Southern Kitchen ran two locations in Dallas for decades, a West spot at 2356 West Northwest Highway at Harry Hines Boulevard, and an East spot at 6615 East Northwest Highway. Both were confirmed still running side by side as of the 1960s, and at least one diner’s memory places a visit to the Bachman Lake–area location as far back as 1975. The company behind both locations operated under the name Southern Hospitality, Inc.
The restaurant’s whole reputation was built around one thing: the Southern Kitchen Deluxe Dinner, printed on the East location’s menu as the specialty that made the place famous. Both locations ran under the same name and the same general format, but the menu that survives comes specifically from Southern Kitchen East at 6615 East Northwest Highway. Dinner started with a choice of cocktail, Alaskan king crab meat, chilled Gulf shrimp, iced tomato juice, or a Baltimore oyster cocktail when in season, served with a house cocktail sauce or remoulade. Next came a tossed green salad with a choice of Roquefort, Thousand Island, or the restaurant’s own Southern Kitchen dressing.
Then came the main event: five foods served family-style as an assortment, deviled crab, deep sea scallops, fried jumbo shrimp, tenderloin of trout, and golden brown Southern fried chicken, with a standing invitation printed right on the menu to reorder as often as you liked. The only rule was that nothing left the building. Sides included a baked Idaho potato with sour cream, chopped green onion, and bacon, or French fried potato puffs, plus crisp Bermuda onion rings and a bread basket of light biscuits, hot cinnamon rolls, and hush puppies. The full dinner ran six dollars a person, with a lower price for children under twelve, and the restaurant kept a wine list on hand for anyone who wanted to order by the glass or bottle.
Of everything on that menu, the cinnamon rolls are what people bring up first, and by a wide margin. They’re the one item that outlived the restaurant itself in Dallas’s collective memory, sweet, warm, cut thick, and served straight out of the bread basket alongside the biscuits and hush puppies. The menu itself called them “hot cinnamon twists,” but almost nobody remembers them that way. Ask anyone who ate there and they’ll call them cinnamon rolls, and they’ll usually mention the smell before they mention the taste. A recipe clipped from a Dallas newspaper right after the restaurant closed still circulates online today, passed hand to hand by people trying to recreate the one thing they never got to order enough of.
The fried chicken had a real following of its own, and the hush puppies and house dressing were distinct enough that regulars still reference them by name. But the cinnamon rolls are the dish that turned into legend.
The atmosphere leaned toward occasion without tipping into formal. One longtime patron described it as “an outrageous orgy of pure lunacy,” meant as the highest compliment, the kind of place where a table could work through three or four rounds of the Deluxe Dinner assortment and the kitchen would keep it coming. It drew families for birthdays and celebrations, church groups after Sunday service, and regulars who came often enough to have a usual order. A German teacher reportedly brought her high school club there once a year as a reward dinner, a small detail that says something about what kind of restaurant it was seen as: special enough to be worth the trip, familiar enough to be a tradition.
Southern Kitchen closed sometime in the 1990s. The West Northwest Highway building, constructed around 1966, sat empty for roughly two decades afterward before it was finally demolished around 2016. By then the restaurant had already earned a permanent spot in how Dallas remembers its own dining history. A 2026 survey of Dallas diners asking which closed restaurants they missed most turned up Southern Kitchen again and again, named in the same breath as Steak and Ale and Bennigan’s, the homegrown chains that weren’t glamorous but anchored an entire generation’s birthdays, family dinners, and Friday nights out.
What made Southern Kitchen work wasn’t complicated. A five-course seafood and fried chicken spread you could reorder until you gave up, cinnamon rolls better than anywhere else in the city, and a room that made an ordinary Tuesday feel like it was worth dressing up for. That combination kept people coming back for the better part of thirty years, and it’s the reason so many longtime Dallasites still bring it up first when the conversation turns to restaurants the city has lost.
