In 2008, Chad Houser was co-owner of Parigi on Maple Avenue and had just been nominated as Dallas’s best up-and-coming chef. He had sold his house to buy into the restaurant, watched the economy collapse the same year, and grew the business 38 percent anyway. Then someone asked if he’d be willing to drive to a juvenile detention facility and teach eight incarcerated young men how to make ice cream.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Genet Mulugeta’s friends were the problem. She had moved to Dallas from Lalibela — a city in northern Ethiopia so old that pilgrims have been walking to it for eight hundred years to see the eleven churches carved from a single mountain of stone — and she had opened a grocery store, and somehow people kept ending up at her house for dinner. They kept eating everything. They kept telling her she needed to open a restaurant.
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Most bars that call themselves the largest patio bar in Dallas are overstating the case. Happiest Hour is not. The numbers are what they are: 12,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space spread across four full-service bars, a rooftop deck with a downtown Dallas skyline view that stops people mid-sentence, and a beverage program running more than 50 beers, wines on tap, and enough signature cocktails to fill a Saturday afternoon without repeating yourself. It sits at 2616 Olive Street in the Harwood District, steps from American Airlines Center, and on a Saturday it opens at 11 a.m. — which is the correct time to start if the plan is to make a day of it.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
An alebrije is a fantastical creature from Oaxacan folk art — part jaguar, part butterfly, part something that exists nowhere in nature, painted in colors that have no business working together and somehow do. The name is a good one for a cafe that looks like nothing else on West Clarendon Drive, because nothing else on West Clarendon Drive looks like it either. Alebrijes Cafe sits at 1323 W. Clarendon Drive in Oak Cliff, a few blocks from the Dallas Zoo, in a room decorated with the colorful folk art the name promises, run by a couple who greet regulars by name and first-timers like they’ve been expected.
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Stanley Kubrick read more than forty books about nuclear war before he made this film, and what he concluded was that nobody really knew anything and the whole situation was absurd. That conclusion is the movie. It is the funniest film ever made about the end of the world, and the most frightening, and sixty years after its release it has not stopped being either one.
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This is one of those weekends where Dallas stacks everything on top of itself. Father’s Day, Juneteenth, the World Cup still running, a free block party in the Arts District, and a music calendar that goes from Randy Rogers to Killswitch Engage to the Dallas Symphony in a single Friday night. Pick your lane and go.
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Father’s Day falls on Sunday, June 21, and Dallas has no shortage of places to take the man who insists he doesn’t need anything. Whether Dad wants a three-course lunch at one of the most celebrated tables in the city, a brunch buffet with a smoked Old Fashioned in hand, or fried chicken and champagne at a neighborhood spot that gets it right, here’s where to make a reservation before the weekend gets away from you.
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Flying Fish restaurants across North Texas are presenting their version of Surf and Turf through August 31.
Peel back the lid on tinned Portuguese sardines in olive oil ($12) or a can of all beef Vienna sausages ($15), both served alongside Saltine crackers. A mélange of mayo, yellow mustard, a shake of Worcestershire sauce and a squeeze of lemon juice accompany the ready-to-eat tinned fish.
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