Brownwood isn’t a place most Dallas or Fort Worth diners think to plan a trip around, but come October, it might be worth the three-hour drive. Feels Like Home Festival has announced the first wave of barbecue joints joining its third annual return on Saturday, October 3, 2026, and the lineup reads like a highlight reel of what’s happening in Texas barbecue right now, not just the usual suspects.
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Empire Baking Company started with a complaint. Meaders Ozarow and her husband, Robert, couldn’t find a real bakery in Dallas in the early 1990s, the kind that made bread the slow way instead of trucking it in from somewhere else, so in 1992 they opened one themselves in a small shop on Oak Lawn Avenue. Their own motto still sums up the founding logic better than anything a marketing team could write: we couldn’t find an artisan bakery, so we started one. More than thirty years later, it’s Dallas’s longest-running craft bakery, and neither Meaders nor Robert ever learned to bake a single loaf themselves. What they understood instead was how to find the right people and get out of their way.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There’s a version of the Perry’s story that most diners never hear, and it starts with a meat counter, not a dining room. In 1979, Bob Perry opened a small butcher shop on the south side of Houston called Perry’s Butcher Shop and Deli. It was a neighborhood operation, the kind of place people walked into for a Friday roast or a pound of ground chuck, nothing more ambitious than that. What changed the trajectory of the business was Bob’s son, Chris, who by 1986 had talked his father into adding a few tables and chairs to the shop. Customers who came in for meat started staying to eat, and what began as a butcher counter with some seating grew into Perry & Sons Market & Grille.
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In 1932, a twenty-eight-year-old confectionery manager named Charles Elmer Doolin ordered a sandwich and a nickel bag of corn chips at a small San Antonio café. He liked the chips enough to track down the man who made them, a vendor named Gustavo Olguín who was getting ready to move back to Mexico and wanted to sell off the business. Doolin bought the recipe, a hand-cranked potato ricer, and nineteen retail accounts for one hundred dollars, borrowed from his mother, who reportedly pawned her wedding ring to help raise it.
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Derby sits inside The Shop on John W. Carpenter Freeway, a private car and motorcycle club that just happens to have one of the more interesting restaurants in Dallas hiding inside it. You don’t stumble onto Derby. You have to already know it’s there, which is part of what makes the place work. From the freeway it reads like a warehouse. Inside, it’s leather banquettes, a working garage full of vintage cars visible from the dining room, and a kitchen turning out food that has no business being this good given how easily it could have coasted on novelty alone.
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The best appetizers aren’t the ones with the longest ingredient lists. They’re the ones where two or three things are genuinely good and nobody got in their own way trying to do too much. Here are three that look like they came out of a real kitchen and actually take almost no skill to pull off.
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Some tequilas are built for sipping and some are built for mixing, and Don Julio Blanco happens to do both without breaking a sweat. It’s unaged, double distilled, and made from 100% blue agave, which means you get that clean agave snap up front and a dry finish that doesn’t fight with whatever you’re mixing it into. That’s exactly why it works so well behind a home bar. You don’t need six ingredients or a torch to make something worth drinking. You need good tequila and a little restraint.
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There’s a particular restaurant type that opens quietly and gets loud through word of mouth alone, and Bite Sushi & Tapas is shaping up to be exactly that. It landed this spring inside East Dock, the new development stitching itself into the edge of Oak Cliff near Bishop Arts and Trinity Groves, and it did not arrive as a stranger.
The people behind it, chefs Ikki Wu and Mason Ho, spent years running Yume Foods, a catering operation built around Asian cuisine that quietly fed a lot of Dallas before Dallas ever had a name to put to the food. Bite is the first time they’ve built four walls around what they do.
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