Creating a national sensation with his tortilla soup and lobster tacos in the 1980s, a young chef named Dean Fearing transformed the restaurant inside the Mansion on Turtle Creek into a Dallas dining hot spot. For more than 20 years, North Texas food lovers and hotel guests booked tables there. Locals continue to do just that at his eponymously named restaurant at the Dallas Ritz-Carlton, no small feat in a city with so many eating-out options.

In Fort Worth, the Worthington Renaissance Hotel made a splash with the opening of the Chisholm Club steakhouse in late 2002. The Marriott property hired Reata’s founding chef, Grady Spears, who first gained attention at the Gage Hotel in Marathon, Texas. Marriott gave the new hotel restaurant a massive makeover that included its own entrance, so guests didn’t have to walk through the lobby. (In 2004, the hotel and Spears parted ways.)

Opened in 2009, the Omni Fort Worth Hotel drew a crowd by featuring Bob’s Steak & Chop House, a locally grown fine-dining option. With its separate entrance and valet service, Bob’s — now with locations across the country — remains a downtown destination.

Today, Fort Worth enjoys another hotel boom. The Worthington underwent a remodel of its rooms and public spaces for several years before quietly announcing last August plans for a major revamp of its in-house restaurant with a new look, new concept (Latin steakhouse) and management by a Colorado-based restaurant group.

The Sinclair, another Marriott property in downtown Fort Worth, celebrated the grand opening of its dining concepts last month. The art deco-inspired hotel features a casual lobby bar and restaurant and a sister steakhouse on the basement level, which also opened in late January. Wicked Bar and Wicked Butcher are managed by a Dallas restaurant group.

We have to wonder: Will the arrival of several new hotels in Cowtown lure area residents into dining at their restaurants? And will you pay more? It depends. Our explorations reveal  prices on par with other high-end restaurants. What about parking? Hotel parking can be a challenge, especially when you’re not a guest. Some validate, some don’t cover parking. The biggest question of all: Will employing a “name” chef be the right kind of drawing card? One astute observer says, the answer is absolutely.

“When customers know the menu is not determined by the hotel itself, that makes a difference,” says Pat Sharpe, executive editor and restaurant critic at Texas Monthly. As evidence, she points to David Bull, named a Best New Chef by Food & Wine while at The Driskill in Austin, as well as Top Chef winner Kristen Kish, hired by the LINE hotel in the capital city. “Celebrity chefs enjoying great success with their own concepts in major hotels displace the notion of dull hotel dining,” Sharpe says.

Noting this trend, Fort Worth chef Jenna Kinard wanted in on the action. “It’s a whole new world, the hotel-restaurant realm, and my interest was immediately piqued,” says Kinard, who was approached nearly two years ago — when she worked at the now-shuttered Max’s Wine Dive —  to helm 97 West Kitchen & Bar at the forthcoming Hotel Drover in the historic Stockyards district. “Interesting hotels have interesting restaurants today, and that excites me.”

Fort Worth-based chef Tim Love — with eateries from Cowtown to Denton, Austin and Knoxville, Tennessee, and three more opening in Houston — jumped into a hotel with Ático, an authentic Spanish-style bar that opened in late January atop the new SpringHill Suites, also in the Stockyards. He feels that having a hotel as landlord solves a lot of problems. “Opening a restaurant is really expensive. A lot of chefs will tell you that the best way to pay for a good restaurant is to put it in a hotel,” Love says. “And design today keeps you from feeling like you’re going to a hotel restaurant. Giving the restaurant its own entrance means you’re not walking through the lobby to get there.”

Ático, across the street from Love’s landmark Lonesome Dove Western Bistro, creates a sense of place that Love believes will attract locals who won’t care if the bar-restaurant is in a hotel. “If you get the vibe right,” Love says, “people will want to visit and then come back again.”