The Kurobuta Tontoro Alone Is Worth the Drive to Bite

photos by Suzi Migdol

There’s a particular restaurant type that opens quietly and gets loud through word of mouth alone, and Bite Sushi & Tapas is shaping up to be exactly that. It landed this spring inside East Dock, the new development stitching itself into the edge of Oak Cliff near Bishop Arts and Trinity Groves, and it did not arrive as a stranger.

The people behind it, chefs Ikki Wu and Mason Ho, spent years running Yume Foods, a catering operation built around Asian cuisine that quietly fed a lot of Dallas before Dallas ever had a name to put to the food. Bite is the first time they’ve built four walls around what they do.

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Cocktails, Wine, and Sunday Supper: Radici’s Summer Lineup 

Radici opened in Farmers Branch in May of 2024, and it did not take long for people to notice. Within a year, Radici Wood Fired Grill was named the No. 2 restaurant in the entire state of Texas by Texas Monthly, a wild jump for a restaurant that had only just found its footing. Now, in the middle of a Dallas summer, Chef Tiffany Derry and her T2D Concepts partner Tom Foley are adding two new events to the calendar that give a good sense of why the place has resonated the way it has.

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This Richardson Family Has Been Feeding the Same Regulars for 25 Years

There is a strip of North Plano Road in Richardson that most people drive past without a second look, and somewhere in that stretch is a restaurant that has been quietly feeding the same families for close to three decades. Grand CafĂ© doesn’t have a sign that stops traffic. It doesn’t need one. The people who eat there already know where it is.

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Val Jean-Bart Turned Grief Into a Dallas Cheesecake Institution

Every cheesecake that’s ever left Val’s Cheesecakes traces back to a Sunday ritual in a home kitchen. Valery “Val” Jean-Bart spent four years caring for his mother, Marie Jose Labossiere, through terminal breast cancer, and the two of them baked together every week, more than 200 sweet and savory creations over that stretch, cheesecake being her favorite. When she passed in 2012, Jean-Bart, a licensed civil engineer with no formal culinary background, had to decide what came next.

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The Expansion Program: A New DMA

Peaceable Kingdom

The Dallas Museum of Art is in the middle of the biggest transition it’s had in years, a new director, a massive expansion campaign, and a full slate of exhibitions running right now, all happening at once. Here’s where things actually stand.

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Zalat Pizza Keeps Its Weird, Wonderful Personality Intact at Store 31

Khanh Nguyen started Zalat Pizza in Dallas back in 2015, and eleven years later the company is opening its 31st Texas location, this time in McKinney’s Heritage Village at 1720 N. Central Expressway, Suite 210, just south of Highway 380 on U.S. 75. For a brand that’s grown this far this fast, Zalat has held onto the same personality it launched with, which says something about how deliberately Nguyen has grown it.

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Terra and Sugar & Sage Team Up for a Five-Week Brunch Collaboration

Terra, the restaurant inside Eataly Dallas at NorthPark Center, is bringing back its Terra Takeover series, and this round pairs the Italian marketplace’s kitchen with one of Dallas’s most respected pastry programs. From July 25 through August 23, weekends only, Terra will host a limited-time brunch collaboration with Sugar & Sage Bakery, the University Park bakery that’s built a genuine following since opening in 2023.

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Victor Hugo Is Back Behind His Own Kitchen, This Time in a Rescued 1899 Bank

The building at 600 S. Harwood St. has been saved from the wrecking ball once already, and that alone makes Bucket & Rope worth knowing the backstory of before ever getting to the food. The structure started life in 1899 as the original Liberty Bank on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, one of downtown Dallas’s oldest surviving commercial buildings. When the city moved to widen the road decades later, the bank was slated for demolition.

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