Elvira Leal married Ruben right before he shipped out to fight in World War II, two purple hearts and a bronze star waiting for him on the other side of it. While he was overseas, she was back home learning the restaurant trade from her own parents, who ran a spot called La Rumba in Little Mexico. Her mother cooked at El Fenix. When Ruben came home, the two of them opened Dallas Tortilla & Tamale Factory in 1950, and the same family has been running it ever since.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
National Tequila Day lands on Friday, July 24, and this year North Texas isn’t treating it like a footnote. Restaurants and bars across the metroplex are pouring real flights, not just $3 shots, and the range on display says something about how far tequila has come from the drink people used to apologize for ordering.
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Highland Park Village on a Saturday morning has a rhythm to it, shopping bags swinging, sunglasses staying on indoors, valets moving cars in a slow choreography out front. Right in the middle of that rhythm sits Bistro 31, doing the kind of unhurried brunch that makes the rest of the morning feel like it can wait.
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The sand at Daytona Beach is packed hard enough to drive a car on, which tells you almost everything about the place before you even unpack. This is a beach town built on speed and salt air in equal measure, twenty-three miles of white shoreline running alongside a boardwalk that still smells like fried dough and sunscreen the way it has for a hundred years. It’s louder than the quiet barrier islands further south, and that’s the whole point.
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The Philadelphia Story opens with one of the great silent gags in American film. Cary Grant, playing the newly ex-husband of Katharine Hepburn, storms out of their house carrying golf clubs while she trails behind hurling his belongings after him. She snaps one of his clubs over her knee. He responds by putting his open palm flat against her face and shoving her, hard, backward through the front door. Not a word is spoken. The whole marriage, its wreckage, and roughly forty percent of the movie’s argument about who these two people are to each other, plays out in about fifteen seconds before the title card even finishes.
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Three days after Chris Jordan and his partners signed the lease on their new steakhouse, a Dodge Challenger ran off White Settlement Road and drove straight through the storefront. The explosion made the local news. A few months later, once repairs were mostly finished, a second Dodge Challenger, nearly identical to the first, did it again.
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Café Momentum just picked up a $10,000 grant from the Jacques Pépin Foundation, one of ten organizations nationwide chosen for the foundation’s Summer 2026 round of funding. The Dallas restaurant is the only Texas recipient on the list this time around.
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Tom Fleming has news worth building a whole morning around. His sticky buns at Crossroads Diner in Plano are now on the menu six days a week instead of a rotating schedule, which means the thing regulars have been driving across town for no longer requires calling ahead to check.
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