Kendall Williams cooked her first Thanksgiving dinner by herself when she was thirteen. Whole meal, whole family, no help. That detail tells you more about the restaurant she just opened than anything on the menu does.
Bluebonnet & Thyme Southern Bistro & Bar is open at 2610 N. Houston St. in Victory Park, in the space that used to be Dirty Bones, right across from the arena. It’s her first brick-and-mortar after a decade of building a name in this city, and she calls the food a Cajun and Texas explosion, which is a fair description of what happens when Louisiana heritage runs into Lone Star cooking in the same kitchen.
The name comes from both halves of her: the Texas state flower, and the herb she keeps reaching for.
Dinner is where the ambition shows. The Golden Fried Hen comes with sweet cream corn. The Gulf red snapper is a two-pound fish laid over dirty rice, which is the order to make if there are two of you and you want the table to notice. The seafood linguine pulls together lobster, crab and shrimp in a white wine butter sauce.
Then there are the deviled eggs, and this is the part with a story behind it. Williams took a Big Tex Choice Award in 2025 for Most Creative Dish with her Wagyu bacon cheeseburger deviled egg sliders. Those aren’t on this menu, but the deviled eggs are, and you can get an assortment of six flavors: Texas BBQ, seafood boil, smoked paprika, hot honey chicken, birria taco and smoked salmon. Order them for the table and watch people argue about which one wins.
Save room. The Southern banana pudding is her family’s recipe, made with warm vanilla custard, wafers, fresh banana and whipped cream, and family recipes on a first menu are never an accident.
Weekend brunch might be the stronger meal. Catfish and shrimp with grits. A whole fried Cornish hen, which almost nobody in this city is doing. Red velvet waffles. Stuffed French toast with cheesecake and strawberry compote. Bottomless mimosas run thirty dollars, which in Victory Park is close to a public service.
The bar is run by Dr. Angela Williams, a longtime collaborator, working Texas ingredients into the list. The DAMM Good Old Fashioned and the Bluebonnet Ranch Water are the two to start with.
As for the room, Williams describes it as your grandmother’s house if your grandmother happened to be Dolly Parton, which is the best line anybody in Dallas hospitality has offered this year and is also accurate. Alligator-skin seating. Floral cast-aluminum bistro chairs. Exposed stone. A longhorn skull on the wall. There’s a patio and a lounge, and the whole thing runs 3,386 square feet.
Her path here is worth knowing. She studied history at Texas Woman’s University, taught herself to cook because she wanted to, traveled to sharpen her technique, and in 2019 started Pretty Tasty Foods, the catering operation behind Pretty Tasty Pasta, which is where a lot of Dallas first tasted her Creole and Italian cooking. The restaurant soft-opened on August 7 and is now running full service.
Hours are 4:30 to 11 Monday through Thursday, 4:30 to 1 a.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 1 a.m. Saturday and 10 to 10 on Sunday. Reservations through OpenTable. Three hours of parking are free at 1701 Payne St., which anyone who has tried to eat near the arena will recognize as the most valuable sentence in this story.
Go for brunch on a Saturday, get the deviled eggs and the Cornish hen, and see what a decade of cooking for other people’s parties looks like when somebody finally gets her own room.
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