Some dishes belong to a restaurant the way a song belongs to the voice that made it famous. Other people can sing it. Other kitchens can cook it. But there is a version that is the version, and if you know, you know. At Café Izmir on Lower Greenville, that dish is the grilled lamb chops.
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Maroma changes as the day goes on, and that is the whole idea. At lunch the room is bright and coastal, the sort of place where a ceviche and a cold glass of something make sense at noon. By dinner the lights come down, the patio glows, and the mesquite grill takes over. Chef Omar Flores calls it daylight to dusk. It is a simple concept, and the kitchen follows through on it.
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Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, which means the whole weekend belongs to costumes, candy and the question every parent asks by mid-October: where are we going? Here is the family-friendly side of Halloween in Dallas-Fort Worth, with no jump scares, no chainsaws and nothing that will keep a five-year-old awake at 2 a.m.
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Mole is the dish that separates a Mexican kitchen that is cooking from one that is trying. A true mole from scratch can take days. It can call for 30 ingredients or more. It cannot be rushed, it cannot be faked, and when it is done right, there is nothing else like it.
The word comes from the Nahuatl molli, which simply means sauce, but there is nothing simple about what lands on the plate. A mole is built in stages. Dried chiles are toasted, soaked and pureed. Nuts and seeds are ground. Spices are bloomed. Chocolate, fruit, bread or tortillas go in as thickeners. The whole thing is cooked low and slow until every ingredient loses itself in the others. What comes out is a sauce that changes with every bite, starting sweet or smoky, turning earthy, finishing with a slow heat that builds and fades. Most diners know mole poblano, the dark, brick-red sauce from Puebla that shows up on enchiladas across the country. That is one mole out of hundreds.
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Lower Greenville is getting another restaurant, and this one has been a long time coming. Chef Aubrey Murphy, who ran the kitchen at SĒR Steak + Spirits atop the Hilton Anatole, is opening his first restaurant of his own. It is called Brute, and it is taking over the old Swizzle tiki bar space at 1802 Greenville Ave., Suite 110, between Via Triozzi and Wabi House. The target is November.
Murphy has been cooking in Dallas for years, and the SĒR run put him on the map. He was part of the team that won Best Food and Beverage Team of the Year, and he was nominated for Chef of the Year Awards. Those are big-hotel, big-production kitchens. Brute will be a different animal entirely.
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Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day is Monday, October 26, and if you want to celebrate it properly, consider a road trip to a convenience store in Belton. The woman behind one of the most talked-about chicken fried steaks in Texas has a secret, and it is a good one. She does not eat it.
Ailehs Gaines owns Expo Quik Stop, a family-run gas station and convenience store at 308 W. Loop 121, about two hours south of Dallas on Interstate 35. We told you about its chicken fried steak back in July. Since then the legend has only grown, and in a new profile in NACS Magazine, the convenience store industry’s trade publication, Gaines revealed the twist. She is a vegetarian.
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The Cristo Amann has company. A few weeks after Sugar & Sage Bakery turned Dallas on its ear with a Monte Cristo baked inside a kouign-amann, the little bakery on Lovers Lane has rolled out its fall lineup, and it is the best argument yet for setting an alarm on a Saturday morning.
If you have not been, Sugar & Sage sits at 4314 Lovers Lane, across from Highland Park High School. Alison Weinstein opened it in 2023 with her daughter, Ashley Sage Weinstein, after the two spent years eating their way through New York’s best bakeries. To run the kitchen, they hired Jill Bates, and that was the smartest thing they could have done.
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Zalat Pizza opens in Duncanville today, Monday, October 12, and it is a milestone. The new shop at 325 S. Cedar Ridge Drive, in the Cedar Park Shopping Center near Wheatland Road, is the 30th Zalat in Texas.
That number still takes some getting used to. Khanh Nguyen, a former attorney, opened his Vietnamese restaurant DaLat on Fitzhugh Avenue in 2012. When the space next door came open, he turned it into a late-night pizza window for the cooks, servers and bartenders who get off work when most kitchens are closed. That was the first Zalat, in 2015. CraveDFW had the very first slice to come out of that oven, and it is hard to believe how far that little shop has come. With Duncanville, there are now 22 Zalats around Dallas-Fort Worth, six in Houston and two in Austin.
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