Every serious restaurant city has a handful of names that actually run the place, not just cook in it. San Antonio’s list runs deeper than most people outside Texas realize, chefs who took their own name and put it on the door instead of climbing someone else’s ladder, then kept building long after the first restaurant found its footing. Here are five of them, and what they’ve built.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Nuri Steakhouse is trying something it’s never done before: a happy hour built around more than just drinks. On Thursday, August 20, from 5 to 7 p.m., the Uptown steakhouse launches Geonbae Hour, a one-night event named for the Korean word for “cheers” that folds cocktails, food, a whisky tasting, and even a beauty consultation into a single ticket.
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Annie Hall opens with Woody Allen, as neurotic New York comedian Alvy Singer, addressing the camera directly, working through a Groucho Marx joke about never wanting to belong to a club that would have him as a member, before announcing flatly that he and Annie have broken up and he’s still trying to figure out why. From there the film abandons any pretense of a straight timeline. It jumps back to Alvy’s childhood in a house literally built under a Coney Island roller coaster, then forward through a first marriage, then to the night he meets Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton, at a Manhattan tennis club.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Maman opens its third Dallas-area location Friday, August 7, at Legacy East in Plano, marking another step in the French-inspired café’s steady expansion across North Texas since it first landed in Park Cities. The new spot joins that original location and the Lakewood café that opened in Hillside Village this spring, giving the brand a real foothold across three very different corners of the metro in under a year and a half.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The State Fair of Texas has named its finalists for the 22nd Annual Big Tex Choice Awards, presented by Karbach Brewing Company, and the field this year is the biggest it’s ever been. The contest has run since 2005, and past winners, everything from Fried Beer to Fried Peaches and Cream, have gone on to become some of the Fair’s most talked-about foods. A record 77 entries came in from 46 different concessionaires, all of them small business owners with at least two years of experience selling food at the Fair. Every recipe gets submitted with an original name and description, then goes through a blind judging process where a panel evaluates each dish with no idea which vendor made it.
From that original 77, fifteen finalists made the cut, and they’ll compete on Tuesday, August 18, in front of 35 judges, including hometown celebrities, TV personalities, and food experts, for four titles: Best Taste – Savory, Best Taste – Sweet, Best Taste – Sipper, and Most Creative. Judges score each entry on taste, value, creativity, and fairgoer appeal before the winners get crowned. Here’s what’s actually competing this year.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Ye Olde Butcher Shop sits in a Plano strip mall next to a church, and nothing about the storefront prepares you for what’s actually happening inside. The shop has been running since 1974, with the current owner taking over in the 1980s, part butcher counter, part game processor, part burger joint that regulars swear is doing the best burger in Collin County. Step through the door and you’re surrounded by red and white gingham tablecloths, antique butchery equipment, and mounted longhorn and buffalo heads watching over the dining room, the kind of unapologetic small-town Texas atmosphere that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the metro.
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Lions Den marks chef Michael White’s first restaurant in Texas, and he picked a location with real weight behind it. White has held five Michelin stars at once across his career and earned multiple three-star reviews from The New York Times, credentials that made his Dallas debut genuine news in a city that doesn’t see a chef of his caliber arrive often. The restaurant opened May 7 inside The Stoneleigh, the Uptown Dallas hotel that first opened in 1923 and just came out of a $20 million renovation under Marriott’s Autograph Collection.
White built his name running Altamarea Group and its flagship Marea in New York before launching his own hospitality company, BBianco, in 2020 with partner Bruce Bronster, opening restaurants since in Coral Gables, the Bahamas, San Juan, and New York. Lions Den is the first time that résumé has touched Texas.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The Oasis on Lake Travis started as a hamburger stand. In 1982, Houston entrepreneur Beau Theriot bought 500 acres of ranch land perched above the lake with no grander plan than a small burger joint to serve the view. More than four decades later, that idea has grown into what’s billed as the largest outdoor restaurant in the country, a sprawling, Tuscan-inspired village of terraced decks built into a cliff 450 feet above the water, with a capacity to seat as many as 2,500 people across more than 40 separate patios and dining levels.
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