Somewhere up Preston Road, past the point where the restaurants start repeating themselves, a tavern called Bit of Grub is having more fun than anyone else on the strip. The menu alone earns the visit before a single plate lands.
Continue readingLamb Lollipops and a Turkish Old Fashioned: An Evening at Saaya
Swiss Avenue at Good-Latimer has turned into its own small entertainment district over the past few years, and Saaya is the corner of it built for staying put. The Mediterranean lounge from Milkshake Concepts sits next door to its sibling Citizen, and the two make an instructive pair. The nightclub runs on volume. Saaya runs on languor, all low seating and hookah smoke drifting across the patio, a room engineered to make three hours feel like one.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The Oak Cliff Kitchen Where Jericalla Still Exists
The food conversation in this town rarely makes it south of the Trinity, which is how a restaurant like Mi Sazon can cook honest Mexican food on South Polk Street for the better part of two decades without the attention it deserves. The regulars have never needed anyone’s permission to fill the place. The rest of us are late.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The Dallas Couple Solving the Midnight Dessert Problem
Dallas has never had a shortage of dessert, just a shortage of dessert after ten o’clock. That gap is exactly what Dessert Lab was built to fill, and the little local operation has quietly grown to three shops without much fanfare, which is more than can be said for most of the trend-chasing sweet spots that come and go around here.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Legacy Hall Welcomes Cheese Lab to Its Eatery Lineup
Legacy Hall has added a new tenant, and the timing could not be better. Cheese Lab, the Nashville concept built entirely around grilled cheese, is now open inside the Plano food hall, and its arrival happens to land on National Mac and Cheese Day. Consider that a sign.
This is the second location for Cheese Lab, which got its start inside Assembly Food Hall at Fifth + Broadway in downtown Nashville. Founder and CEO Youssef Koutout built the menu on a simple premise: take the most familiar sandwich in America and refuse to leave it alone.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
J. Rae’s Bakery Returns to Fort Worth with New West 7th Location Opening July 16th
J. Rae’s is coming home. The bakery, known across North Texas for its hand-decorated sugar cookies, opens its new Fort Worth location on Thursday, July 16 at 3330 West 7th Street, and the address is no accident. The original J. Rae’s opened on West 7th in 2008, which makes this less an expansion than a homecoming, right down to the street.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There’s an H-E-B in Texas With Five Restaurants and a Full Bar
Somewhere along the way, H-E-B stopped thinking like a grocery store. The clearest evidence sits inside the company’s Mueller location in Austin, where shoppers can finish the weekly run, order duck fat fried chicken from a Top Chef alum, and settle in at a full bar with a Texas whiskey cocktail before heading home.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Celebrate National Ice Cream Day in Dallas!
Sunday, July 19 is National Ice Cream Day, a holiday Ronald Reagan put on the books in 1984 and one of the few proclamations everyone has managed to agree on since. In a Dallas July, it barely needs the excuse. What it needs is a plan.
So here is one: fourteen scoop shops worth your Sunday, split between the places that have been doing this for decades and the newcomers proving the craft still has somewhere to go. A moment of silence first for Wild About Harry’s, which served its last frozen custard on Knox in 2021 after 25 years and never found a new home. The metroplex is poorer for it. These fourteen carry the torch.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
