Garland doesn’t always get the attention it deserves when people talk about DFW dining. That may be about to change.
Chef Burak Ozcan — the Turkish-born culinary force behind the Ferah family of restaurants — has opened his latest concept, Herb & Ember, inside Firewheel Town Center at 365 Coneflower Drive in Garland. If you know Ozcan’s work at Ferah Tex-Med Kitchen or Ferah Smokehouse & Cantina, you already have a sense of what he’s capable of. Herb & Ember feels like his most polished swing yet.
Most people come up Grant Avenue. That’s the Chinatown tourists know — painted lanterns, souvenir shops, roast duck hanging in windows. Brandon Jew moved the entrance to his restaurant around the corner before he ever opened it, tucking the door into Waverly Place, a narrow alley that runs parallel to Grant and feels like a completely different city. Quieter. More lived in. The street where old men sit outside in folding chairs and the shops are for people who actually live here, not people passing through. You have to mean it a little to find Mister Jiu’s. That was the idea.
If you grew up in Dallas, you know Desperados. The original Greenville Avenue location has been there since 1976 — founded by Vietnam War veteran Jorge Levy, who opened the doors with two partners and built something that outlasted trends, recessions, and the rise and fall of a hundred restaurants that came and went around it. A second location followed in Garland in 1994. And now, nearly fifty years after that first tortilla hit the comal on Greenville, Desperados is crossing into Collin County for the first time.
Dallas has no shortage of brunch options, and most weekends the same names cycle through every list — the Uptown spots, the Knox-Henderson regulars, the places with two-hour waits and bottomless mimosa deals that keep you there until 3pm whether you planned to be or not. Nothing wrong with any of that. But if you want something quieter, more personal, and honestly more interesting, you have to drive east.
Found into the historic Junius Heights neighborhood of Old East Dallas, Garden Cafe has been doing farm-to-table brunch since 2002 — before that phrase became a marketing term — and it remains one of the most genuinely singular dining experiences in the city. Most people outside the neighborhood still haven’t found it. That’s their loss and your opportunity.
Spring doesn’t announce itself with a memo. It shows up one afternoon when the air smells different and you suddenly want to be outside with something cold in your hand that isn’t a glass of wine. That’s your signal. The heavy bourbon drinks of winter served their purpose — they got you through — but the season has turned and your bar cart deserves to reflect it.
These three cocktails are built for the transition: bright, fresh, and easy enough that you don’t need a culinary degree or a bar tool you’ve never heard of. Name-brand bottles you likely already own, ingredients from any grocery store, and results good enough that whoever you’re pouring for will ask you to make another one before they’ve finished the first. Spring has a flavor. Here it is.
Years ago I made myself a New Year’s resolution that I’ve actually kept — which puts it in a category of one. Before any fine dining experience, I open with a glass of Champagne or sparkling wine. Not during dinner, not after. Before. Just one glass, alone or with whoever I’m with, to mark the transition from the rest of the day into something worth paying attention to. It works every time. There is something about those bubbles that clears the palate, sharpens the senses, and signals to your brain that what’s coming next deserves your full presence. It has become a ritual I won’t give up, and over the years it has pushed me to actually learn what I’m drinking rather than just grabbing whatever’s on the list.
What follows are five bottles worth knowing — spanning from a California gem that will genuinely surprise you at its price to the splurge that earns every cent of its price tag. All of them show up on wine lists. All of them are available at a good wine shop or Total Wine. All of them are worth the glass.
April 17 is National Crawfish Day — a holiday that was actually founded in 2020 by Shell Shack, a Dallas-based seafood chain, which makes it especially fitting that this city goes hard on mudbugs every spring. Crawfish season peaks from February through mid-May, putting April 17 right in the sweet spot when Louisiana shipments are rolling in daily and the boils are at their best. Whether you want a classic Cajun boil, a Vietnamese-style butter sauce situation, or a plate of étouffée that would make a New Orleans grandmother proud, Dallas has it covered. Here is your crawfish locator:
Jon Bonnell is Fort Worth through and through. Fourth-generation, born and raised, the kind of guy who hunted and fished growing up and never really stopped thinking about what ended up on the plate. He went to Vanderbilt, came home, taught science and math for a couple of years, and then had one of those moments — watching a cooking show, of all things — where something clicked. He enrolled at the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, did his internship at Mr. B’s Bistro in the New Orleans French Quarter, and came back to Fort Worth in 1997 with a plan already forming.
