Malai Kitchen. Photography by Kelsey Shoemaker
In India, Malai means smooth. In Thailand, it means beautiful and full of quality.
And for Yasmin and Braden Wages, owners of Malai, a modern Southeast Asian restaurant in Preston Center, the word means all of the above.
Yasmin and Braden met at a hospitality college in upstate New York and connected instantly. After graduating, they went to California to work with restaurants across the state before transferring to Dallas. And they knew from the beginning that they wanted to open their own restaurant in Preston Hollow.
“I knew the people, I knew the environment, and I said, ‘One day we’d really like to have a restaurant in this neighborhood.’ And the truth is, we’ve been kind of sniffing around waiting for the right opportunity to come along since then,” Braden says.
Their love language was food, but they knew it took more than that. Braden was working at R+D Kitchen, just across the street, and Yasmin began working with startup restaurants to get the “independent view” of restaurant ownership. They were saving money and getting their ideas in place for a concept.
“When you finish college, you have all these ideas like, ‘Oh, this would make such a cool restaurant idea,’” Yasmin says. “And so we’d sit there and do write ups and stuff and create a rough idea of what we thought it could be. We did that three or four times before we settled.”
Malai Kitchen. Photography by Kelsey Shoemaker
At R+D, Braden often had regulars ask him his thoughts on the restaurant industry.
“What do you guys think is the next big restaurant idea?” “Where do you think restaurants are headed?” “What do you think hasn’t been done?”
They were questions without answers, and that haunted the couple.
Then, out to lunch at a casual Vietnamese restaurant and tossing those questions around over bowls of pho, the couple has an epiphany.
“We both looked down, and we looked around, and we were like, ‘This place is packed with all sorts of people, and it’s the food we love to eat. It’s the kind of food we crave,’” Yasmin says.
In California, Southeast Asian food and fresh ingredients were super common. But an elevated take was something they thought was missing from the Dallas food scene.
“We could modernize it and update it and have really great cocktails, a really good curated wine list,” Yasmin says. “We were just trying to highlight the food for what it is. I mean, it’s an amazing cuisine that I think hasn’t been given the atmosphere that it deserves.”
They opened their first location in Uptown in January 2011. During the construction phase, passersby expressed anticipation for the opening by asking questions about the menu and design. When opening day came, they were ready to feed a line out the door.
And then, crickets.
“We literally used every penny we’d had to get this loan and to get this thing open. And so we couldn’t fail,” Yasmin says. “That was not an option.”
Yasmin told Braden that in the “worst case scenario,” they could turn the restaurant into a taco place. But slowly, business crescendoed into what is now a full house most nights.
In the beginning, there were about 15 items on the menu. The usual Southeast Asian staples were inspirations from their extensive travels to Thailand and Vietnam.
It was important when crafting the menu, they say, to have homemade curry and noodles. They even make their own beer. Other dishes range from the popular Vietnamese “meatballs,” a plate of four char-grilled bun cha style pork patties, Icelandic cod covered in homemade red curry sauce and a classic drunken noodle made in-house with beef tenderloin and Thai basil.
Some dishes take on an Asian-fusion twist, pulling in ingredients and flavors more commonly associated with Indian food.
“We really wanted to have the base of the menu have dishes that people are familiar with and showcase our personality within them while trying to respect the culture of the dish,” Braden says.
In 2016, the Southlake location opened. Then came the Fort Worth location. Finally, the Preston Center location opened in 2021 across the street from where their Dallas careers started out.
“It was right here,” Yasmin says. “It was very full circle for us.”
Malai Kitchen 6130 Luther Ln., 972.373.4434, malaikitchen.com
