Category Archives: Steven Doyle

Smokey John’s Hits 50, and the Reaves Family is Still Cooking

Fifty years ago, John Reaves wasn’t running a restaurant. He was running a roofing and construction business, and smoking turkeys and hams in his backyard as thank-you gifts for clients. The gifts got so popular he ran out of room and started storing the extras in his mother-in-law’s bathtub. A friend eventually told him he needed to just open a restaurant. In 1976, he did.

Smokey John’s Bar-B-Que and Home Cooking is still standing at 1820 W. Mockingbird Lane, and this year the family is marking half a century in business. On August 29, the restaurant is opening its parking lot and dining room for a free block party, capping a Customer Appreciation Week that runs August 24 through 29. Frost Bank is presenting the event, with support from the Mark Cuban Heroes Center and the Dallas Stars Foundation.

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6 Dallas Spots Where Summer Actually Means Something Lighter 

Montlake Cut Poke

Dallas summers don’t leave much room for a heavy plate. Once the heat sets in, the better move is something cold, something citrus-driven, something that doesn’t fight you on the way down. Here are six places actually built for that.

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Lovers Seafood’s Sunday Menu Does Double Duty as Brunch

Sunday’s at Lovers Seafood & Market run from 11 in the morning until 8 at night, one long stretch where lunch and dinner just blend into each other. That’s really brunch here, not a separate menu with a name on it, just the regular lineup served early enough that mimosas make sense with it.

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Retro Movie Review: Star Wars – A New Hope (1977)

Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope opened on May 25, 1977, written and directed by George Lucas, produced by Gary Kurtz, with a score by John Williams that did as much to define the movie’s identity as anything on screen. A desert-planet farmhand named Luke Skywalker, played by Mark Hamill, gets pulled into a galactic rebellion after a droid hides a stolen set of plans inside its memory banks. He falls in with an aging hermit named Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Alec Guinness, a smuggler named Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford, and a captured rebel leader named Princess Leia, played by Carrie Fisher.

Standing against them is Grand Moff Tarkin, played by Peter Cushing, and his enforcer, Darth Vader. The plot is simple enough to draw on a napkin. Everything interesting happens in how it’s executed.

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Gorji’s New Mediterranean Cuisine Is Unlike Anything Else in Dallas

There are only five tables at Gorji, and on any given night, each one belongs to a single party for the entire evening. Nobody else is coming in after your reservation. Nobody’s rushing the check to turn the room. That single decision says almost everything about how Mansour Gorji runs his restaurant.

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Twelve Years In, Micklethwait Craft Meats Finally Has Room to Breathe 

The smoke gets you before the building does. Turn onto Springdale Road in East Austin on a weekend morning and it’s already in the air, oak and rendered fat drifting out over the parking lot before the line even comes into view. That smell has hung over this part of the city since 2012, first out of a trailer parked in a lot on Rosewood Avenue, now out of a building that used to be a church.

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Seventy-Seven Years In, Arthur’s Steakhouse Is Still Addison’s Best-Kept Secret

There’s a version of Dallas dining that mostly disappeared decades ago, the kind with a chandelier the size of a compact car, a curtained room for the tables that want privacy, and a bandleader who knows when to bring the room down to a whisper. That Dallas still exists. You just have to drive to Addison to find it.

Arthur’s Steakhouse opened in 1948 on McKinney Avenue, back when Uptown was still just a stretch of Dallas nobody had branded yet. Arthur Bates and his wife ran it there for years, building the kind of reputation that gets a restaurant called Dallas’ first real steakhouse. Bates sold it in 1988 to Mohsen Heidari, a restaurateur who’d already run Farmer’s Grill and worked his way up through Dallas kitchens since the early ’70s. Heidari moved Arthur’s twice more, first to Central Expressway, before landing it at 15175 Quorum Drive in Addison in 2001, where it’s been ever since. Seventy-seven years, three addresses, one name that never changed.

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Metro Diner Has Been Open Every Hour Since 1964; Nobody’s Touched a Thing

It’s 3:40 in the morning on West Davis Street, and the lights are on at Metro Diner the way they’ve been on every night since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. A cook flips something on the flattop. A waitress tops off a mug for a guy in scrubs who just got off a shift at Methodist. Nobody looks up when the door opens. In Oak Cliff, that’s just Tuesday.

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