The fog is still sitting on the water at seven in the morning, and the pier disappears into it about halfway out. A man in waders walks the tide line with a bucket, looking for clams the way people here have for a hundred years. By ten the fog burns off, the pier reappears all 1,200 feet of it, and the smell of butter and clam broth starts drifting up Pomeroy Avenue.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Smokey John’s Bar-B-Que and Home Cooking turns fifty this year, and the story of how it got here is better than most restaurants could invent.
It starts with a mortgage broker. In the mid-seventies, John Reaves was juggling home loans, roofing, construction, and insurance businesses around Dallas, and every holiday season he thanked his clients with hickory-smoked turkeys and hams he cured himself. The gesture got out of hand in the best possible way. People started asking for them year-round. At one point the family had more than a hundred turkeys and hams stacked in the house waiting for pickup. A friend finally told him the obvious. You need to open a restaurant.
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There is no sign outside Shi-Ya. You walk into Meat Point, the kosher steakhouse that has held down its stretch of Campbell Road since 2014, take an immediate right, and suddenly you are somewhere else. Sage green club chairs. Gold-rimmed tables. A small marble bar pouring Japanese whisky and sake. The unmarked entrance is no accident, and neither is anything else about the room.
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First-timers at Queen of Sheba all stall out at the same spot on the menu. They get through the doro wot fine. The tibs, no problem. Then they hit the spaghetti and look up, confused, because there is a full Italian section at this Ethiopian restaurant in Addison, and somebody at the table always says the same thing. Oh, that must be for people who won’t try the real food.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Olivia Genthe has been opening restaurants in Dallas neighborhoods that did not know they needed one since 2020. Fount Board & Table in Uptown. Little Blue Bistro in a 980-square-foot house in Bishop Arts. And now Seegars Deli, which opened this spring at 1910 South Harwood Street in the Cedars, next door to Mike’s Gemini Twin, a few blocks from the Dallas Farmers Market. Three concepts, three neighborhoods, the same instinct every time.
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Every so often somebody opens a restaurant in Dallas that has no comparison point, nothing to measure it against, and you find yourself explaining it to friends in fragments. Punk Noir, which opened June 2 in the Design District, is one of those. Twenty courses.Multiple rooms. A Mistress of Ceremonies. Graffiti on the walls and Kaluga caviar on the plates. It should not work. Early word is that it does.
Filed under Steven Doyle
Nobody plans to eat well at an airport. You plan to survive it. But DFW has quietly built one of the better airport dining programs in the country, and if you know where to walk, a layover turns into a legitimately good meal. The trick is the Skylink train, which connects all five terminals inside security and runs every two minutes. Your gate does not have to decide your dinner. Ride to the food.
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Hui Lau Shan started in the 1960s as an herbal tea stall in Yuen Long, out in Hong Kong’s New Territories, selling turtle jelly to people who believed in its medicinal powers. Nobody was thinking about mangoes. That came thirty years later, when the founder’s grandson put mango, pomelo, and sago pearls in a bowl together, and Hong Kong lost its collective mind. The chain grew to hundreds of shops. Anthony Bourdain ate there on a layover. At its peak, the company was going through a thousand tons of carabao mangoes a year.
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