Chef Shuffle: Chad Starling to lead Landmark restaurant, Library Bar at Warwick Melrose

Chad Starling, who served the world a 459-day dry-aged prime rib-eye steak (pictured above with Starling on right) last year when he was chef at Dallas Chop House, has decamped the downtown steakhouse and headed Uptown, to Dallas’ Warwick Melrose Hotel.

Starling says he’ll join the Oaklawn hotel on Monday, July 13, aS executive chef. He plans a top-to-bottom revamp of the hotel’s legendary Library Bar and Landmark restaurant menus.

Starling says he’ll reboot the Library with new offerings that will be “very contemporary American with lots of Southeast Asian influence.”

As for the Landmark, once one of the city’s top rated restaurants, Starling says he’s hard at work creating a from-scratch Northern Italian concept.

DRG Concepts, Starling’s former employer, also has an Italian restaurant under construction in Dallas, though it’s been crawling along for quite some time. A spokesperson for DRG told me last week that no chef has been selected to lead that restaurant and no opening date has yet been set.

“We’ll have some news to share with you very soon, though,” offered the spokesperson.