Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy marshmallow soup. That's my honest read after eating at Rise Soufflé on Monahans Avenue in Fort Worth three separate times on one trip. Three. We kept leaving and then finding reasons to go back.
Rise is a French-influenced soufflé restaurant and wine bar — savory soufflés, sweet soufflés, salads, soups, cheeses, and drinks. The concept sounds delicate, maybe precious. It isn't. The food is confident, the portions are real, and nothing on the menu feels like it's trying to impress you. It's already impressive; it doesn't need to announce it.
Start with the bacon mac and cheese soufflé. The dome rises high above the white ramekin, cheese sauce running down the sides and pooling on the plate below. Crispy bacon on top. It looks dramatic because it is dramatic — and it delivers. The inside is airy where a regular mac and cheese would be dense, which sounds like a tradeoff but isn't. You get all the flavor and none of the weight.
The RISE salad deserves its own paragraph. Grilled chicken with serious char on it, blue cheese crumbles, pecans, julienned green apple fanned across the top. It's the kind of salad that recalibrates your expectations — you stop thinking of salad as the responsible option and start thinking of it as the one you actually want. The gluten-free version with grilled chicken is on the menu, which matters if that's your situation.
Then there's the Marshmallow Soup. The menu lists a gluten-free version available sans marshmallows, which tells you there's enough going on in the bowl to hold up without them. Some dishes you should just order. The sweet soufflés close the meal hard — the Gâteau de Chocolat arrives as a towering dark chocolate dome dusted with powdered sugar, and it's listed gluten-free on the menu.
The savory soufflés run 250–540 calories. We were not in the 250-calorie camp.
Rise is open Sunday through Thursday 11am–9pm and Friday through Saturday 11am–10pm. Reservations for parties of fewer than five are handled by phone at 817-737-7473. Find it at 5135 Monahans Avenue, Fort Worth, TX 76107.
When you're back in Mount Shasta, Baldovino's Wine Bar & Kitchen handles the wine-and-good-food brief with real skill, and The Garden Tap owns summer dining. But if travel takes you to Fort Worth, Rise is the move. Order the soup. Order the soufflé. Order the soufflé again.