Author Archives: Steven Doyle

Inside the Recipe and History of Perry’s Legendary Pork Chop

There’s a version of the Perry’s story that most diners never hear, and it starts with a meat counter, not a dining room. In 1979, Bob Perry opened a small butcher shop on the south side of Houston called Perry’s Butcher Shop and Deli. It was a neighborhood operation, the kind of place people walked into for a Friday roast or a pound of ground chuck, nothing more ambitious than that. What changed the trajectory of the business was Bob’s son, Chris, who by 1986 had talked his father into adding a few tables and chairs to the shop. Customers who came in for meat started staying to eat, and what began as a butcher counter with some seating grew into Perry & Sons Market & Grille.

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The Real History of Fritos, Frito Pie, and the Dallas Connection

In 1932, a twenty-eight-year-old confectionery manager named Charles Elmer Doolin ordered a sandwich and a nickel bag of corn chips at a small San Antonio café. He liked the chips enough to track down the man who made them, a vendor named Gustavo Olguín who was getting ready to move back to Mexico and wanted to sell off the business. Doolin bought the recipe, a hand-cranked potato ricer, and nineteen retail accounts for one hundred dollars, borrowed from his mother, who reportedly pawned her wedding ring to help raise it.

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Derby Dallas Review: A Kitchen That Refused to Coast on Novelty

Derby sits inside The Shop on John W. Carpenter Freeway, a private car and motorcycle club that just happens to have one of the more interesting restaurants in Dallas hiding inside it. You don’t stumble onto Derby. You have to already know it’s there, which is part of what makes the place work. From the freeway it reads like a warehouse. Inside, it’s leather banquettes, a working garage full of vintage cars visible from the dining room, and a kitchen turning out food that has no business being this good given how easily it could have coasted on novelty alone.

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Three Appetizers That Look Expensive, No Cooking Required

The best appetizers aren’t the ones with the longest ingredient lists. They’re the ones where two or three things are genuinely good and nobody got in their own way trying to do too much. Here are three that look like they came out of a real kitchen and actually take almost no skill to pull off.

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Why Don Julio Blanco Is the Only Tequila You Need This Summer

Some tequilas are built for sipping and some are built for mixing, and Don Julio Blanco happens to do both without breaking a sweat. It’s unaged, double distilled, and made from 100% blue agave, which means you get that clean agave snap up front and a dry finish that doesn’t fight with whatever you’re mixing it into. That’s exactly why it works so well behind a home bar. You don’t need six ingredients or a torch to make something worth drinking. You need good tequila and a little restraint.

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The Kurobuta Tontoro Alone Is Worth the Drive to Bite

photos by Suzi Migdol

There’s a particular restaurant type that opens quietly and gets loud through word of mouth alone, and Bite Sushi & Tapas is shaping up to be exactly that. It landed this spring inside East Dock, the new development stitching itself into the edge of Oak Cliff near Bishop Arts and Trinity Groves, and it did not arrive as a stranger.

The people behind it, chefs Ikki Wu and Mason Ho, spent years running Yume Foods, a catering operation built around Asian cuisine that quietly fed a lot of Dallas before Dallas ever had a name to put to the food. Bite is the first time they’ve built four walls around what they do.

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Cocktails, Wine, and Sunday Supper: Radici’s Summer Lineup 

Radici opened in Farmers Branch in May of 2024, and it did not take long for people to notice. Within a year, Radici Wood Fired Grill was named the No. 2 restaurant in the entire state of Texas by Texas Monthly, a wild jump for a restaurant that had only just found its footing. Now, in the middle of a Dallas summer, Chef Tiffany Derry and her T2D Concepts partner Tom Foley are adding two new events to the calendar that give a good sense of why the place has resonated the way it has.

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This Richardson Family Has Been Feeding the Same Regulars for 25 Years

There is a strip of North Plano Road in Richardson that most people drive past without a second look, and somewhere in that stretch is a restaurant that has been quietly feeding the same families for close to three decades. Grand Café doesn’t have a sign that stops traffic. It doesn’t need one. The people who eat there already know where it is.

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