Jeff Bekavac opened Goodwins in May 2024 in the old Blue Goose space on Greenville. He named it after the cross street. He’s been in Dallas kitchens for years — Neighborhood Services, Cane Rosso — and this is his first real shot at doing it his own way. The room is warm, the bar is brass, the back bar is darker and better for a martini. It fills up fast on weekends and most weeknights aren’t far behind.
Filed under Steven Doyle
Dallas has been waiting for Clark’s Oyster Bar longer than it should have had to. The Austin institution opened in 2012, became one of the most copied seafood concepts in Texas, expanded to Aspen, Houston, and Montecito — and somehow Dallas kept getting skipped. That changes this fall.
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The French Room inside The Adolphus has been one of the great rooms in Dallas since the hotel opened in 1912. Adolphus Busch built it on the beer fortune he made in St. Louis, and the design — vaulted ceilings, Corinthian columns, twin Murano glass chandeliers from Italy, marble floors, Louis XVI chairs — has aged exactly the way serious things age: without apology and without effort. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip stayed at The Adolphus during their 1991 state visit. It has held the AAA Five Diamond Award without interruption since 1989. There is not another room quite like it in Texas, and maybe not in the South.
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Wyl Lima grew up in Keene, Texas, which is not a place most people have heard of. It’s a small town built around Southwestern Adventist University, a school that draws students from over a hundred countries. Lima was born in Angola, moved to Texas at ten, and spent his formative years eating food that had nothing to do with what was on most Dallas menus — flavors from Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, South America, all of it cycling through a neighborhood that looked nothing like it from the outside.
He went to Chicago to learn technique. Michelin-starred Temporis, where he worked as chef de cuisine, gave him the structure. What he’d grown up eating gave him the instinct. When he came back to Dallas, first at Sister and then at The Charlotte, those two things finally got to work together in the same kitchen.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There is a scene in The Last Picture Show where Sam the Lion takes two teenage boys fishing at a tank on the edge of town. Early morning, flat Texas light, nobody saying much. Ben Johnson starts talking about a woman he loved forty years before — how they used to swim there, what it felt like, where it all went. He doesn’t perform the speech. He just says it, quietly, looking at the water. It’s one of the great moments in American cinema, and if you aren’t close to tears by the end of it you may want to check your pulse.
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Shyboy Hi-Fi has been open for two months and it’s already doing something Dallas nightlife hasn’t seen before. The venue sits underground at 1313 Main Street in the former bank vaults of The Drakestone — nine-foot OJAS speakers, acoustics tuned by the same specialist who worked on installations at the San Francisco MoMA, cocktails starting at $13, soft-serve ice cream at the bar. The idea came from Tokyo’s postwar jazz kissas, the intimate cafés where people gathered to sit down, close their eyes, and actually listen. Headington Companies built their version of that beneath downtown Dallas and May is when the calendar really opens up.
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Wan Kim knows both ends of the dining spectrum. He runs Smoothie King, a chain with over a thousand locations worldwide. He also built Nuri Steakhouse in Uptown Dallas — a $20 million Korean steakhouse that the Wall Street Journal named one of three in the country worth splurging on, and one of two Dallas restaurants to land on the World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants list in 2025. The man operates at a very high level regardless of the price point. That context matters when you’re trying to understand what Flock & Fresh actually is.
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Bill Rossell found out last week that he needs dialysis and is facing a kidney transplant. He posted on social media about it, not really knowing what to expect. Dallas answered immediately. People who had been coming to Lakewood Landing for twenty years — who had never said out loud what the place meant to them — said it all at once. “I feel rejuvenated,” he said. “I keep saying that word. I’m overwhelmed with happiness.” For a man who has been through as much as he has, that response means everything.
To understand why Dallas showed up that way, you have to know the story.
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