Karla Orta started selling native plants out of the back of her RAV4. Then her parents’ driveway. Then she opened a nursery on White Settlement Road in Fort Worth, and when people kept showing up and lingering, she put a café next to it. Nativo Café y Bodega opened May 16, and the two businesses now sit side by side at 1701 White Settlement Road — native plants on one side, espresso and focaccia on the other.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The menu at Taste Community Restaurant has no prices on it. That is not an oversight. It is the entire idea.
Chef Jeff Williams and his wife Julie opened Taste on December 5, 2017, at 1200 S. Main Street on Fort Worth’s Near Southside — the city’s largest food desert — with a straightforward premise: pay what you can, pay what you want, or pay nothing at all. Nobody is turned away. Nobody is asked to explain themselves. You walk in, you order, you eat, and you leave whatever feels right.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Parlor Doughnuts is coming to Henderson Avenue, and if you’ve been watching the construction at 2802 N. Henderson — the small standalone building that used to be a clothing store — that’s what’s going in. No confirmed open date yet, but the brand is on the official website, the address is live, and franchisee Ben Burkett has been talking about it since early 2026. “You have all these great restaurants and nightlife but no place for people in the neighborhood to bring their kids and grab a doughnut and coffee,” he said when the deal was announced. He’s not wrong about the gap.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
On Monday, June 29, FreeRange Concepts announced the permanent closure of every MUTTS location — the flagship Uptown Dallas spot at 2889 Cityplace West Boulevard, the Fort Worth location at The Shops at Clearfork, the Allen location, and the Austin franchise. The announcement came via social media with no advance warning. Business had been running as usual the weekend before the post went up.
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A year ago on July 4th, at 3:30 in the morning, Blair and Brooke Harber sent a text message to their parents. It said: “I love you.” A short time later, the two sisters — Blair, 13, and Brooke, 11 — were swept away by the Guadalupe River as catastrophic floodwaters tore through Hunt, Texas. Their grandparents, Mike and Charlene Harber, were lost in the same waters. When rescuers found Blair and Brooke the following day, fifteen miles downriver, their hands were locked together.
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Palm Beach is an easy call from Dallas — direct flight into Palm Beach International, three hours in the air, and you land somewhere that moves at a different pace entirely. Eau Resort & Spa sits in Manalapan, a small town on the barrier island just south of Palm Beach, fifteen minutes from Worth Avenue and the crowds but on seven private acres of Atlantic coastline where the beach is seaweed-free and the only noise is the water.
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The frozen margarita was invented in Dallas. The machine that made it is in the Smithsonian, sitting next to Julia Child’s kitchen and the first Tupperware. And somehow, fifty-five years later, this is still not the first thing Dallas tells people about itself.
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Every July 4th since 2009, a group of mostly amateur eaters has gathered at a bar on Greenville Avenue, sat down in front of a basket of corn dogs, and spent fifteen minutes regretting every decision that led them to that table. The crowd packs in around them, the screaming starts, and somewhere around the eight-minute mark the contestants’ faces take on the specific expression of a person who has made a terrible mistake and cannot stop making it. This is the Brass Knuckle Corn Dog Beatdown, and it is the best July 4th tradition in Dallas.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
