55 Seventy continues its 2026 Guest Chef Series on Monday, May 4 with David Uygur, chef-owner of Lucia. The dinner is members-only and limited in size.
Lucia has a long-standing reputation in Dallas for a tightly run kitchen built on house-made pastas, whole-animal butchery, and a menu that changes with product availability. Reservations there are consistently difficult to secure, which makes an off-site dinner like this relatively rare.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Farmers market season is back, and with it the question every Dallas cook eventually asks: which one is actually worth the Saturday morning. There are dozens of markets in the metroplex, and they are not all the same thing. Some are real producer-only markets where everything sold has to be grown, raised, or made by the person selling it. Others are flea-market hybrids where the produce is mostly resold from a wholesaler and the real action is the soaps and candles. Both have their place. They are not the same place.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
The cocktail party that works is the one that does less than it should. Twelve passed bites do not work. Three signature cocktails do not work. A sit-down menu pretending to be a cocktail party does not work. What works is five small things you can pick up with one hand, one good drink already poured into a pitcher, a bowl of nice olives somewhere visible, and a host who actually shows up to her own party instead of disappearing into the kitchen for the first hour.
That is the whole formula. People come to a cocktail party to talk to each other. The food is there to keep nobody from getting drunk on an empty stomach, the drink is there to give them something to hold, and the host is there to keep the room moving. Nothing else.
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Omar Flores has another one coming. Maroma, the latest project from Big Dill Hospitality and the Marshi family, opens Monday, May 4 in the Design District at 1333 Oak Lawn Avenue, on the ground floor of the new Thirteen Thirty Three Building. The premise is coastal Mexican cooking — ceviches, aguachiles, raw bar, mesquite-grilled meats — done with the kind of restraint Flores has been known for since his Driftwood and Whistle Britches years.
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Five years ago, Wagyu in Dallas meant a $42 burger at one steakhouse and a footnote on a tasting menu somewhere in the Design District. Today it is on the menu at a Korean omakase room that flies A5 in from Japan six days a week, on a chicken-fried steak in East Dallas, on a wood-fired tasting counter in a ten-seat dining room, and on a double-patty smashburger across the street from a skate shop. The word has gone from a flag of expense to a working ingredient that Dallas chefs use for actual reasons. That is a real shift, and it is worth paying attention to as a home cook, because it changes what a good steak night at home should look like.
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Duck is having a moment. Walk through any half-dozen new Dallas menus in 2026 and you will find duck showing up where it was not showing up five years ago — in confit on brunch plates, in kebab form next to flatbread, sliced over grilled endive, glazed and hung in the window of a dumpling shop, served whole on a sharing plate at the most-talked-about new restaurant in town. Chicken is still king. Beef is still beef. But duck has quietly moved up the menu in a way that says something about where Dallas dining is going.
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The drive-in almost disappeared. Texas had nearly four hundred of them in the nineteen-fifties, more than any state in the country, and now there are fewer than twenty. The ones that survived did it on stubbornness, mostly — family-owned places that never stopped believing a warm night and a big screen and a car full of people was a good way to spend a Friday. Some of them have been running the same single screen since 1948. Some have expanded into four and seven screens. They all still tune to FM radio for the sound. They all still sell popcorn that tastes better than it has any right to. And every one of them is worth the drive from Dallas for a weekend.
Here are the five I would point you toward, from the closest one to the furthest.
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You know a brunch spot is working when the valet is full, the front patio is full, and nobody at any of the tables seems in a hurry to leave. That is Beverley’s Bistro & Bar on a Saturday around noon. The food is the reason, but the mood is why people stay. A couple at the bar splitting a plate of caviar latkes and not saying much because they do not need to. A family of six crammed into a corner booth with three kinds of eggs between them. Somebody at the next table ordering a second glass of prosecco before their plates have been cleared. You walk in and you feel like you just showed up at a party that was already going.
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