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
The smartest State Fair days do not start at the gate. They start a few minutes away, across I-30 in the Mount Auburn neighborhood, with lunch at Kalachandji’s.
There is a logic to it. The next six hours are going to be fried, battered, dipped, sugared and served on a stick. A plate of dal, rice and fresh vegetables first is less about virtue than about pacing. It also happens to be one of the most peaceful rooms in the city.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Oktoberfest is underway in Munich, a good excuse to point out that Dallas has had its own German kitchen for 65 years. It is in Snider Plaza, and it is called Kuby’s Sausage House.
By Dallas standards, 1961 is ancient. By the family’s standards, it is recent. In 1728, Friedrich Kuby opened a meat market in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and the recipes passed from father to son for generations. “The original one was bombed in ’44,” Karl Kuby Sr. has said. “It was wiped out.”
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The kouign-amann has been Sugar & Sage Bakery’s calling card since the mother-daughter team of Alison and Ashley Weinstein opened on Lovers Lane in 2023. Now it is doing double duty as a sandwich.
The Cristo Amann is the bakery’s take on a Monte Cristo, and it started the way good ideas in a kitchen usually do, with everyone bringing something to the table. Executive chef Jill Bates, who led pastry at Fearing’s at the Ritz-Carlton before joining the Weinsteins, says it came out of a collaboration party where the whole team pitched ideas. “We made sandwiches, brought sammies and ideas,” she said. From there she kept working on it and sampling it for guests until it was ready.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Start with the pie case at Judy’s Cafe. Judy bakes them every day, and on a good morning the case holds coconut cream, chocolate cream and cherry, with cakes and cobblers filling in around them. If you want a whole one, call a day or two ahead. They go.
Judy’s has been on West Campbell Road in Garland since 2014, a family-run diner that serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. The menu is where it pulls away from the pack.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
