Dallas gets undersold as a tourist city, which works in your favor. The crowds at the major attractions are manageable, the parking situation is easier than it has any right to be for a city this size, and the things genuinely worth doing are spread across a city with enough distinct neighborhoods that two days here feel like two different trips. Here’s where to start.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The name makes more sense once you meet them. Chef Hugo Galván runs the kitchen. Hugo Osorio runs the bar. Together they run Hugo’s Seafood Bar at 334 W. Davis Street in Bishop Arts, inside a room with an original stamped tin ceiling, exposed brick, and an octopus painted on the wall. The place seats fewer than 30 people. On a Friday night it feels like twice that, which is not a complaint — it’s the sign of a room that has figured out exactly what it wants to be.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Most restaurants don’t make it to ten years. Norma’s Cafe opened in Oak Cliff in 1956 and has been at it ever since. That original location has never moved. The biscuits and gravy are still on the menu. The Mile-High Pies still require you to plan around them. On Wednesday, June 24, Norma’s turns 70 and all five traditional locations are marking it the way the restaurant always has — by feeding people and keeping the price where it belongs.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Tanner Agar describes Flamant as the restaurant where you can have a European vacation without leaving Plano. That sounds like marketing copy until you sit down at a table on the waterfront patio at Granite Park, order the wood-fired bread with Spanish tomato spread and chive butter, and realize that for the next two hours, the North Dallas Tollway genuinely could be anywhere else. The place earns its premise.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Sergio Quijano grew up in Mexico City and worked his first job at a place called Dulcería El Metro — a candy shop near one of the city’s subway stations, which is where the name of his restaurant comes from. Not just the subway iconography covering the walls, though that’s there too, the colorful maps and signage of the Sistema de Transporte Colectivo rendered as decor in a Northwest Dallas strip center on Walnut Hill Lane. It comes from something more personal than that — a first job, a city, a specific kind of memory about where food fits into a life.
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Chef Tiffany Derry and Tom Foley are hosting the Annual Crawfish Boil at Roots Southern Table on Sunday, June 28, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. — and if you know anything about what Sunday afternoons look like at this restaurant in Farmers Branch, you already know this is worth clearing your calendar for.
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The Lone Star Dinner Series has been running for two years. Austin’s Hestia launched it as a way to bring acclaimed Texas kitchens into its live-fire dining room for one-night collaborative dinners — a chef swap concept that sounds simple and is actually quite difficult to execute well. In two years of doing it, the series had never included a Dallas restaurant. That changes on July 21, when Mamani chef Christophe De Lellis takes his kitchen to Austin for an evening that most serious Texas food people have already marked on their calendar.
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Most wine regions announce themselves. Walla Walla doesn’t bother. Set in the southeastern corner of Washington State, four hours from Seattle, surrounded by wheat fields and framed by the Blue Mountains, it is the American wine destination that the people who know about it have quietly kept to themselves for thirty years. The wineries here — more than 140 of them — produce Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah that belong in any serious conversation about what this country can grow.
The restaurants are better than you would think. The town itself, compact and walkable and genuinely beautiful, is the kind of place that turns a wine trip into something you talk about for years. It rewards discovery. Go find it.
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