Shohei Takamatsu died on April 26, 2026, just over a week before his 95th birthday, and the obituaries that followed described him correctly as a pioneer of Japanese cuisine in Dallas. What they couldn’t fully capture is the specific weight of that word in this context — what it actually meant, in practical terms, to open a serious Japanese restaurant in Dallas in 1973, and what grew from the seed he planted over the next three decades.
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For most of its history, Texas has been an oyster-eating state that couldn’t grow its own. The Gulf of Mexico runs along 367 miles of Texas coastline, and for decades the wild oyster beds out there fed the rest of the country — enormous, creamy, deeply flavored bivalves that bore no resemblance to the delicate East Coast varieties sitting on ice at the better raw bars in Dallas. But farming them? That was illegal. Texas was, until 2019, the last coastal state in the country that hadn’t legalized cultivated oyster mariculture. Every state on the Atlantic, every state on the Pacific, even Louisiana and Mississippi and Florida — all permitted. Texas: no.
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Dallas is not a pizza city the way New Haven or New York is a pizza city, but it has become something more interesting: a city where nearly every serious style of the form is being made at a high level, by kitchens that mean it. Neapolitan, New Haven, New York, Roman, Detroit, Neo-Neapolitan — they’re all here, they’re all good, and the range is wide enough that the argument about which is best usually comes down to which style you were raised on.
What follows is our working list of the pizzerias worth knowing, organized by style and neighborhood. No Cane Rosso. No chains. Just pizza.
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Twenty years of covering this city and the one thing that hasn’t changed is that Dallas keeps surprising people who think they already know it. What follows is every dining guide CraveDFW has published, organized by neighborhood and cuisine. Click through for the full picture on anything that interests you. We update this page as new guides go live. Check out the Master Dallas Dining Guide.
Please note, these are suggested restaurants and not every restaurant is represented. If you have a favorite missing, let us know and we can add.
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Plano has spent the last decade building a dining scene that surprises people who haven’t been lately. The Legacy West and Legacy Park corridors have drawn serious national and regional concepts. Downtown Plano has its own thing happening around the historic square. And the restaurants that predate all of it — the diners, the neighborhood spots — are still there, still packed, still worth knowing about. This guide covers the full range.
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When Joseph Palladino co-founded Nick & Sam’s in 1999, he helped establish the template for what a Dallas steakhouse could be — loud, celebratory, thick with regulars, the kind of room that feeds off its own energy. He eventually moved on from that partnership, spent years building other concepts including the Coal Vines pizza chain, and then did something unexpected: he went to New York and opened a steakhouse at Grand Central Terminal. Palladino’s Steak & Seafood launched in September at the historic Grand Central space that last housed Michael Jordan’s restaurant, and it became one of the year’s most talked-about New York openings almost immediately. Now it’s coming home.
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Two years ago, Kirk Oldham started Meals with Meaning with a simple premise: chef-prepared meals for people who are food insecure, distributed through a network of Fort Worth chefs, volunteers, and community partners who believe that food dignity matters as much as food access. On July 12, the nonprofit celebrates its second anniversary and a milestone that took some effort to reach — 50,000 meals donated throughout Tarrant County.
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Chef Belal Kattan grew up in Syria and came to Dallas by way of some of the most demanding kitchens in the city — Cry Wolf on Gaston Avenue, which closed in 2023 and whose absence is still felt, and then Georgie in Knox-Henderson, where Michelin inspectors took notice. What he carries from those years is a precise technique, a pasta obsession so deep that he has invented his own shape, and a culinary identity that he describes as “Syria meets everything.” In 2025 he launched Bazaar — a traveling pop-up that has been hosted at Encina, Mot Hai Ba, Meridian, and Restaurant Beatrice — and built one of the most attentive followings of any young chef in this city.
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