This $20 Zinfandel Was Just Named Wine Spectator’s Wine of the Year, and an Italian Immigrant Started It in 1886

Edoardo Seghesio left his family’s vineyards in Piedmont, Italy, in 1886 and landed in Sonoma County with nothing but the same skill he’d grown up with. He found work at the Italian Swiss Colony, one of the region’s earliest wine operations, and did well enough there to marry his boss’s niece, Angela. Together they bought 56 acres of land with one goal: plant their own vineyard and make their own wine. In 1895, Edoardo put Zinfandel vines into what the family still calls the Home Ranch, in Alexander Valley, and some of those original vines are still alive and still being harvested today, a hundred and thirty years later.

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Kilo Is Bringing Gram-Precise Coffee to Snider Plaza

Alex Vu taught himself to fix an espresso machine by watching videos online, working the equipment at his family’s Vietnamese restaurant, V’s House, in North Richland Hills. That repair job turned into a real obsession with dialing in a cup of coffee, and it’s the reason a new specialty cafe called Kilo is set to open this summer at 6600 Snider Plaza, Suite 110, right next to the new Sueño location.

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The Dallas Morning News Is Finally Hiring a Restaurant Critic Again (Maybe)

For more than four years, the largest newspaper in Dallas hasn’t run a formal restaurant review. That’s changing. A new job posting for a Food Editor at the Dallas Morning News confirms the paper is building back out a real restaurant criticism operation, listing that the new hire will supervise both a dedicated restaurant critic and a food digital producer, two positions the paper hasn’t had staffed together in years.

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Cafe Hunan Has Been Quietly Feeding Dallas Since 1998

Cafe Hunan started as Hunan Express, a small operation that opened in Uptown Dallas in 1998 during the neighborhood’s first real wave of growth. Nearly three decades later, it’s grown into a small local chain with locations near SMU and off Forest Park Road in the Medical District, and it’s built its reputation less on flash than on the kind of consistency that gets a restaurant quietly recommended by the exact people who’d know: local chefs who order delivery on their nights off.

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8 Small-Town Texas Restaurants Worth Driving For

Texas hides its best food in places that don’t show up on a typical road trip map. These are the restaurants worth the detour: a general store with no printed menu, a garden nursery with a wood-fired oven, a house-turned-tea-room that only opens for lunch. None of them are trying to be famous. They just kept cooking the same way long enough that people started driving hours to find them.

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Graham Elliot’s Fort Worth Restaurant Group Is Finally Coming to Dallas

Graham Elliot’s first restaurant job in Texas was at the Mansion on Turtle Creek, working the line under Dean Fearing before either of them had a television deal to their name. More than two decades later, Elliot is coming back to Dallas with his own name behind the reservation book, bringing Fort Worth-based Far Out Hospitality across the Trinity River for the first time since he joined the company two years ago.

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Sketches of Spain Just Closed, and The Wild Detectives Is Taking Over the Space

Sketches of Spain served its last pintxo on July 19, closing the book on six years as Oak Cliff’s only pincho bar. The Bishop Arts spot built its following on Basque-style small plates meant to be pierced with a toothpick and shared across a table: patatas bravas, boquerones, ham and cheese croquettes, quail egg-topped chorizo, and a paella that regulars treated as the closest thing to a trip to Spain available in Dallas. The send-off came the Sunday before closing, an informal goodbye party where $20 bought unlimited pintxos and a glass of sangria alongside, presumably, a lot of stories about the place.

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DFW Restaurant Week Turns 30 This Year, and Reservations Are Already Open

DFW Restaurant Week has been running long enough to outlast most of the restaurants that participated in its first year, and this August it hits a real milestone: 30 years, making it the second-longest-running restaurant week campaign in the country. The main event runs August 10 through September 7, with a Preview Weekend August 6 through 9 for anyone who doesn’t want to wait for the official kickoff. Reservation Day landed July 16, which means the full list of participating restaurants, expected to run past 160 across Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and Denton counties, is already public and booking is open now through DFWRestaurantWeek.com.

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