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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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 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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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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Kostas Lazanas describes himself as half Greek and half redneck, and that combination turns out to be exactly what Rowlett needed. He grew up training under Charlie Venetis at Opa Grille as a kid, spent years working the floor and the kitchen at other Greek restaurants around Dallas, and in 2013 finally opened a place of his own on Lakeview Parkway, a space that used to be a Chinese restaurant. He picked the name for what it means, not for any connection to the place he trained, and thirteen years later it’s still one of the most reliably good Greek kitchens in the eastern suburbs.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Finding Marie’s Kitchen the first time involves a little faith. The restaurant sits at 11910 Greenville Ave., inside a building called Forest Green that mostly houses medical offices and small businesses, with no sign visible from the parking lot. Regulars describe walking in through the main doors, catching the smell before they catch the restaurant itself, and following it down a hallway to Suite 103. It has become part of the restaurant’s identity rather than a flaw. People find Marie’s Kitchen because someone told them to, not because they drove past it.
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Javier GarcÃa del Moral and Paco Vique met as civil engineers, which is not the résumé line most people would guess for the two men behind Dallas’s most quietly influential bookstore. Both are Spanish, both landed in Texas separately, del Moral in Austin in 2008 and Vique in Dallas a year later, and both carried the same memory from home: Tipos Infames, a bookstore and wine bar in Madrid where literature and drinking shared the same room without either one feeling like an afterthought. When del Moral moved to Dallas in 2011, the two friends started planning a version of that idea for Oak Cliff, and on February 28, 2014, The Wild Detectives opened its doors in a 1940s Craftsman house on West 8th Street, just off the edge of Bishop Arts.
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Somewhere between the fishmonger hurling a forty-pound salmon over your head and the ferry horn cutting through the fog on Elliott Bay, Seattle stops feeling like a city you’re visiting and starts feeling like one you’ve always sort of known. It’s a place built on contradictions that somehow work: a coffee-obsessed, tech-money city that still closes up early, a waterfront town that hosted the Beatles and Led Zeppelin in the same hotel a decade apart, a fine-dining institution that once served burgers from a drive-in when the power went out and didn’t miss a beat.
Four days is enough to get a real feel for all of it: enough time for a ferry ride, a fish market, a splurge dinner, and at least one 2 a.m. burger stop you won’t be able to fully explain to people back home, and won’t want to.
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