Somewhere on the menu at The Londoner, next to the burger description, sits the line that tells you everything about this place: “A burger to lose your head over.” It’s a Tower of London joke, the kind of dry British wink that could only come from a pub that named itself after a city instead of a saint or a street.
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There’s a martini for a dollar at Walloon’s next month, and the fine print is that you have to eat a dozen oysters to get there. Fair trade, honestly.
The restaurant is throwing its first Yacht Club Week starting Sunday, August 2, and the concept fits a room that was already halfway there. Chef Marcus Paslay opened Walloon’s in the summer of 2023 inside the old Fort Worth National Bank building on Magnolia Avenue, his fourth restaurant under the From Scratch Hospitality banner alongside Clay Pigeon, Piattello, and Provender Hall.
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There’s a dead man on a Vermont hillside, and nobody in this movie can be bothered to call the police. That’s the joke. It shouldn’t work. It works.
Alfred Hitchcock spent two decades getting rich off making people afraid, and then in 1955, at the absolute height of it, he made a movie about a corpse nobody can work up the nerve to be scared of. Harry turns up dead on a hillside outside a New England town so pretty it looks painted, and the whole town’s reaction amounts to a shrug and a sigh. Captain Wiles is pretty sure his rifle did it. Miss Gravely thinks it might’ve been her hiking boot. The local painter is mostly annoyed Harry’s ruining the light. Nobody screams.
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The chef at this table is six centimeters tall, made entirely of light, and better at his job than most people twice his size.
Le Petit Chef has taken over a private room at The Westin Galleria Dallas, and the premise sounds like something a five-year-old would invent and a Belgian animation studio actually built. A tiny animated chef appears on the blank white tabletop in front of you, using 3D projection mapping to turn the plate into a stage. He chops. He grills. He sails across a tropical island to fetch dessert. By the time the real food lands in front of you, you have already watched it cooked twice.
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A king walked into a strip mall on Sherman Street this summer, and the people working the counter at Khashoka still talk about it like it happened yesterday.
King Abdullah II of Jordan and Crown Prince Hussein stopped in before the Jordanian national team’s first-ever World Cup appearance, part of a swing through North Texas that put Amman’s food culture directly in front of Richardson strip-mall traffic. The restaurant’s own account of the visit calls it an honor to welcome the players who made history, and owner Mohammad Albakri has said the moment still catches him off guard when he thinks about it.
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Le Rêve has a second address in Dallas, and this one comes with a train running past the window. The gelato and pastry shop that built a following in North Dallas’s Preston Valley Shopping Center has opened at Mockingbird Station, taking over the space that closed as Milk and Honey ice cream shop last year.
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The best chicken fried steak in Bell County is sold next to the beef jerky rack, behind a counter that also rings up gas and lottery tickets, at a family-run convenience store called Expo Quik Stop.
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The Design District’s transformation into Dallas’s dinner-and-a-show corridor continues. Juliet, the Houston steakhouse built around a movie-theater fantasy, is coming to 1400 Hi Line Drive, directly next door to Delilah, with a late-summer opening targeted for August.
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