Tin Star Is Coming Back, and It’s Starting Over in McKinney

Before Torchy’s, before Velvet Taco, before every bar in town put a fried avocado on a tortilla and called it a special, there was Tin Star.

Rich Hicks opened the first one in Uptown in 1999. He’d come up through Macaroni Grill, where he was an area director at 25, and his idea was simple: take the taco seriously, put it in a fast-casual room, and charge accordingly. Brisket and queso. Pork and kimchi. A portabella taco with roasted corn and sweet potatoes that people still bring up by name. In North Texas at the time, that was a strange way to sell tacos.

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Celebrate All That is Mama’s Daughter’s Diner

In 1986, Norma Manis sold the Oak Cliff cafe that carried her name. She had been feeding Dallas for decades by then, and the plan, as far as anyone could tell, was to finally sit down.

That plan lasted about two years.

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Martha Stewart’s Fall Menu is at Maman in Dallas, and One Cookie Leaves September 30

Maman’s fall collaboration with Martha Stewart is now at all three of the chain’s North Texas cafes, and one item is on a short clock. The oatmeal raisin sandwich cookie, two chewy oatmeal cookies with golden and dark raisins and cream cheese frosting, is sold only through September 30.

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La Calle Doce Celebrates 45 Years, You Should Too

La Calle Doce opened on September 15, 1981, in a renovated house on West 12th Street in Oak Cliff. Oscar and Laura Sanchez ran it, and they served Mexican seafood at a time when most people in Dallas ordered a cheese enchilada plate and called it a night. That was 45 years ago last week. The house is still there. So is the fish soup.

The anniversary happens to fall on the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month, which gives anyone looking for an excuse a pretty good one.

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A Late Night Fort Worth Staple: Ol’ South Pancake House

Pull into the lot at Ol’ South Pancake House at three in the morning and you’ll find more cars than you’d expect. TCU students, mostly, plus whoever else in Fort Worth is up at that hour and hungry. Inside, the coffee is on and somebody at a back booth is squeezing lemon over a pancake about the size of a hubcap.

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Retro Movie Review: Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

Forty-three years ago today, on September 21, 1983, a new David Mamet play opened in the smallest theater at London’s National Theatre. Seven men, two rooms, a lot of talking. Mamet had worked in a Chicago real estate office for a while in the late 1960s, and he wrote about it like someone who never quite got the smell of the place off his clothes. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the next year.

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Kalachandji’s Is the Fair’s Best-Kept Warm-Up

The smartest State Fair days do not start at the gate. They start a few minutes away, across I-30 in the Mount Auburn neighborhood, with lunch at Kalachandji’s.

There is a logic to it. The next six hours are going to be fried, battered, dipped, sugared and served on a stick. A plate of dal, rice and fresh vegetables first is less about virtue than about pacing. It also happens to be one of the most peaceful rooms in the city.

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Oktoberfest Every Day: Kuby’s Has Been Dallas’ German Kitchen Since 1961

Oktoberfest is underway in Munich, a good excuse to point out that Dallas has had its own German kitchen for 65 years. It is in Snider Plaza, and it is called Kuby’s Sausage House.

By Dallas standards, 1961 is ancient. By the family’s standards, it is recent. In 1728, Friedrich Kuby opened a meat market in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and the recipes passed from father to son for generations. “The original one was bombed in ’44,” Karl Kuby Sr. has said. “It was wiped out.”

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