Category Archives: Steven Doyle

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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Remembering The Mecca, Home of Dallas’s Most Ridiculous Cinnamon Roll

The cinnamon roll at The Mecca was roughly the size of a dinner plate, and people still bring it up more than a decade after the restaurant closed. It shut down in 2014. It’s been gone long enough now that anyone under thirty has to take the size of that roll on faith.

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Shakshuka Explained: Four Dallas Kitchens Doing It Right

Shakshuka is eggs poached in a simmering pan of tomatoes, peppers, onion, and garlic, spiced with cumin, paprika, and enough cayenne or harissa for real bite. The name comes from Arabic and roughly means “mixture” — about as literal as a dish name gets. The sauce cooks down slow until it holds its shape, then the eggs go in whole, cracked into wells carved out of the sauce, and the pan finishes under a lid or in the oven until the whites set and the yolks stay loose enough to burst at the first touch of a fork.

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The Zodiac Room’s Downtown Chapter Ends This Fall — NorthPark Picks It Up

The Zodiac Room opened on the sixth floor of the downtown Neiman Marcus flagship in April 1953, designed by New York decorator Eleanor LeMaire around a celestial theme, with signs of the zodiac worked into both the main dining room and the terrace. Stanley Marcus wanted a restaurant that would give out-of-town shoppers a reason to stay downtown longer, and for more than seven decades it did exactly that. On September 30, when the downtown store closes for good, the room closes with it. It’s a room CraveDFW has written about before, back when its future still seemed settled.

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