Tiffany Derry’s Radici Wood Fire Grill has been one of the more interesting stories in DFW dining since it opened — an Italian concept built around a wood-fired grill, handmade pastas, and a chef who has never been shy about folding Texas into everything she does. May is a good month to pay attention to what both locations are doing.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There is a restaurant in Denton called Osteria Il Muro with 22 seats, a backyard garden, and a menu that changes every single day. It is one of the hardest reservations in North Texas. People set calendar alarms for the last Monday of each month — the one morning the next month’s tables are released — and still don’t always get in.
The chef who runs it is a James Beard finalist for Best Chef: Texas. His name is Scott Girling. Most of Dallas has never heard of him.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Everyone knows Aspen. Everyone knows Vail. You book the flight, you rent the gear, you pay the resort prices, and you come home having seen the version of Colorado that was designed to be seen — groomed, expensive, and full of people doing exactly what you’re doing.
The Colorado worth knowing is the other one. The one where a town of 400 people has a winery that outperforms Napa at altitude. Where a Victorian saloon still has the bullet hole from when Doc Holliday was a regular. Where a chef-trained café changes its entire menu every week because the farm down the road harvested something new. Where you pull off the highway not because a sign told you to, but because the canyon suddenly opened up and you had no choice but to stop the car.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Vijay Sadhu has been one of the most interesting chefs in Dallas for a long time. He opened Samar with Stephan Pyles and watched it become a James Beard semifinalist. He ran the kitchen at the W Hotel’s Cook Hall. He beat Bobby Flay on national television. He’s cooked for 50 people under a storm at a working farm in Van Alstyne while the lights flickered and the hail came down, and he didn’t miss a beat.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Jackson Kalb was 13 years old the first time he walked into a real kitchen. Not his family’s kitchen — his parents, by his own admission, were not good home cooks. The kitchen he walked into was Mélisse in Santa Monica, a two-Michelin-star French restaurant, and he was there because a guest at one of his backyard catering gigs happened to know the chef. That chef was Josiah Citrin. He let the kid in.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Most people don’t think about Plano when they’re planning a serious dinner. That’s their mistake, and Jashan is the reason to correct it.
The restaurant opened quietly at 7401 Lone Star Drive in Legacy North a few months back, and what’s happening inside is unlike anything else in North Texas. The man behind it, Prasanna Singaraju, spent years in tech before he walked away from all of it to do this. He’d been standing in a parking garage near the Dallas North Tollway, staring at an empty retail space, imagining what it could become. That’s not a metaphor. He actually stood there and pictured the restaurant. Now it exists.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The tortilla is the first thing you need to understand about Molino Olōyō. Not the filling, not the protein, not the salsa. The tortilla. That’s where this whole operation begins, and once you taste one, you’ll understand why chef Olivia López has spent the last five years obsessing over it.
Continue readingFiled under Crave
If you’re looking for a reason to get out on May 5th and don’t want to fight a generic margarita crowd, Vaqueros Texas Bar-B-Q in Allen is running $5 specials all day and actually has the food to back it up.
The deal is simple: $5 margaritas, $5 tacos, $5 palomas, and $5 beers from open to close on Monday, May 5th. The beer selection includes Victoria, Modelo, El Chingón, and house picks. Not a limited window, not just during happy hour — all day long at their Watters Creek location.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
