Casa Brasa at 8111 Preston Road launched Sunday brunch last week — three courses, $65 per person, Sundays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. If you’ve been to Casa Brasa for dinner you already understand the kitchen’s instincts: Japanese raw bar technique alongside Latin American open-fire cooking, charcoal heat, live fire. The brunch menu runs on those same principles and doesn’t dilute them for the weekend crowd.
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The night before Japan faces the Netherlands in Dallas, the Crow Museum of Asian Art is turning the Trammell Crow Center Plaza into a Japanese beer garden. The event is called From Dallas to the World: A Toast to a Summer of Soccer, it runs Saturday, June 13 from 6 to 9 p.m., and it’s 21-and-up. The timing is deliberate — Dallas is about to host tens of thousands of international visitors, and this is the kind of evening that gives them somewhere genuinely worth going.
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The FIFA World Cup comes to North Texas on June 12, with matches running through July at AT&T Stadium in Arlington. Hundreds of thousands of visitors from dozens of countries will be in Dallas for days at a time, and most of them will be hungry. CraveDFW is building the most comprehensive neighborhood-by-neighborhood dining guide for World Cup visitors and locals alike — covering Bishop Arts, Deep Ellum, Uptown, the Design District, Downtown Dallas, Addison, and the stadium corridor in Arlington.
Whether you’re looking for a pre-match lunch, a long dinner after the final whistle, or a late-night spot that stays open when everything else closes, this is where you start.
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Tony Street had been in the restaurant business his whole life — his family’s legacy, not a career he chose so much as one he grew up inside. Jab Street came up differently, learning her craft over ten years as a chef at Toys Café before bringing that background to Dallas. What they shared was an obsession with Thai food done right, and eventually that shared obsession became a restaurant. Family Thais Asian Bistro opened in 2019 at 208 N. Market Street in the West End, ten tables, counter service, and has been the best Thai restaurant in Dallas ever since.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
A coin flip brought Gene Dunston to Dallas. His mother had scraped together enough money working in a country café in rural Alabama to get the family out and into a city with better prospects. She put it to a coin: heads was Dallas, tails was Miami. Heads came up, the family packed everything they had, and a 15-year-old boy arrived in North Texas in 1946 with no particular plan.
He washed dishes at the Topper hamburger stand after school and valeted cars downtown on weekends. The valet job is where he met the man he still calls the Jukebox Man — a cash-heavy operator who rented jukeboxes to bars and restaurants across the city and had money to lend. Gene was a good enough kid that the man loaned him enough to open his first restaurant, a place called the Silver Castle on Oak Lawn Avenue. That led to the Wheel-in Drive-In on Harry Hines Boulevard in 1955. Ten years after that, Gene installed an open-flame mesquite pit in the middle of the dining room, renamed the place Dunston’s Steakhouse, and the rest is the kind of Dallas history that doesn’t get written up enough.
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Chef Omar Larson spent years in some of the most demanding fine dining kitchens in Dallas — Kessaku, Monarch — before opening his own room in downtown. Luna Roja opened April 2 at 1525 Elm Street, steps from the AT&T Discovery District, and it is doing something nobody else in downtown Dallas is doing.
The concept is modern Mexican — regional flavors, shareable plates, 50-plus tequilas and mezcals, all-day service from breakfast through dinner. That’s the daily operation. But once a month, Larson pulls the chairs together and runs the TacoKase: a chef-led taco tasting built on the omakase model, a curated progression of tacos made with seasonal ingredients that changes completely each time. It’s the kind of thing that sounds gimmicky until you think about what omakase actually is — a chef deciding what you eat based on what’s best right now — and realize the taco is as logical a vehicle for that format as any piece of fish. The monthly rotation means no two dinners are the same, and regulars are already tracking the dates.
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If you’ve spent any time in Los Cabos, you already know La Lupita. The original is open-air — no roof, just Baja sky — and has been one of the most reliably packed restaurants in Cabo San Lucas for years, earning recognition from Condé Nast Traveler, GOOP, and Marie Claire along the way. The concept built its reputation on al pastor done right, a mezcal program taken seriously, and the kind of room energy that makes a two-hour dinner feel like thirty minutes. It opened its first United States location on May 23 at 1201 Oak Lawn Avenue in the Design District, and Dallas is the right city to receive it.
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Chinese-Mexican fusion sounds like a joke until you understand where it comes from. In the late 1800s, Chinese laborers working on the railroads and in the mines of northern Mexico put down roots rather than returning home. Over generations they built communities — in Mexicali, in Sonora, in Baja California — and their food blended with the Mexican cooking around them in ways that produced something completely its own. Birria and dim sum. Chile heat and wok smoke. Tacos with fillings nobody in either tradition had tried before. It’s a genuine culinary history, and most people in Texas have never encountered it.
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