Matt Tobin and Josh Yingling were bartenders who didn’t want to become the kind of bartenders who are still pouring drinks at fifty, chain-smoking behind the stick until dawn. So, in 2011 they did what seemed like the logical alternative: they opened a bar. The difference was that this time it was theirs.
The space was a strip mall on Peavy Road in East Dallas, right next to Good 2 Go Taco. It had most recently been a biker bar called Texas Trap. They painted the walls dark, built a coffin-shaped bar, stocked it with craft beer nobody else in the neighborhood was pouring, and called it Goodfriend Beer Garden & Burger House. They didn’t plan to be a serious food destination. They initially had the taquerÃa next door handling the kitchen. That lasted about five minutes before they figured out the burgers needed to be their own.
Thirteen years later, Goodfriend at 1154 Peavy Road has become one of the most important restaurants in East Dallas — not because it reinvented anything, but because it did exactly what it said it would. Good beer. Good burgers. A neighborhood that could feel like it was theirs. The Peavy and Garland intersection that once needed a reason to exist now has a cluster of independent food and drink businesses that grew up partly because Goodfriend proved the neighborhood was worth showing up to. That does not happen by accident.
Starting May 15, Goodfriend is bringing back something it hasn’t done in six years — lunch service Friday through Sunday, open every day of the week. The beer garden patio with its cedar pergola and East Dallas afternoon light is going to make for a very different experience than the one most regulars have had at night, and if the kitchen holds to what it has always done, the lunch crowd is in for something worth returning to.
The food has always been better than the room suggests on first glance. Culinary director David Peña came up through Braindead Brewing and took over the Goodfriend kitchen after years of eating there as a regular. He cleaned up some of the excess — the portions that used to arrive as genuine challenges to human dignity — and focused on what the menu actually was: a small number of things done correctly, served with beer that is worth thinking about.
The P.L.O.T. is the burger to know. It stands for Pickles, Lettuce, Onion, Tomato — a fully dressed natural grass-fed beef patty with horseradish pickles and white cheddar on a toasted bun. It is not complicated and it does not need to be. The horseradish pickles are the move — they cut through the fat in a way that a standard dill pickle does not and give the burger an edge that keeps you eating. The patty is cooked medium unless you say otherwise, which is the right call. Get the sweet potato waffle fries alongside, which are large enough to share and consistently the side dish people wish they had ordered more of.
The Blue is the other burger worth knowing — beef topped with a creamy Swiss mushroom sauce, a quieter and more European riff on what the kitchen does well. For heat, the Fire & Ice is built with habanero, ghost chile, and scorpion chile sauce, topped with habanero jack cheese and the same horseradish pickles. It comes with what the menu describes as a waiver. That is not entirely a joke.
Beyond the burgers, the BBQ Grilled Cheese on toasted brioche with yellow cheddar, angus brisket, grilled onions, and fresh jalapeños is a sandwich that has outlasted several menu overhauls because the people who order it once keep coming back for it specifically. The battered fried pickles are the right bar snack, thick cut and served with ranch, the kind of appetizer that disappears before anyone decides who is sharing it. The cheese plate from Scardello’s — pickled vegetables and fresh bread — is the move if someone at the table needs something that isn’t fried.
And then there is pie. Goodfriend has been serving rotating slices from Pie Falootin, the from-scratch pie house out of Garland, for years — $6 a slice, vanilla ice cream on top for a dollar fifty more. The flavors rotate and they run out, which means you order it before you think you’re ready rather than after. That is the right call.
The beer list is the other half of the equation and always has been. Tobin and Yingling built Goodfriend on craft beer before it was everywhere in Dallas, and the tap selection still runs deeper than most bars in the city. They rotate seasonals and special releases alongside the reliable anchors, and the menu suggests beer pairings for each burger, which is either charming or useful depending on how seriously you take it. Both, usually.
Tobin and Yingling also own Goodfriend Package across the street at 1155 Peavy — a deli and craft beer retail shop with Cultivar Coffee inside, open daily from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. If you need breakfast or a sandwich before the beer garden is open, that is where you go. The Cuban is the thing to get at the Package. Together the two operations have made this stretch of Peavy Road into something the neighborhood built around rather than the other way around.
Goodfriend Beer Garden & Burger House is at 1154 Peavy Road in East Dallas. Starting May 15 the restaurant will be open for lunch Friday-Sunday. Follow updates on Instagram at @goodfriend.dtx and at goodfrienddallas.com.
