Category Archives: Steven Doyle

Bluebonnet & Thyme Opens, and Brunch Is the Meal to Book

Kendall Williams cooked her first Thanksgiving dinner by herself when she was thirteen. Whole meal, whole family, no help. That detail tells you more about the restaurant she just opened than anything on the menu does.

Bluebonnet & Thyme Southern Bistro & Bar is open at 2610 N. Houston St. in Victory Park, in the space that used to be Dirty Bones, right across from the arena. It’s her first brick-and-mortar after a decade of building a name in this city, and she calls the food a Cajun and Texas explosion, which is a fair description of what happens when Louisiana heritage runs into Lone Star cooking in the same kitchen.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

The Old Monk for a Bite and a Bit of Ale

The patio at the Old Monk is the best argument in Dallas for showing up somewhere with no plan. Wood benches, trees overhead, a smattering of people who each found their own reason to be out there, and a server who has seen every version of your evening and isn’t worried about it.

You sit down for one and stand up at closing. Everybody does it. Nobody minds.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Dallas Iconic Dish: Tupinamba’s Cheese Enchilada

The cheese enchilada is the plate nobody brags about. Two corn tortillas, cheese, chili gravy. Nowhere to hide. You either have it or you don’t.

Tupinamba has it, and has had it longer than almost anybody in Dallas.

The cheese enchiladas come out on a plate hot enough that the cheese is still moving. The gravy is dark and beefy with none of the flat canned taste that ruins this dish all over town, and the tortillas hold instead of dissolving. That’s the test, and most kitchens fail it.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Retro Movie Review: The Producers (2005)

Go watch it. That’s the verdict, and I’ll spend the rest of this telling you why, but I don’t want you sitting through eight paragraphs wondering whether I’m going to recommend a musical comedy about Hitler.

The Producers (2005) is a movie about two men scheming to produce the biggest flop in Broadway history. It cost forty-five million dollars and took in thirty-eight. Mel Brooks could not have written that ending himself, and God knows he tried everything else.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Naples, Florida Has the Vacation You Need

Naples in January is the reason people put up with Naples in August. Mid-seventies, no humidity, the Gulf flat and green, and a sunset every evening that empties the restaurants onto the sand for ten minutes.

That’s when the biggest resort on that stretch of beach reopens under a new name.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Ojos Locos Opens an Hour Early with New Breakfast Menu

The whole thing started because two guys couldn’t find anywhere decent to watch the World Cup.

That was 2010 in Dallas. Rich Hicks and his business partner were sitting in a Hooters when one of their employees set down his beer and said they needed a place like this, for us. Meaning for Latino sports fans. Meaning somewhere the fútbol was on the main screen instead of buried on a corner TV with the sound off.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Brunch Me Hard: Sundown at Granada

Brunch runs every day at Sundown, until three in the afternoon, and the mimosas are two dollars. On Lower Greenville in 2026, that shouldn’t be possible. It’s also not the reason to go, which surprised me.

Sundown at Granada has sat at 3520 Greenville Ave. since 2011, next door to the Granada Theater, both owned by Mike Schoder and Julia Garton. A restaurant attached to a music venue usually cooks like one. This one doesn’t, and it took a second visit to believe it.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Rodeo Goat’s “Big Tex” Burger Returns October 4 for State Fair

Look at what’s on this thing before you decide whether you’re the kind of person who orders it.

A beef patty, ground in house. A chicken fried mashed potato cake sitting on top of it, which is exactly what it sounds like and better than it has any right to be. Bacon. A fried onion ring, whole, riding the middle. And chorizo gravy over all of it, running down into whatever it can find.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle