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.
He claims he invented Texas Toast. In 1955, Gene was ordering unsliced loaves from Golman Baking Company in Oak Cliff — the baker had never had anyone ask for bread unsliced before — and having his kitchen cut them thick and grill them with butter. Nobody in Dallas had seen a piece of toast that thick. People started coming in for breakfast just to have the bread. Whether culinary historians want to argue the point, the story fits the man: simple idea, executed well, becomes something everybody takes for granted fifty years later.
In 1971 Dunston’s became the first restaurant in Dallas to receive a liquor license after Prohibition. Gene has opened and closed as many as nine locations over the decades. Two remain. The regulars at both have been coming since before some of them can remember how they started. Herb Kelleher, who founded Southwest Airlines, used to eat there regularly. Carroll Shelby, the car man. Lee Roy Jordan. Walt Garrison. Cliff Harris. Randy White. The kind of Texas names that accumulate around a place that’s been doing things right for seventy years.
The beef comes from Dunston’s own cattle company. That detail gets mentioned in passing on the website but it’s worth slowing down on: most steakhouses buy their beef from a distributor. Gene Dunston raises his own. The menu reflects that ownership in the pricing — a filet mignon at the Harry Hines location comes in under $30, which in 2026 is nearly impossible for a steak of that quality. The bacon-wrapped filet is the one regulars mention first. The bone-in ribeye and New York strip are the other anchors, both mesquite-grilled over an open flame that you can see and smell from the dining room. Sides run the full Texas range — fried okra, butter beans, skillet fried potatoes with sautéed onions, collard greens, mac and cheese. The salad bar has been voted Dallas’s best. The mushroom poppers and calamari start the table. Friday brings a special of BBQ brisket and sausage with onion rings that has its own following.
The Lovers Lane location at 5423 W. Lovers Lane is the one with the throwback charm intact — art deco captain’s chairs, black leather booths in the back bar, table reservations marked with regulars’ names in hand-scrawled plastic placards. The Harry Hines original at 8526 was rebuilt in the 1990s but the soul didn’t leave with the old walls. Gene can still be found there.
He’s been making short videos on Instagram and TikTok lately, telling stories from seventy years in the business. One about the mesquite pit has 51,000 likes. The man who flipped a coin to get to Dallas and talked a jukebox operator into a loan is now a social media presence at an age when most people have been retired for twenty years. The steaks are still the same price they were in a different era. That’s either stubbornness or integrity, and in Gene Dunston’s case it reads as both.
Dunston’s Steakhouse is at 8526 Harry Hines Boulevard (Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 or 10 p.m., closed Sunday) and 5423 W. Lovers Lane (Monday through Friday from 11 a.m., Saturday and Sunday from 4 p.m.). dunstonssteakhouse.com.
