Panda Fest is coming back to downtown Dallas, so go hungry and wear comfortable shoes.
The traveling Asian food and culture festival made its Dallas debut at Carpenter Park last November, and it returns to the same spot, 2201 Pacific Ave., Nov. 6 through 8. This year’s lineup has more than 60 food vendors serving upward of 150 dishes, plus more than 20 merchandise vendors and a schedule of live cultural performances that includes kung fu shows.
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If you want to understand how chicken fried steak became Dallas’ everyday dinner, start at the corner of Cedar Springs Road and Reagan Street.
In 1975, Gene Street and his partner Phil Cobb opened the first Black-eyed Pea there, in a brick building that dates to 1933. The food was what people’s mothers made, and in Street’s case that was literal. Many of the recipes came from his own mother in Salado. There were fried okra, squash casserole, warm rolls in a basket, and a chicken fried steak that covered most of the plate under a pour of cream gravy.
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Paul Ko was the head sushi chef at Uchi when he decided to leave. He’d been there since 2017, seven years in all, and he gave up that job to open a place with his name on it.
It took a while. Sushi Kozy ran into construction delays at 2000 Ross Ave. in the Arts District, and when it finally opened in the summer of 2025, there wasn’t much of an announcement. Four months later the Michelin Guide put it on the Texas list as a Recommended restaurant, which is a fast way to let people know you’re open.
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There’s a stretch of the Sterling Highway, about two and a half hours south of Anchorage, where the Kenai River turns a shade of blue-green that doesn’t look real. Glacial silt does that. It catches the light and turns the whole river the color of a swimming pool somebody forgot to tell nature about. That’s Cooper Landing.
The town isn’t much on paper. It runs about eight miles along the highway at the west end of Kenai Lake, where the Kenai River begins, and only a few hundred people live there year-round. A prospector named Joseph Cooper found gold here in the late 1800s, and the place stayed an outpost until the road from Anchorage reached it in 1951. Today the gold is salmon. All four of the Kenai’s salmon species and some very large rainbow trout pull anglers here every summer, and the town fills up from June through August.
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Nick Roditis grew up in Chicago’s Greek restaurant community, where breakfast counters and family-run dining rooms are part of the city’s identity. That’s where he learned the business.
In 2015, he moved to Dallas-Fort Worth to open Yolk‘s first Texas location. That opening came just before the area’s breakfast boom, and in the years since, chain after chain of all-day brunch spots has followed it into North Texas. Roditis spent years helping one of those brands grow.
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At almost any Korean restaurant in Dallas, the small dishes arrive (banchan) before you’ve finished reading the menu. There might be bean sprouts in sesame oil, pickled radish, and a little dish of fish cake. In the middle of the table, without fail, there’s a dish of kimchi.
Most Dallas diners have eaten it by now. It shows up on burgers, in fried rice, and on tacos. But kimchi is bigger than the red, spicy cabbage most of us picture. In Korea, it’s a whole category of food, a centuries-old way of preserving vegetables, and a seasonal ritual that families still plan their calendars around.
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Punk Noir is closed. The Design District tasting-menu restaurant lasted about four and a half months, and it ended with almost no warning.
Co-owner John McKeel has confirmed the closing. According to people who worked there, the staff was let go on Wednesday, Oct. 14. That was one day after the restaurant posted about a new fall menu on Instagram. Reservations are no longer available.
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When The Henry opened in Uptown in 2019, it quickly became the default answer for half the questions Dallas asks about where to eat. A business lunch, a birthday dinner, a Saturday brunch that runs long, and a coffee meeting that turns into a cocktail all ended up there. Seven years later, it’s still an Uptown fixture.
Now Plano gets its own. The Henry opens its second Dallas-Fort Worth location on Wednesday, Oct. 21, at 7700 Windrose Ave. in Legacy West, across the street from Legacy Hall. A grand opening celebration follows on Saturday, Oct. 24.
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