Pianists share their love of music with Terilli’s & St. Martin’s customers to enhance the dining experience

“Everyone loves music. What would the world be without music? What would your day be without music? We have to have music.”

— Lewis Henderson II, longtime piano player at St. Martin’s.

Imagine going to dinner at Terilli’s Restaurant and Bar or St. Martin’s Wine Bistro for a special occasion. Maybe you’re celebrating a birthday or anniversary. You’re sitting down for dinner with your spouse, your friends, your parents, your children, and then you hear the pianist playing a tune.

Doesn’t that make your evening even more memorable? The owners of Terilli’s and St. Martin’s would hope so. That’s why they employ pianists to play live while guests eat their meals.

John Solly at Terilli’s and Lewis Henderson II, one of three pianists at St. Martin’s, are both professionals who have served their respective restaurants for decades. Longtime patrons may remember their names, faces and the songs they play.

Lewis Henderson II

The current Oak Cliff resident was born in East Dallas, but he didn’t stay for long.

“My dad was a minister, and the conference moved him around like every four or five years,” Henderson says.

This included Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Illinois, Arkansas and Colorado (his favorite because of the views). Along the way, Henderson was put in piano classes as a young child by his parents, particularly his mother who also played.

“They gave me lessons throughout elementary school and high school,” he says. “I didn’t get a piano until I was about 9 or 10. We didn’t have a piano, so I used to play the table and hear the music in my head.”

Meaning he would tap his fingers on the edge of a table, pretending it was a piano. He still can do this for just about any song. He learned to play easily and kept going in college.

“I think my gifts come from God,” Henderson says.

He started playing piano at restaurants in Pennsylvania and continued that when he came back to Dallas around the late ’90s when his father was ill. This has been his career ever since.

“I’m not going to work any other place, except I taught school for a while,” he says.

This was at southern Dallas’ Southwest Christian Academy for about three years. Henderson taught choral music and directed the children’s choir for students in first through eighth grades.

“They loved me, and I liked them,” Henderson says about his former pupils.

The opportunity at St. Martin’s came along when Henderson found out that the East Dallas mainstay was looking for a new pianist after its former one passed away. He won the gig after auditioning for the role.

“I liked the place, the room,” he says. “They had a grand piano; that made a difference.”

Henderson has been performing at St. Martin’s since around the turn of the century at both the restaurant’s former location and its current one in Old East Dallas. He is one of three pianists (others are Alexis Lugo and Robert Brown) at St. Martin’s and plays Tuesdays through Thursdays and Saturdays.

“I can play what I want to play,” he says about his role. “The people are nice.”

He performs all kinds of music, like pop, religious, classical and tunes from movies and Broadway, but not country.

“It has to have strings,” he says of that genre. But even if he had accompaniment, he still wouldn’t be interested.

St. Martin’s diners will make requests of Henderson on a regular basis, which he’ll generally do if he knows the song.

“If he doesn’t know it, just play it for him on YouTube or something because he plays by hearing,” says Omid Haftlang, one of St. Martin’s operators. “And they’re just so fascinated by that. … They go to YouTube, play it and then he gets it and plays it for them immediately.”

The caveat here is that Henderson also has to want to play the song. The music has to meet the moment, he says. People make plans in advance to have dinner at St. Martin’s, and the tunes are part of what makes the evening special.

Henderson knows he’s appreciated because the same people keep coming back to St. Martin’s to hear him play. He says some diners won’t make a reservation unless they know he’ll be there.

Today, he also plays and directs the choir at Lee Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in southern Dallas on three Sundays each month. He continues this work because it’s his act of service.

“We were raised to help people,” Henderson says.

John Solly

As a pianist and singer at Terilli’s, Solly considers himself to be just part of the guest experience.

This is modest talk for someone who once attended a party at Diana Ross’ house.

The North Dallas native and W.T. White High School alumnus left college at the University of North Texas and moved to California for two years with a band for a record deal.

Which band?

“You’ve never heard of it,” he says. “No one ever did. We did the album, but it never was released — the story of a lot of bands.”

Despite this, Solly had some once-in-a-lifetime experiences in California.

“We opened shows for Sly and the Family Stone, Three Dog Night, and we recorded our album at a studio (that) everybody used,” he says. “You know, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and actually our engineer was their engineer, so we were kind of rubbing elbows with some people that were successful.”

Solly actually got to meet David Crosby, who passed away in 2023, and says he was nice.

Remembering that Crosby was in recovery for addiction, this reporter asks, “Is he the one who had the drinking problem?” And Solly replies, “Who didn’t?”

Older folks around Dallas at the time may remember Solly’s other band — The Novas — which he played in from junior high through high school. At home, his grandmother played piano and would sit with him while he practiced. And his father was in a men’s choir at St. Monica Catholic Church in Northwest Dallas.

“I got exposed to a lot of schmaltzy songs,” he says. “Songs from musicals like Show Boat and Irving Berlin.”

But he was inspired by the way his father’s choir sounded, especially the harmonies.

California never felt like home to Solly, so he returned to Dallas. Then, in the ’70s, he started his band John Solly Society, and that lasted for a couple of years before he decided to focus on solo work.

“The most unusual thing I did, I was in my 20s then with a young family, for six and a half years, I simultaneously played three jobs a day — lunch, cocktail hour and night,” he says.

Solly’s gigs were at The Filling Station at Park Lane and Greenville Avenue, the Downtown rib joint Tony Roma’s, and hotels like the Hyatt Regency Dallas. But he took a break from playing at restaurants in the ’80s and ’90s.

“I lost my lunch job, and you cannot replace a lunch job because there just are none,” he says.

He turned to his family’s restaurant (Salih’s Barbecue in Preston Center until it became Solly’s Barbecue in Addison) and worked there for about 25 years. Once that closed and he had some downtime, Solly found his way back into music gigs at Jeannie Terilli’s house at the right time.

“She had a piano, and we were playing music, and she offered me a job,” he says.

That was in 2005, and Solly has been playing at Terilli’s ever since, currently 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. He knows hundreds of songs — covers of Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra and Elton John tunes, plus more obscure jazz tracks and his originals — and he plays and sings them by memory.

“I never have a set list. I just go by how I feel and the vibe of the guests and everything,” he says.

The ambiance tends to be more mellow in the early evening and more upbeat later in the night.

“It’s a lot of fun here, and the crowd is lively, and you can feed off that energy,” Solly says.

With performances at the Greenville Avenue Italian restaurant spanning over two decades, he now hears from diners and staffers who have been listening to him play at Terilli’s since they were young.

“I just love music. I love the way it sounds,” he says. “It’s always interesting to me.”