Upscale Restaurants in Arlington, TX

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How to tell an upscale restaurant from a loud one

The Entertainment District has added a great many restaurants in the past few years, and most of them are built for volume: big rooms, big screens, a crowd on its way to a game. That is fine for what it is. Upscale is a different job, and in Arlington you can check for it with five tests: the room, the kitchen, the bar and cellar, the house policies, and the address. Here is how Mercury measures against each.

Price is deliberately not one of the tests. Plenty of expensive rooms in the district are still loud, and a $17 Chophouse Burger at weekday lunch is served on the same linen as a $210 ribeye at dinner. What you are paying for upstairs is the room, the kitchen and the service, and those show up in the details below.

The room

An upscale room is quiet enough to hear the person across from you and interesting enough to look at. Mercury’s dining room is on the ninth floor of the Brookhollow Two tower, along a curved wall of floor-to-ceiling windows with the stadiums, the Six Flags tower and the district hotels below. Tables are set with white cloths and linen napkins; the chairs are leather; the booths are tufted and sit under a blue-lit banquette wall; the light comes from crystal chandeliers.

The TVs are at the marble-topped bar, not over the dining tables. A grand piano stands beside the windows near the bar and is played on select evenings. Sunset lands on the west end of the curve, which is the detail that sets this room apart from every ground-floor dining room in the district.

The kitchen

The menu is a chophouse menu with a Wagyu program on top: an 8 oz Wagyu Filet with herbal compound butter at $105 and a 27 oz Wagyu Long Bone Ribeye at $210. The Dry-Aged 36 oz Porterhouse is $175, the Bone-In Ribeye $90, the Center-Cut Filet Mignon $62 for 6 oz or $74 for 8 oz. Off the beef, there is Espresso-Rubbed Elk at $85, Chicken Saltimbocca at $42 and Seared Sea Bass at $57.

The full menu is online, and the menu guide walks through it cut by cut.

The bar and the cellar

A list tells you a lot. Mercury’s wine wall opens onto a list with Opus One 2022 at $686, Quintessa at $525 and Cain Five at $248, but also Roth Heritage and Ken Wright Pinot Noir at $78. The whiskey shelf runs from Buffalo Trace at $14 to Johnnie Walker Blue at $79, with Blanton’s at $38, Yamazaki Distiller’s Reserve at $35, and Texas bottles such as Garrison Brothers Small Batch at $23 and Ironroot Harbinger at $20, all in 2 oz pours.

The cocktail book is its own thing: the MCA Smoked Manhattan at $18, the Steakhouse Old-Fashioned made with tallow-washed Knob Creek at $19, the Naked & Famous at $19. After dinner there is a Louis XIII pour at $150 for a half ounce, and shaken ice cream cocktails from $17. The whiskey page lists the shelf in full.

The house policies

Upscale restaurants have rules, and they publish them. Reservations are taken through OpenTable and by phone at 817-381-1157. The dress code is business casual and enforced: no athletic wear, hoodies, graphic T-shirts or baseball caps, hats off at the table. A 20% gratuity is added for parties of six or more. Groups of 12 or more in the dining room, and any group in the Boardroom, receive one check. Composed entrées split at the table carry a $25 fee. Private dining requests are answered within 48 hours, with a food and beverage minimum quoted in the proposal.

The address

Mercury sits just north of the stadium district on E Lamar Blvd, off the main lots, which makes arriving and leaving on an event night simpler than at restaurants inside the district core. Lamar connects to Highway 360 about a mile east and to Ballpark Way heading south; I-30 is about a mile away. Free garage and outdoor parking is at the tower. Downtown Fort Worth is about 17 miles west, downtown Dallas about 20 miles east and DFW Airport about 12 miles north, which is why the room fills with both locals and visitors. The district page and the best restaurants page pick up from here.