Down in the lower levels of the W.T. Waggoner Building, the 20-story tower that has stood at 810 Houston St. in downtown Fort Worth since 1920, there is an old bank vault. When Musume moved in, the owners lined it with tatami and made it a private dining room. When the restaurant reopens in early November, that vault will still be there, intact, after nearly three years in which very little else down there was.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Donica Jimenez fell for Spain in a high school classroom. Her Spanish teacher at Hockaday used to come back from trips abroad with slides, and those pictures brought the country to life for her. “I fell in love with Spain before I ever went there,” Jimenez has said.
She went on to study Spanish and Iberian culture and history at SMU. In 1989 she noticed a lease sign in a window on Travis Street and did something very practical. She measured the drive from her house. It came to 1.8 miles. She wanted to stay close to home, and that was close enough. The following year she opened Cafe Madrid at 4501 Travis St., at the corner of Armstrong, one block south of Knox.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Mike Stites and Evan Pemberton met in 2017 in Stephan Pyles’ kitchen at Flora Street Cafe. Stites had come up from Corpus Christi the year before to go to culinary school and work for Wolfgang Puck. Pemberton grew up in Dallas and already had plenty of miles on his knives. The two became friends, and over time the friendship settled into something closer to mentor and student.
In 2019 they moved to Chicago together to cook at Roister, the Alinea Group’s open-hearth restaurant in Fulton Market. A year later they went their separate ways.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Mary’s Cafe sits on Highway 16 on the south side of Strawn, a Palo Pinto County town of about 600 people. Most days the parking lot is full of pickups and motorcycles, and the extra cars park across the road. People drive in from Fort Worth, Abilene and well beyond for one dish, the chicken fried steak.
With Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day coming up on Oct. 26, this is a good week to make the trip.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The saddles at the counter are real. Somebody wore that leather smooth a long time before you sat down, and the stools at the Old Spanish Trail in Bandera have been holding up ranch hands, bikers, dude ranch guests and road-trippers for the better part of a century. Order the chicken fried steak. Everybody does.
Locals just call it the OST. It opened in 1921 on Main Street, in a building that went up in the 1870s as a general store and later spent the 1930s and ’40s as a dance hall. The name comes from the Old Spanish Trail highway, an early coast-to-coast route meant to run from St. Augustine, Florida, to San Diego, with a stretch that carried motorists through the Hill Country. Interstate 10 eventually took the traffic. The restaurant stayed put, and today it calls itself the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Bandera County. You’ll also hear it described as the second oldest in Texas.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Somewhere around Sunday afternoon, Big Tex is going to say goodbye for another year, and the whole city will feel it a little. This is the last weekend of the State Fair, the first weekend that actually feels like fall, and one of those rare stretches on the North Texas calendar where every corner of the Metroplex has something worth leaving the house for. Here’s how to spend it, and where to eat and drink along the way.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There are two kinds of brunch. One is fuel: eggs, coffee and the check before you’ve finished your second cup. The other is an occasion. You gather a table of people you like, order a round, then another, and look up to find it’s somehow 2:30 and nobody wants to leave.
This list is for the second kind. These are Dallas restaurants where the food is good enough to justify the reservation, the drinks are made with care, and nobody is in a hurry to turn your table.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Most operas are about people. Leoš Janáček wrote one about a fox, and then quietly made it about everything else: love, aging, freedom, and the way the forest keeps going long after any of us are gone.
The Dallas Opera brings The Cunning Little Vixen to the Winspear Opera House starting Oct. 30. It’s been a long wait. The company hasn’t staged this opera in 26 years and hasn’t presented anything by Janáček in 22. This time it arrives in director Barrie Kosky’s production, created for the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 2022 and making its North American premiere here in Dallas.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
