Ask someone from Philadelphia what to eat and you’ll have an answer before you finish the question. Same in Buffalo. Same in Louisville. Ask someone in Dallas and you get a pause, then a list, then an argument.
That pause deserves a closer look. Dallas has fed the country more than it gets credit for, and it has never settled on the one plate it would put on its own flag. So let’s try.
Start with how the other cities did it, because none of them planned it.
In 1930, Pat Olivieri and his brother Harry were selling hot dogs from a stand in South Philadelphia, near the Italian Market. Tired of eating his own product, Pat sent Harry to a butcher for some inexpensive steak, cooked it on the hot dog grill and put it on a roll. The family story goes that a cab driver smelled it, bought one and told Pat to forget the hot dogs. Pat’s King of Steaks still stands at Ninth Street and Passyunk Avenue, and the cheesesteak became shorthand for an entire city.
Buffalo’s came from a mother feeding her son’s friends. On March 4, 1964, Dominic Bellissimo was tending bar at the Anchor Bar when a hungry crowd came in late. His mother, Teressa, deep-fried a batch of chicken wings, a part of the bird that usually went into the stockpot, and dressed them in her own sauce. From that night on, Buffalo wings were part of the Anchor Bar menu, and before long they were on nearly every bar menu in the country.
Louisville’s started in a hotel kitchen. In 1926, chef Fred K. Schmidt at the Brown Hotel was feeding more than 1,200 dinner-dance guests a night, and they had grown tired of late-night ham and eggs. He laid turkey on toast, covered it in Mornay sauce, crossed two strips of bacon on top and sent it out. The Hot Brown turns 100 this year, and the Brown Hotel still serves it.
Look at what those three share. Each one started as a fix for an ordinary problem. Each has a birthplace you can still walk into. And locals actually eat them on a regular weeknight instead of saving them for company.
That gives us a fair test for Dallas. A signature dish should be born here and still made here. Dallas people should eat it without being dragged. And a visitor who skips it should go home feeling a little cheated. Run the contenders through that and the field shrinks quickly.
Brisket and chicken fried steak leave first. They belong to the whole state, and Dallas doesn’t get to claim them alone.
The frozen margarita has the best paperwork of anything on this list. On May 11, 1971, Mariano Martinez rigged a soft-serve machine at his new restaurant to pour his father’s margarita recipe, and that original machine now sits in the Smithsonian. CraveDFW told the whole story this summer. It passes every test but one, which is that you drink it. Dallas keeps that trophy, but it goes on a different shelf.
The Fletcher’s Corny Dog has the history. Neil and Carl Fletcher introduced it at the State Fair of Texas in 1942, and the batter is still made from Neil’s original recipe. We covered the full Fletcher’s saga in September. The trouble is the calendar. The real thing, at its real home, is a 24-day affair at Fair Park, and a city’s signature shouldn’t come with a closing date.
Snuffer’s cheddar fries have the loyalty. Pat Snuffer opened on Lower Greenville in 1978, next to the Granada, with a single 55-seat dining room built to feed SMU students, and that basket of fries has been on Dallas tables ever since. Dallas didn’t invent cheese fries, though. It just perfected the habit.
Frito pie has a Dallas connection and a custody problem. The Frito Company moved its headquarters to Dallas in the 1930s, and Frito-Lay credits an employee named Nell Morris, who helped put together the company’s official cookbook in the 1950s, Frito pie included. Santa Fe has its own version of the story, built around Teresa Hernández and the Woolworth’s lunch counter on the plaza in the 1960s. Until that fight is settled, Dallas can’t plant a flag.
The hotel dishes are where Dallas starts to look like Louisville. Dean Fearing created his lobster taco in 1985 to launch Southwestern cooking at The Mansion on Turtle Creek, and he has been making his tortilla soup since 1981. Both went into The Mansion on Turtle Creek Cookbook in 1987, and the soup is still a fixture at Fearing’s in The Ritz-Carlton on McKinney Avenue. If any Dallas dish has earned Hot Brown status, it’s that soup. There’s one wrinkle. Fearing has said the original recipe came from San Antonio by way of the Mansion’s owner, which makes the birth certificate a little complicated. The lobster taco is pure Dallas, but most people in town have never had one.
Then comes the one most Dallas people don’t know belongs to them.
On June 3, 1957, The Dallas Morning News ran a reader’s recipe in Julie Benell’s Recipe of the Day column. It came from Mrs. George Clay, a homemaker in Southeast Dallas, and it called for Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate, a baking chocolate named for Samuel German, who developed it back in 1852. She called it German’s Chocolate Cake. General Foods, which owned the Baker’s brand, sent the recipe to newspapers across the country, sales of the chocolate reportedly jumped 73 percent, and somewhere along the way the apostrophe fell off. By 1963, Lyndon Johnson was serving it at his ranch to West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, a guest who surely wondered what the cake had to do with his country.
To be fair, a recipe for “Summer German Chocolate Cake” ran in the Irving News Record in May 1956, a year ahead of Mrs. Clay. Either way, the cake never left Dallas County. It passes the birthplace test. Where it struggles is the restaurant test, because nobody in town has ever made it their calling card.
Which brings us to the plate that passes everything.
On September 15, 1918, the eve of Mexican Independence Day, Miguel “Mike” Martinez and his wife, Faustina, turned their small Dallas cafe into El Fenix. More than a century later, the order that matters is still the cheese enchilada plate, two enchiladas in chili gravy with rice and refried beans, and on Wednesdays the dinner special turns it into a citywide habit. CraveDFW has told the El Fenix story before, and it bears repeating here.
The chili gravy is what makes it ours. Built on dried chiles, beef stock, cumin, garlic and masa, it’s a Texas sauce with no real equivalent south of the border, and nearly every old Dallas Tex-Mex house has its own version. Mia’s on Lemmon Avenue has one. So does La Calle Doce in Oak Cliff, along with others we rounded up in our enchilada history. San Antonio will argue that Tex-Mex as a whole is theirs, and they have a case. The cheese enchilada plate, ordered on a Wednesday at the McKinney Avenue flagship, is still about as Dallas as eating gets. Locals eat it every week, and a visitor who skips it has missed something.
So here is the CraveDFW ballot. A frozen margarita to start, a cheese enchilada plate in chili gravy for dinner, ideally on a Wednesday, and a slice of German chocolate cake to finish. Other cities ended up with a sandwich or a plate of wings, and Dallas, without anyone noticing, put together an entire dinner, from the first drink to the last slice of cake.
Now we want yours. Tell us what we got wrong, what we left out and what Dallas should put on the flag. Make your case in the comments or tag us on Instagram at @crave_dfw or Facebook.
