Some of the most expensive restaurants in Dallas have a back door, and it’s the bar between 4 and 6:30.
The same kitchens that charge $36 for a plate of yellowtail and keep a $7,500 bottle of Burgundy on the list will sell you a smaller version of their best food for the price of a sandwich. The smart move is to show up early, sit at the bar, and save the full dinner for a birthday.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
On Sunday night, the specials at Reata will be written by teenagers.
Culinary arts students from North Side High School are taking over the kitchen on Sunday, November 8, from 5 to 9 p.m. They’ll create the three dishes Reata’s executive chef comes up with every day: the chef’s feature, the fish feature and the soup. The students are working from a Día de los Muertos theme, and they’ll be cooking for a regular Sunday dining room full of paying guests. Students from Trimble Tech get their own night later in the month, putting their spin on familiar Texas dishes.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Café Olivia’s smaller sibling opens Thursday, November 5, in Plano. Olivita by Café Olivia takes a spot inside the Park Center office building at 2400 Dallas Parkway in the Willow Bend area. CraveDFW first wrote about the plan in September, when the target was early October. It took a few extra weeks, but it’s here.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Your Texas wine can now fly free. As of November 2, Southwest Airlines has expanded its Sip and Ship program to four Texas airports, including Dallas Love Field. Passengers can now check one case of wine at no extra charge on flights leaving from Love Field, Austin-Bergstrom, Houston Hobby and San Antonio International.
The program launched in April on the West Coast, timed to Southwest’s new service into Sonoma County wine country. It started with airports in California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Texas is the first expansion beyond that region, and Southwest says it came after a big response from Texas wine lovers and growers. It’s fitting for an airline that has called Love Field home since it started flying in 1971.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Planes, Trains and Automobiles has aged better than almost any comedy of the 1980s, and the reason it still works comes down to one performance. John Candy takes a part that could have been a running gag and turns it into the heart of the picture.
John Hughes wrote and directed it, and it opened November 25, 1987, the day before Thanksgiving. It was the first time the man behind the teenage hits built a movie around grown men, and he reportedly wrote the script in five days, working from a real business trip of his own that detoured through Wichita. Both facts show on screen. The film is loose and quick, and it understands holiday travel misery the way only someone who has lived it can.
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In 1946, twenty Duncanville businessmen met at Linwood Hayne’s service station at Main and Davis and agreed the town needed a fire department. Each man put in at least $20. Neighbors built a one-room station by hand, and a siren went up on the water tower. One tone sent the volunteers north of town. Two sent them east.
Eighty years on, a midcentury building on North Main that its new owners say once housed the town’s volunteer firefighters is sending out plates of beef cheek pastrami.
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Sauce’d opened on Grapevine’s Main Street in 2019 as a pizzeria. Three years later the family that runs it added smashburgers, and the little shop has been arguing with itself ever since. The restaurant calls itself a burger joint that moonlights as a pizzeria, then corrects itself and says it’s the other way around.
After eating there, CraveDFW can settle at least part of the debate. The smashburger at Sauce’d is truly one of the best burgers in DFW.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Oyster season is here, and Aw Shucks and Big Shucks are marking it with something they’ve never done in 43 years of shucking. The family-run oyster bars have launched their first OysterFest, a run of special oyster dishes at all four North Texas locations that wraps up with a patio party on Saturday, November 14.
Bob Peterson opened the original Aw Shucks on Lower Greenville in 1983 with a simple idea, a seafood shack in Dallas without the beach. His son Nick Peterson now runs the family’s Peterson Management Group, which also owns Blue Goose Cantina. The places still look and feel like they always have, which is a big part of why people keep coming back.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
