Here’s the part of the Ellen’s story most people don’t know: Ellen wasn’t a great cook. Founder Joe Groves named the restaurant after his mother, and by his own account she was famously bad in the kitchen — which makes Ellen’s Southern Kitchen either an elaborate inside joke or the most honest kind of tribute, food good enough to make up for whatever happened at her stove. Either way, it’s a better story than the generic Southern-name-on-a-sign approach most comfort food restaurants take, and it’s worth knowing before the original West End location reopens this month after a nearly two-year absence.
Ellen’s opened in downtown Dallas in 2012 and became a fixture of the West End — the kind of place that caught tourists, conventioneers, and downtown residents all at the same table, serving breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner with a full bar attached. It closed roughly two years ago in what Groves has called a “temporary” closure, tied up in landlord disputes that have since been resolved. The good news: it’s coming back to 1790 N. Record Street this June with the same management team, many of the same familiar servers and bartenders, and — by Groves’s own description — the same menu and personality, just better.
The menu is the type of Southern comfort spread that doesn’t need updating because it was built right the first time. Chicken-fried steak, fried catfish, meatloaf, shrimp and grits, and macaroni and cheese anchor the lunch and dinner side. Breakfast and brunch are where Ellen’s built its reputation — steak and eggs, migas, huevos rancheros, and the Ellen’s omelet, an unusual combination of spinach, bacon, strawberries, mushrooms, and bleu cheese that sounds like it shouldn’t work and apparently does.
The signature dish is the Pancake Pot Pie — layered pancakes, maple cream sausage gravy, bacon, sausage, hash browns, scrambled eggs, and cheddar, all in one bowl. It’s a polarizing plate; the sweet-and-savory combination either clicks for you immediately or it doesn’t, and there’s no real middle ground. The eight-way benedict menu — including a Cajun shrimp benedict and a crab cake benedict — is the safer bet for anyone who wants the Southern-brunch experience without the gamble.
While the West End flagship gets back on its feet, the Casa Linda Plaza location at 1211 N. Buckner Boulevard has been open since 2023 and runs the same scratch-made menu daily from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. — a large room with a full bar, booth and table seating, and the kind of bright, window-heavy space that makes a Tuesday morning breakfast feel like an event. Bottomless mimosa carafes run $25 most days. Reservations for parties of two to fourteen are available through ellens.com, with private event space for 30 to 40 guests at each location.
The West End reopening at 1790 N. Record Street is expected this June — the same hours, the same menu, the same down-to-earth room that made it a downtown institution the first time around. For a city that loses old standbys faster than it gains new ones, getting one back is worth noticing.
