Tim Goza has spent more than a decade proving Lower Greenville can hold a restaurant. He opened Palapas Seafood Bar there in 2014, in the space that used to be Dallas Tortilla & Tamale Factory, and it’s still standing. In March 2025 he opened a second restaurant right next door with his business partner Gustavo De Los Rios, who also runs Mami Coco. This one isn’t about seafood. It’s about fire.
Las Brasas, at 1418 Greenville Ave., is built around a wood grill Goza had custom-made in Monterrey, and the cooking style follows the region it came from. Northern Mexico grilling doesn’t lean on a smoker and a low, slow burn the way Central Texas barbecue does. It runs hot, direct, and fast, over charcoal and mesquite, with the cook pulling meat off the fire in stages to control doneness rather than setting it and walking away. That’s the technique behind the restaurant’s carne asadas, and it’s a different animal from the steakhouse experience the name might suggest to someone driving past.
The bone marrow, tuétanos on the menu, comes out on its own small grill split into two long halves, served with a spoon for scraping out the center and a molcajete-made sauce for scooping it into a warm tortilla with lime and salt. It’s a shared plate, and at most tables it doesn’t last long enough to actually be shared. The ribeye aguachile takes the raw, citrus-cured aguachile format and puts grilled beef in the role usually held by shrimp, which is a smart trade for a menu that’s already built around the grill rather than the raw bar.
Whole or half brasas chicken, marinated and split before it hits the coals, is the other anchor of the menu, finished with a roasted tomato sauce rather than anything heavier. Beef short ribs and a 12-ounce Black Angus cut round out the proteins. On the side, the kitchen roasts a whole onion in the embers until it opens on its own, no batter and no fryer involved, which is a more interesting version of a dish that shows up everywhere in a worse form.
Chips come with a fire-roasted molcajete salsa rather than the standard pico, and queso flameado and stuffed jalapenos cover the rest of the shared-plate end of the menu.
The patio is the room to ask for. It’s large enough to absorb a Friday night crowd without feeling like a wait, and it’s where the restaurant’s better instincts show up most clearly — string lights, a fire pit, and enough distance from Greenville Avenue traffic that a conversation across the table doesn’t require raising your voice.
Las Brasas is open Sunday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., according to the restaurant’s own site — though a couple of listings elsewhere show slightly later closing times on weekends, so it’s worth a call to (972) 803-3616 if you’re planning a late one.
This is a different restaurant from Casa Brasa in Preston Center, worth noting since the names get confused. Casa Brasa is Omar Flores’s Latin-Japanese fine-dining room. Las Brasas is Goza and De Los Rios’s neighborhood grill, and it’s doing something distinct enough from its Greenville Avenue neighbors to be worth the trip on its own.
