Checking In at Craft, You Should Too

Preston Center has been missing a rooftop bar for about twenty years. CRAFT Restaurant & Beer Market showed up on April 1 and fixed that, along with a few other things the neighborhood did not know it needed.

The concept started in Calgary in 2011, built by PJ L’Heureux into nine Canadian locations before he decided Dallas was where to make the American move. His partner here is Tom Gaglardi — owner of the Dallas Stars, the man who brought Moxie’s to Dallas years ago and knows how to read this market. The two of them landed at 5974 W. Northwest Highway in the old medical office space across from the Starbucks on Kate Street, gutted it, and built a 10,500-square-foot room with a 360-degree bar at the center and 5,250 square feet of rooftop patio on top. The rooftop is one of the first of that size in Preston Center. On a clear May evening it is the best outdoor seat in this part of Dallas.

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Kilmac’s Brought a Smoked Guinness Old Fashioned West Davis Street

The building at 814 West Davis Street in Oak Cliff started as an automotive garage. A man named Ron Patterson eventually bought it, spent years turning it into a private room — dark, personal, built around the things he liked — and lived in the house just behind it. When Patterson died in 2021, Feargal McKinney acquired the property. He walked in, looked around, and largely left it alone. McKinney said he figured Patterson would have found a favorite stool and never left. He named the bar after himself and opened it in March 2026. That is how Kilmac’s came to exist.

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The Best Burger in McKinney Was Opened by Two Chefs Who Had No Business Making Burgers

Lamb Burger on Pita

Most people who end up at Square Burger in McKinney did not plan to be there. They were walking around the downtown square, realized they were hungry, and pushed open the door of a 1929 building on the corner of Kentucky and Virginia streets. What they found inside surprised them. It still does.

Brandon Horrocks and Craig Brundege opened this place in June 2010 with credentials that had no business ending up in a burger joint. Horrocks graduated at the top of his class from the Culinary Institute of America, did a fellowship at Wolfgang Puck’s Granita in Malibu, cooked in Mexico City, and worked Dallas rooms like Patrizio’s and Café Pacific. Brundege came through serious kitchens in San Francisco and Los Angeles — Providence, one of the best seafood restaurants on the West Coast, was on his résumé. They chose burgers. Specifically, they chose McKinney.

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Wine Review: The Best $20 Wine for a Texas Summer

In 1936, a wine merchant named Gabriel Farnet drove through the hills of the Saint-Tropez peninsula and stopped at a 17-acre vineyard overlooking the Gulf. There was a 19th-century château on the property, a small chapel, and vines that had been neglected during the war years. He bought it, replanted everything — Grenache, Cinsault, Syrah, Mourvèdre — and started making rosé at a time when nobody outside the South of France particularly cared about rosé.

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Everything Worth Eating, Drinking, and Watching at Legacy Hall Right Now

Whisk Crepes

There is no other building in North Texas quite like Legacy Hall. Three floors, 55,000 square feet, more than 20 food stalls, five bars, a craft brewery on the top floor, and an outdoor entertainment venue built from reclaimed shipping containers that holds 1,500 people and has a stage with a full LED screen. It opened in Plano’s Legacy West development in December 2017 and has been one of the most reliably good decisions in North Texas dining ever since. The address is 7800 Windrose Avenue. Open Monday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday until 1 a.m., Sunday until 10 p.m.

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Oak & Stone to Open McKinney Location Tuesday, May 19

Florida has been quietly building something worth paying attention to. Oak & Stone started in St. Petersburg in 2018, spent eight locations proving its concept worked, and then decided Texas was the next move. McKinney got the first one. It opens May 19 at 8575 W. University Drive in the West Grove development, and if you have been waiting for something genuinely different in North Texas, this is worth the drive up.

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Everything Worth Eating at the Dallas Farmers Market Right Now

The Dallas Farmers Market has been at 920 South Harwood Street since 1941, which makes it older than most of the buildings around it and considerably more interesting than any of them. It is two things at once — a 26,000-square-foot indoor food hall called The Market, open every day of the week, and an outdoor pavilion called The Shed where regional farmers, ranchers, and food artisans set up on Saturdays and Sundays. Most people know one or the other. The ones who know both tend to spend their Saturday mornings there like it is a standing appointment.

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The Zalat Pizza Empire Started with the Love of Late Night Dining

Khanh Nguyen was eight years old when his family fled Vietnam in 1975. His father was a general in the South Vietnamese army and the governor of a mountain province called DaLat — and when the country fell, a communist assassin was sent to kill them. The family’s escape plan collapsed at the last minute. What saved them was a bowl of pho. The cook at a roadside restaurant outside the city recognized Nguyen’s father, fed the family, hid them, and helped them find another way out. They made it through the Philippines and Guam before landing in Texas. Khanh grew up here, went to UT law school, became a corporate attorney, then a software startup CEO, then looked around at forty-something and decided he wanted to make pizza.

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