In 1946, twenty Duncanville businessmen met at Linwood Hayne’s service station at Main and Davis and agreed the town needed a fire department. Each man put in at least $20. Neighbors built a one-room station by hand, and a siren went up on the water tower. One tone sent the volunteers north of town. Two sent them east.
Eighty years on, a midcentury building on North Main that its new owners say once housed the town’s volunteer firefighters is sending out plates of beef cheek pastrami.
The restaurant is Isbella, and it belongs to chef Matt Balke and co-owner Corey McCombs, the team behind Encina in Oak Cliff. It opened October 14 and serves dinner Tuesday through Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m. Weekend brunch is in the plans.
Getting here took a while, and it took City Hall. On November 19, 2024, the Duncanville City Council took up a resolution authorizing incentive grants of up to $300,000 from the Duncanville Community & Economic Development Corporation to Balke for the building. The owners have said the grant helped them buy it.
Ownership is the detail worth sitting with. Most independent restaurants lease their space and live at the mercy of the next renewal. Owning the building changes the math for a small operator, and it says Balke and McCombs intend to be on Main Street for a long time.
They credit developer Monte Anderson with pointing them toward Duncanville. Anderson’s firm, Options Real Estate, has spent years reworking the town’s downtown, and its Duncanville Main Street revitalization earned a regional development award from the North Central Texas Council of Governments back in 2013.
Balke’s own road runs through Oak Cliff. He grew up in Uvalde and trained at the Culinary Institute of America. He started out at Bolsa, left to cook at The Rustic and Smoke, then came back to Bolsa as executive chef. That kitchen carried real weight. Graham Dodds opened Bolsa in 2008 with Randall Copeland as his sous chef, and the restaurant did as much as any in town to teach Dallas what cooking from nearby farms could look like.
When Bolsa closed in January 2020 after twelve years, Balke and McCombs took over the same room at 614 W. Davis St. and opened Encina that October. The name is the original one for Uvalde. Six years in, the weekend brunch still draws a crowd, and Encina’s Blue Corn Butterscotch Pancake Mix took third place in H-E-B’s 2024 Quest for Texas Best. CraveDFW spent time with dinner and brunch at Encina this spring.
The owners have said a good share of Encina’s regulars drive up from Duncanville and the towns around it. Isbella brings the cooking to them.
The name is personal. Isbella is named for Balke’s mother, and the script on the sign out front was drawn from his grandfather’s signature.
Encina people will find familiar ground on the menu. The beef cheek pastrami arrives with pimento cheese, and the warm crab dip comes with potato chips for scooping. The chile braised black-eyed peas belong on the table no matter what else gets ordered.
The sandwich list includes a warm muffuletta with provolone and pepperoni. There’s a chicken fried steak on the dinner side too, which in a town this size is close to a civic obligation. Save room for the strawberry goat cheese cheesecake.
The bar leans toward New Orleans and France, with cocktails built on absinthe and Chartreuse, a long run of cognac, rhum agricole from the French Caribbean, and French ciders and beers. Between that and the muffuletta, a Louisiana thread runs through the place. Non-drinkers get a zero-proof menu of their own.
Downtown Duncanville has been working at a comeback for years, one storefront at a time. A chef with Balke’s résumé putting his own money and his mother’s name on a building there is about as clear a vote of confidence as that street has gotten.
Isbella is on North Main Street in downtown Duncanville. Dinner is Tuesday through Saturday, 5 to 9 p.m., and reservations are taken through OpenTable.
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