Bocuse. He received a grant and left for New York to work at Daniel, one of Boulud’s most renowned restaurants since its 1993 debut. “Long before I was at Daniel, I was really inspired in cooking, but Daniel really set it off,” he shared.
His mentorship program lasted about eight months, and he’d hoped to stay in New York, but as a single father at the time, he knew he had to return to California, where his mom was caring for his daughter. (He’s now a father of three, ages 15, 6, and 4.)
Once back in Marina del Rey, he returned to his old stomping grounds at Café del Rey and was named its executive chef at only 22. But the restaurant’s new direction as a gastropub lacked the appeal of the cuisine he had grown accustomed to during his brief tenure at Daniel.
When Catch Hospitality Group came to the market to open Catch LA, Osorio seized the opportunity to join the team. He eventually became senior chef de cuisine for the entire operation and helped open multiple restaurants in other cities.
In 2023, he met Morgan Dillon at the opening of a Yardbird Group restaurant in Chicago. At the time, she was Vice President of Food & Beverage, Entertainment & Events at The Village back in Dallas, and Meridian had just lost its original executive chef, Junior Borges. Dillon asked if he was interested in the position, and soon after, Osorio flew to Dallas for three days. He spent time in Meridian’s kitchen, ate the food, and finished the visit by preparing a tasting. “I loved the restaurant, and I saw a lot of potential,” he says.
Three months later, in early 2024, he packed up and moved to Dallas. He ran the Meridian kitchen for a few months before the restaurant shuttered for a major revamp that lasted more than a year. The following fall, Meridian 2.0 reopened with refreshed interiors, a new menu focused on live-fire cooking, and Osorio at the helm as executive chef.
Being in Dallas, Osorio felt there was room to do something special with live-fire cooking. That philosophy extends all the way down to the wood fueling Meridian’s fire. The restaurant recently swapped Texas post oak for pecan wood, which Osorio says lends warmer notes, darker smoke, and a subtle nutty sweetness to the food.
Changing out wood seasonally is next-level, but it exemplifies his attention to detail. “Everything I try to do intentionally,” he says. With cooler, rainier weather settling in, pecan wood adds a sense of warmth to the cooking.
For anyone who hasn’t been to Meridian—or regulars who’ve always wondered what the chef recommends—Osorio has suggestions.
He suggests starting with the Mile High Club, a clarified Paper Plane cocktail he collaborated on with one of Meridian’s bartenders, Brandon. As a California native and seafood lover, he’s also partial to the chilled smoked clam, one of the restaurant’s “one hitters,” or individual bites. “That’s definitely a starter that you need to get,” he says.
With cooling temperatures, he also recommends the Foie & Sea Island Cornbread, which has a striking purple color and is made with white cheddar and shishitos before being topped with foie gras and brown butter. “It’s very elegant yet approachable,” Osorio says.
The lamb belly is another favorite, balancing richness and spice with fresh lettuce cups and a side of hot sauce fermented in-house.
For entrées, he recommends the Sakura Pork Kan Kan, a traditional Puerto Rican dish designed for sharing. “I don’t think anyone’s serving a kan kan right now,” he says.
To prepare the dish, he covers the pork in a brava spice before blackening it, caramelizing the sugars and creating a flavorful bark. He cooks down and smokes sweet tomatoes, then brightens everything with garlic, fresh herbs, and lime juice.
For dessert, it’s the Campfire S’Mores, hands down. The dish combines chocolate ganache, toasted vanilla ice cream and a brown sugar-coated marshmallow that’s flamed tableside. “It’s a really good way to end the dinner and just feel nice and warm,” he says.
In conjunction with the restaurant’s one-year relaunch anniversary on Saturday, October 17, Osorio will debut an entirely new menu. Some of the dishes, he teases, may appear in his Instagram story when he takes over the DiningOut Dallas account on Wednesday, October 7. A photo shoot of the new dishes is also scheduled that day, so followers may get an inside look at the work that goes into the process.
In September, he was named culinary director for all concepts at The Village, including Anise, Buzz & Bustle, Over Under, and Village Country Club. During the takeover, Osorio plans to give followers a glimpse of what his days actually look like, from driving his kids to school and checking on The Village’s other restaurants to preparing for dinner service with the Meridian team.
You might even get a glimpse of his partner, head baker, Ashley Cordon, whom he met while they were both working for Catch. Though she bakes at the Village’s commissary kitchen a few doors away, behind Buzz & Bustle, their paths do cross occasionally.
“It’s been a while since we’ve worked together, so it’s great to be doing that again,” he says, adding that they enjoy quality family time on Mondays and Tuesdays when the restaurant is closed.
But Osorio always has something cooking, literally and figuratively, which sometimes costs him one of those precious days off. One Monday a month, he welcomes a guest chef he admires for his Chef Collective Series. The next event features chef RJ Cooper of Punk Noir joining him in the kitchen on Monday, October 19 to create a multi-course meal for $165 per person. After dinner, from 9 p.m. to midnight, guests can stick around for drinks with a mixologist from Daniel, who will be crafting cocktails alongside Meridian team members Johnny and Brandon.
Like the restaurant’s approach to live-fire cooking, Osorio says everything the team does is meant to have a purpose.
“Everybody here cares about what we do, and we all cook with love,” he says. “We try to be creative, fun, and very experimental, but also approachable.”
For Osorio, that means giving diners ingredients they recognize, just not necessarily in ways they’ve seen them before.
Meridian, 5650 Village Glen Dr., Dallas, meridiantherestaurant.com
