Parliament opened in August 2014 in the old Four Lounge space on 2418 Allen Street, in the State Thomas Historic District, and more than a decade later it is still the same low-lit, red-walled room where Eddie “Lucky” Campbell built his name pouring drinks most bartenders would need a cheat sheet to remember.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The whistle sounds before you see the smoke. Then the smoke comes, curling up over farmland that Amish families have worked for generations, and a locomotive built for a different century pulls slowly into view. This is Strasburg, Pennsylvania, home to the oldest continuously operating railroad in the country, chartered in 1832. What happens over the following days is where the real trip lives.
A word of honesty before anything else: Strasburg Rail Road is not an overnight sleeper train. The signature excursion is a 45-minute, nine-mile round trip through 2,500 acres of Lancaster County farmland, out to Paradise, Pennsylvania, and back. There are no berths, no sleeping cars, nothing resembling the Orient Express. What Strasburg offers instead is something quieter and, in its own way, harder to replicate: a working piece of American railroading history, still running on steam, still passing through the same Amish countryside it always has. Built around three days, this is everything worth knowing before you go.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
In 1980, in the city of Guiyang in southwestern China, a widow named Yang lost her husband at 30 years old. She had five children to raise. She started with one charcoal stall.
That stall became Yang’s Smokehouse, now open in Plano at 240 Legacy Dr #306, inside the Mitsuya Marketplace center. The path from a single grill to a Texas strip mall took 40 years, three generations, and one very determined grandmother.
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For eight years, the only way to get a loaf from Kuluntu Bakery was to order ahead and pick it up from a house in North Oak Cliff, sometimes off a basket lowered from a second-story balcony so nobody had to touch anything during the pandemic. This summer, that finally changed. Kuluntu opened its first real storefront in June, and the wait tells you something about how this bakery actually operates: slow, deliberate, and never in a hurry to be bigger than it needed to be.
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Houston is trying to copy something Dallas built almost by accident. 55 Seventy started four years ago as a place for Preston Center residents to store wine they didn’t have room for at home. Members would rent space, open a bottle on the couches while they were there, and eventually didn’t want to leave. Owner Tommy Shuey didn’t set out to run a restaurant. He built one anyway because that’s what the members actually wanted.
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Fifty years ago, John Reaves wasn’t running a restaurant. He was running a roofing and construction business, and smoking turkeys and hams in his backyard as thank-you gifts for clients. The gifts got so popular he ran out of room and started storing the extras in his mother-in-law’s bathtub. A friend eventually told him he needed to just open a restaurant. In 1976, he did.
Smokey John’s Bar-B-Que and Home Cooking is still standing at 1820 W. Mockingbird Lane, and this year the family is marking half a century in business. On August 29, the restaurant is opening its parking lot and dining room for a free block party, capping a Customer Appreciation Week that runs August 24 through 29. Frost Bank is presenting the event, with support from the Mark Cuban Heroes Center and the Dallas Stars Foundation.
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Dallas summers don’t leave much room for a heavy plate. Once the heat sets in, the better move is something cold, something citrus-driven, something that doesn’t fight you on the way down. Here are six places actually built for that.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Sunday’s at Lovers Seafood & Market run from 11 in the morning until 8 at night, one long stretch where lunch and dinner just blend into each other. That’s really brunch here, not a separate menu with a name on it, just the regular lineup served early enough that mimosas make sense with it.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
