Bill and Lynn Gross opened their first hamburger stand in a converted fire station on Central Expressway in the early 1980s. That detail tends to get mentioned in passing whenever Chip’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers comes up, which is a shame, because it explains a lot about why the place still looks and feels the way it does more than forty years later: built for a crowd, built to move fast, built with the sort of bones that outlast whatever’s trendy that decade.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
We already told you the festival was coming back. What nobody’s told you yet is what’s actually new on the shelves this year, and that’s the part worth planning a grocery trip around.
The short version: Central Market is running its Hatch celebration from August 5 through August 18, with two free in-store events bookending the season, and a genuinely different product lineup than last year’s. The chain has been doing this since a single pallet of peppers sold out in ten minutes at the Austin store back in August 1995, and thirty-one years in, they’ve apparently decided the answer to “what else can we do with a chile” still hasn’t run dry.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Thirty years ago, a handful of Dallas restaurants agreed to knock a little off the check in exchange for sending a cut to a food bank. Nobody involved could have guessed it would still be running three decades later, or that it would grow into the second-longest-running restaurant week in the country. This week it did exactly that, officially kicking off its 30th year on August 10, with more than 175 restaurants across five counties taking part.
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Start on Preston Road in North Dallas and drive north for twenty minutes, and you’ll pass through one of the more unexpected food corridors in the metroplex. It doesn’t advertise itself. There’s no sign, no branded district, no banner year hung on it by a chamber of commerce. It’s just four restaurants, spread between North Dallas and Plano, all cooking from the same general stretch of the map: the old Silk Road, where China, Central Asia, and the Middle East blur together on a plate.
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Rock Springs Cafe shut its doors for good on June 30. It had sat inside the Rock Springs Building at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden since 2019, pouring coffee and building lunch plates for a steady stream of garden visitors who wanted something to eat between the rose collection and the Japanese Garden. That building has been standing since 1934, when the Botanic Garden first opened as the oldest one in Texas, and for a few months this fall it’s going to sit quiet while a full renovation happens inside it.
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The boats still make their slow loop below the River Walk turnaround, same as they always have. But look up now from that spot near the Shops at Rivercenter and something has changed. Where a food court used to sit — the every mall has (had), fluorescent and forgettable — there’s now a sprawling, more than 20,000-square-foot space that smells like fresh masa and citrus-cured fish, with a mural of La Catrina watching over the room like she’s been there since the building went up.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Punk Noir, the immersive fine dining destination in Dallas’ Design District, is introducing two new ways for guests to experience its boundary-pushing culinary and beverage programs. The punk-inspired restaurant will now offer a 7-course dining experience priced at $135 per person, alongside Off the Cuff, a bespoke cocktail experience available in the Noir Lounge.
Since opening in June, Punk Noir has challenged the conventions of traditional fine dining with its signature 20-course tasting menu, transportive multi-room design and provocative culinary storytelling. Led by James Beard Award-winning Chef RJ Cooper, the restaurant combines disciplined, world-class cuisine with irreverent artistry and an energetic, design-forward atmosphere.
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Jonathon’s Forestwood sits at 5337 Forest Lane in North Dallas, and on a Saturday morning the parking lot fills up long before most people are willing to admit they’re awake. Owner Jonathon Erdeljac, known around Dallas as the Gravy King for good reason, has built a real weekend following here since opening in September 2023, and the thing regulars mention before the food is usually the bar setup: a build-your-own Bloody Mary station, house-made mix, a full spread of garnishes, the kind of thing that turns waiting for a table into part of the plan instead of a nuisance.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
