Ask a room full of Dallas people where they ate as kids and you will hear the same dozen names. Some of those places are gone. A surprising number are not.
Your grandparents may have ordered these plates on a first date. Your parents probably bribed you with them after a dentist appointment. The dining rooms have been repainted and a few have changed hands, but the food would still look familiar to anyone who sat down there in 1965.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The wind shows up before the mountains do. It comes off the Southern Patagonian Ice Field with nothing to slow it down, flattens the tall grass across the steppe, and leans on the car door hard enough that you have to push back. Then the clouds pull apart for a minute and the towers appear, three gray granite spires standing over Torres del Paine National Park, close enough that you forget how cold your hands are.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Before Torchy’s, before Velvet Taco, before every bar in town put a fried avocado on a tortilla and called it a special, there was Tin Star.
Rich Hicks opened the first one in Uptown in 1999. He’d come up through Macaroni Grill, where he was an area director at 25, and his idea was simple: take the taco seriously, put it in a fast-casual room, and charge accordingly. Brisket and queso. Pork and kimchi. A portabella taco with roasted corn and sweet potatoes that people still bring up by name. In North Texas at the time, that was a strange way to sell tacos.
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In 1986, Norma Manis sold the Oak Cliff cafe that carried her name. She had been feeding Dallas for decades by then, and the plan, as far as anyone could tell, was to finally sit down.
That plan lasted about two years.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Maman’s fall collaboration with Martha Stewart is now at all three of the chain’s North Texas cafes, and one item is on a short clock. The oatmeal raisin sandwich cookie, two chewy oatmeal cookies with golden and dark raisins and cream cheese frosting, is sold only through September 30.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
La Calle Doce opened on September 15, 1981, in a renovated house on West 12th Street in Oak Cliff. Oscar and Laura Sanchez ran it, and they served Mexican seafood at a time when most people in Dallas ordered a cheese enchilada plate and called it a night. That was 45 years ago last week. The house is still there. So is the fish soup.
The anniversary happens to fall on the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month, which gives anyone looking for an excuse a pretty good one.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Pull into the lot at Ol’ South Pancake House at three in the morning and you’ll find more cars than you’d expect. TCU students, mostly, plus whoever else in Fort Worth is up at that hour and hungry. Inside, the coffee is on and somebody at a back booth is squeezing lemon over a pancake about the size of a hubcap.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Forty-three years ago today, on September 21, 1983, a new David Mamet play opened in the smallest theater at London’s National Theatre. Seven men, two rooms, a lot of talking. Mamet had worked in a Chicago real estate office for a while in the late 1960s, and he wrote about it like someone who never quite got the smell of the place off his clothes. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the next year.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
