There are only five tables at Gorji, and on any given night, each one belongs to a single party for the entire evening. Nobody else is coming in after your reservation. Nobody’s rushing the check to turn the room. That single decision says almost everything about how Mansour Gorji runs his restaurant.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The smoke gets you before the building does. Turn onto Springdale Road in East Austin on a weekend morning and it’s already in the air, oak and rendered fat drifting out over the parking lot before the line even comes into view. That smell has hung over this part of the city since 2012, first out of a trailer parked in a lot on Rosewood Avenue, now out of a building that used to be a church.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There’s a version of Dallas dining that mostly disappeared decades ago, the kind with a chandelier the size of a compact car, a curtained room for the tables that want privacy, and a bandleader who knows when to bring the room down to a whisper. That Dallas still exists. You just have to drive to Addison to find it.
Arthur’s Steakhouse opened in 1948 on McKinney Avenue, back when Uptown was still just a stretch of Dallas nobody had branded yet. Arthur Bates and his wife ran it there for years, building the kind of reputation that gets a restaurant called Dallas’ first real steakhouse. Bates sold it in 1988 to Mohsen Heidari, a restaurateur who’d already run Farmer’s Grill and worked his way up through Dallas kitchens since the early ’70s. Heidari moved Arthur’s twice more, first to Central Expressway, before landing it at 15175 Quorum Drive in Addison in 2001, where it’s been ever since. Seventy-seven years, three addresses, one name that never changed.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
It’s 3:40 in the morning on West Davis Street, and the lights are on at Metro Diner the way they’ve been on every night since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. A cook flips something on the flattop. A waitress tops off a mug for a guy in scrubs who just got off a shift at Methodist. Nobody looks up when the door opens. In Oak Cliff, that’s just Tuesday.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
From the outside, there’s almost nothing marking what’s happening inside Scilla. Duro Hospitality has built its reputation on rooms that reveal themselves slowly, and its newest restaurant, set into the ground floor of the new 8111 Douglas office tower at Preston Center, keeps that habit intact.
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The cinnamon roll at The Mecca was roughly the size of a dinner plate, and people still bring it up more than a decade after the restaurant closed. It shut down in 2014. It’s been gone long enough now that anyone under thirty has to take the size of that roll on faith.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Shakshuka is eggs poached in a simmering pan of tomatoes, peppers, onion, and garlic, spiced with cumin, paprika, and enough cayenne or harissa for real bite. The name comes from Arabic and roughly means “mixture” — about as literal as a dish name gets. The sauce cooks down slow until it holds its shape, then the eggs go in whole, cracked into wells carved out of the sauce, and the pan finishes under a lid or in the oven until the whites set and the yolks stay loose enough to burst at the first touch of a fork.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The Zodiac Room opened on the sixth floor of the downtown Neiman Marcus flagship in April 1953, designed by New York decorator Eleanor LeMaire around a celestial theme, with signs of the zodiac worked into both the main dining room and the terrace. Stanley Marcus wanted a restaurant that would give out-of-town shoppers a reason to stay downtown longer, and for more than seven decades it did exactly that. On September 30, when the downtown store closes for good, the room closes with it. It’s a room CraveDFW has written about before, back when its future still seemed settled.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
