Fly with me on a Journey of Burleson’s Honey

By Chef Annie Greenslade

Surrounded by Texas wildflowers on a crisp Texas spring morning with the steady hum of thousands of bees beginning their intensive work, Burleson’s Honey delivered something far more immersive than a standard tasting event. This was a firsthand look into one of Texas’ most enduring agricultural legacies — and it involved stepping directly into the world of the hive.

Chef Mallory Atkins, of the beloved “Farm to Belly,” and I suited up in full beekeeping gear before approaching active hives buzzing with life. There is something simultaneously thrilling and humbling about holding a frame directly from inside a hive, completely covered with live bees still working. What initially feels chaotic quickly reveals itself to be astonishingly organized.

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Dinner, Brunch, and Everything In Between at Encina

Matt Balke grew up in Uvalde, a small ranching town near San Antonio where the Spanish name for the place was once Encina — holm oak. He left for Texas Tech, then changed course and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America, graduating salutatorian in 2007. None of that is what shaped him most. That came later, working under James Beard Award winner Sharon Hage at York Street in Dallas — the woman Balke credits as his real culinary education. After York Street, his path ran through Bolsa, The Rustic, SMOKE, and back to Bolsa as executive chef until its closure in early 2020.

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Meridian Launches “Meridian’s Chef Collective,” a New Dining Series 

Meridian has been on a quiet roll since reopening at The Village Dallas last fall under executive chef Eduardo Osorio, and now the restaurant is doing something genuinely interesting with the momentum. Starting this month, Meridian is launching the Chef Collective, an ongoing dinner series built around the relationships Osorio has curried in the Dallas dining scene over the past few years. One-night-only events, different collaborators each time, no two dinners the same.

It’s a smart move. Osorio came up through serious kitchens — Catch Hospitality, the 50 Eggs group, Yardbird — and he’s spent enough time in Dallas now to have a real network. This series is the payoff on that. Not a marketing exercise dressed up as a dinner. The chefs on this list are people he actually cooks with, eats with, respects.

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The Best Breakfast Burritos & Tacos in Dallas

Austin gets the credit. It always does. The breakfast taco conversation in Texas starts and ends there, and if you want to argue about it you’ll lose, because Juan in a Million has been in East Austin since 1980 and the Don Juan — eggs, potato, bacon, cheese, refried beans, wrapped in a flour tortilla the size of your forearm — is legitimately one of the great morning meals in the state. Veracruz All Natural built an empire out of a food truck. The whole city treats breakfast as a competitive sport and it shows.

But Dallas has been doing its own thing quietly for years, and the breakfast burrito scene here rewards people who know where to look. These aren’t the places that show up in hotel concierge guides. Most of them have small parking lots and a line out the door by 8 a.m. on Saturday, and that is exactly the point.

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Rose’s Bluebonnet Sandwich Shop: The Dallas Burger Legend Nobody Could Find

The address was 4515 Greenville Avenue, but that didn’t help much. The building sat back off the street, down an alley near Yale Boulevard, behind nothing that looked like a restaurant. No sign. No parking lot to speak of. No indication from the street that anything worth finding was back there. Judge Buchmeyer — a federal judge, a man accustomed to having things run efficiently — drove up and down Greenville trying to locate it before finally giving up, parking, and walking until he found the door. When he walked inside, Mickey Mantle was sitting at a table eating a burger.

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Meals with Meaning Supper Club with Hao Tran

Duong DeVille doesn’t open until August. But if you want a seat at Hao Tran’s table before then, Meals with Meaning is giving you one.

On June 7 at 6:30 p.m., the Fort Worth nonprofit hosts a special edition of its monthly Supper Club at Brewed on Magnolia Avenue, with Chef Hao Tran and Chef Luu Lac cooking a menu drawn directly from the Duong DeVille kitchen. Tickets are $99 and limited. The event is at 801 W. Magnolia Ave in Fort Worth.

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What We Would Order at Lavendou Tonight

Rack of Lamb

Pascal Cayet grew up in Argenteuil, just outside Paris, and trained at the Médéric culinary school before landing his first real job at La Tour d’Argent — the legendary Paris restaurant perched above the Seine with Notre Dame Cathedral. He was in his twenties and cooking in one of the most storied rooms in the world. Then he came to America, worked in Indianapolis alongside a young Wolfgang Puck at a restaurant called La Tour, spent a year in the French Army, five years running food and beverage in Bermuda, and arrived in Dallas in 1982 with a clear idea of what he wanted to build.

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A Great Enchilada: Mia’s Tex-Mex

In 1981, Ana and Tiburcio Enriquez opened a small Tex-Mex restaurant on Lemmon Avenue. They had spent years managing El Chico locations and knew the business from the inside out. What they built at Mia’s was something different — a room that felt like family because it was family, named after their daughter, anchored by recipes that didn’t come from a corporate playbook.

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