Somewhere in Dallas there is a booth you sat in at seven years old, feet dangling a good foot above the floor. Maybe it was Saturday lunch after a soccer game. Maybe it was a birthday dinner where an uncle complained about the tea. You have no idea what anyone talked about that day.
You remember the plate, though.
These ten dishes still do that to people. Each one comes with a single Dallas restaurant serving it close to the way it tasted when you were small, minus the prices, which have grown up right along with you.
Cheese Enchiladas
Every Dallas kid had a standing Tex-Mex order, and for a lot of us it was two cheese enchiladas, rice, beans, and as many chips as Mom allowed before the food landed. Yellow cheese, a few chopped onions if you were feeling grown, and dark chili gravy running into the refried beans. The adults ordered fajitas. We knew better.
Avila’s on Maple Avenue has been rolling them since the mid-1980s, when Anita and Octavio Avila opened in the small house that once held Anita’s beauty shop. Anita’s father ran a grocery store in Little Mexico, and the family cooking traces right back to that neighborhood. The dining room still feels like somebody’s home because it was one.
Build a plate of cheese enchiladas, ask for the house hot sauce, and promise yourself you won’t fill up on chips. You will anyway.
Hamburger and Fries
Before you could drive, a burger joint you could reach on a bicycle was the closest thing to freedom. For generations of Park Cities and SMU-area kids, that place was Burger House at 6913 Hillcrest Ave.
It opened in 1951 under a man everyone called Jack, who came up with a garlicky, peppery seasoning salt and shook it over everything. Angelo Chantilis and his business partner bought the place in 1982 and had the good sense to leave it alone. The fries now carry the founder’s name, Jack’s Famous Fries, and old-timers still call the whole restaurant “Jack’s.”
Order a double-double, a basket of those fries, and a malt. The griddle is right there in front of you, the room is small, and the salt will follow you home on your shirt.
Frito Pie
In Texas, Frito pie day in the school cafeteria was a holiday nobody put on the calendar. Corn chips, chili, a fistful of cheese, and the whole thing eaten with a plastic spork at a desk carved up by kids who came before you. Later it showed up at Friday night football games in a split-open bag, and it tasted even better under the lights.
Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse has been serving barbecue at 2202 Inwood Road since 1958, and the original location still seats you at old wooden school desks, the same kind Sonny Bryan used when he opened. Barbecue runs deep in that family. Sonny’s grandfather Elias Bryan opened his first barbecue place in 1910.
The Frito Pie here swaps the chili for chopped brisket and barbecue beans, then piles on cheese, chives and barbecue sauce. Eat it at one of those desks and see if you don’t sit up a little straighter. Save room for the Peach Cobbler.
Meatloaf and Pot Roast
Sunday dinner at Grandma’s had rules. Elbows off the table, nobody touches the rolls until grace, and you take at least one spoonful of whatever vegetable got passed your way.
Celebration at 4503 W. Lovers Lane has been running Sunday dinner every day of the week since Ed Lowe opened it in 1971. Lowe was buying produce at the Dallas Farmers Market long before anyone printed “farm-to-table” on a menu. You pick your main, the table agrees on sides, the bowls get passed around, and seconds come out on many of the entrees.
Go with the meatloaf or the pot roast and let the bread basket do its job.
Fried Chicken
Fried chicken came home in a cardboard box on the back seat, and the whole car smelled like it before you hit the first red light. Somebody always snuck a few fries out of the bottom before the box ever reached the table.
That box has a family tree in Dallas. Herman Henderson started frying chicken in 1948 at a little spot that became Henderson’s Chicken Shack, and his place at Thomas and Hall became the fried chicken address in town. His grandson John Hall learned the recipe as a kid and opened his own shop in 1989 with the family’s blessing. Today John’s daughter, Mackenzie Hall, runs Hall’s Honey-Fried Chicken at 1407 Medical District Drive, which makes her the fourth generation behind the fryer.
The “honey” in the name describes the deep golden color, so don’t expect anything sweet. Order a mixed basket and it lands the old way, on a bed of fries with pickles, jalapeños and white bread. Eat it on the hood of the car. Nobody will judge you.
Grilled Cheese
Rainy afternoon, cartoons on, and a grilled cheese cut corner to corner, because triangles taste better. Every mother in Dallas knew that, and none of them could explain it.
AllGood Cafe has been on Main Street in Deep Ellum since the summer of 2000, when music promoter Mike Snider opened it with recipes from his friend Brian Hennington, the chef behind the old Deep Ellum Cafe. The grilled cheese was on that first menu and it never left. Snider retired last November after 25 years and handed the keys to musician and producer John Pedigo of The O’s and his partner, Robin Gill, who promised to keep his vision intact. The room still carries Snider’s fingerprints, from the stage he filled with Texas music for decades to the cafe’s old motto, “Make Love, Not Money.” Deep Ellum owes him a few rounds.
The Grilled Cheese with Roasted Green Chiles stacks cheddar and pepper jack with roasted green chiles, tomatoes and chipotle mayo on grilled sourdough. Mom’s bowl of tomato soup has been traded for tortilla chips and house salsa, which in Texas counts as the same food group.
Spaghetti and Meatballs
There was always one Italian place your family went for birthdays, with red sauce, a candle on the table and meatballs the size of a fist. The spaghetti never stayed on the fork, and nobody cared.
Dallas knew Barsotti’s for more than a decade as Carbone’s, the Oak Lawn spot Julian Barsotti, the chef behind Nonna, named for his great-grandfather Angelo Carbone. After a trademark tussle with the New York restaurant of the same name, it reopened in 2023 under the family’s own name, same corner at 4208 Oak Lawn Ave., same house-made pasta.
The spaghetti and meatballs stayed on the menu through all of it. Barsotti’s own daughter grew up on that plate, which is about the best endorsement a dish can get.
Chili Dog
The chili dog was the treat you begged for at the ballpark, the one that went down the front of your T-shirt before the third inning. Your mother saw the stain and said nothing. She’d eaten one too.
Angry Dog has been on Commerce Street in Deep Ellum since 1990, which makes it older than most of the bars around it. The namesake Angry Dog starts with a grilled beef dog on a grilled bun, then disappears under chili, cheddar, grilled onions and mustard. It is a fork-and-knife situation. Bring napkins, or better yet, wear a darker shirt than you did in 1985.
Pancakes
Pancakes on a Saturday morning were proof you’d been very, very good that week. Pancakes with sausage were proof you were the favorite.
Jonathon Erdeljac, the Gravy King, and his wife, Christine, opened Jonathon’s in May 2011 in a little house at 1111 N. Beckley Ave. in Oak Cliff, and the weekend line was out the door almost from the start. The original closed in 2021 after a steep rent hike, and the Erdeljacs carried the menu north to Jonathon’s Forestwood at 5337 Forest Lane, which opened in September 2023. Oak Cliff regulars still have Jonathon’s Diner at 1619 N. Beckley Ave., with the same classics on the menu.
Start with the Danger Dogs, turkey sausage links dipped in pancake batter and fried, served with spicy mustard. Think of them as pigs in a blanket that went to the State Fair. Then order a side of Pancakes and the Peanut Butter Jelly Time waffle with peanut butter fluff and berry preserves. Add the Biscuits & Gravy while you’re at it. Visiting the Gravy King without ordering gravy would just be rude.
Ice Cream
Summer meant a cone that dripped faster than you could lick it, a parent with a fistful of napkins, and the agony of choosing just one flavor.
Howdy Homemade at 12300 Inwood Road, Suite 200, brings all of that back, and then some. Tom Landis opened the shop in 2015 with a Dr Pepper chocolate chip flavor and a mission to hire adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, who make and scoop the ice cream themselves. The welcome you get at the counter is the warmest in town, and the samples come generously.
The flavor board reads like a childhood wish list: Birthday Cake, Strawberry Milkshake, Orange Dreamsicle, Butter Pecan. Get two scoops. You’re a grown-up now, and nobody can stop you.
