Sweet Sixteen, Dive Coastal Cuisine Is Still Snider Plaza’s Taste of the Coast

Walk into Dive Coastal Cuisine on Rankin Street on a weekday around noon and you will usually find the same scene. There’s a line at the counter, light pouring through the big front windows, and a neon sign on the back wall telling everyone to dive in. Half the room looks like it came straight from a Pilates class and the other half looks like it came from a closing in Preston Center. Nobody seems to be in a hurry to leave.

Franchesca Nor opened Dive in Snider Plaza in 2010, and it has outlasted a long list of Park Cities restaurants that arrived with more noise and left with less. It is now in its sixteenth year, still chef-owned and still run by the woman whose name is on one of the plates.

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How Kevin Carr Built Community Beer Co. Into a Dallas Institution

Long before he was pouring beer for half of North Texas, Kevin Carr was a guy with a day job in software and a homebrew setup that kept getting more serious. He’s a Dallas native who spent about 25 years starting businesses in financial services, internet technology and manufacturing. One of those was a legal software company that had him traveling constantly, and it was on those trips that he fell for craft beer. He homebrewed for more than 15 years before deciding the hobby deserved a building.

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The Role of Food and Hospitality in Poker Traditions

Dinner was built into Harry Truman’s poker afternoons in Key West. Cards usually began around 4 p.m., with dinner served at 7. Sometimes the president and his guests returned to the south porch afterward and played until midnight or later. That schedule captures something familiar about poker gatherings: the meal has its own place in the evening, giving everyone time to leave the cards and talk over food.

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Trapèze Brings a Bohemian French Brasserie to a Rebuilt Bishop Arts Bungalow

From the sidewalk on West 8th Street, the house at 240 still looks like what it is: a 1940s bungalow on a quiet block in Bishop Arts. Behind the porch, it is something else entirely now. The structure had to be rebuilt from the ground up, and because the lot sits inside a conservation district, the crew had to do it without changing the face the neighborhood has known for decades.

That house is about to become Trapèze, a French bar and restaurant from Peter Novotny and Dan Murry, the partners behind Ruins and Armoury D.E. in Deep Ellum. Their third project lands six miles southwest of the other two, and the reason has as much to do with history as real estate.

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Musume Returns to Downtown Fort Worth, and Nearly the Whole Crew Is Coming Back

Down in the lower levels of the W.T. Waggoner Building, the 20-story tower that has stood at 810 Houston St. in downtown Fort Worth since 1920, there is an old bank vault. When Musume moved in, the owners lined it with tatami and made it a private dining room. When the restaurant reopens in early November, that vault will still be there, intact, after nearly three years in which very little else down there was.

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As Knox Street Grows Up, Cafe Madrid Stays Right Where It Is

Donica Jimenez fell for Spain in a high school classroom. Her Spanish teacher at Hockaday used to come back from trips abroad with slides, and those pictures brought the country to life for her. “I fell in love with Spain before I ever went there,” Jimenez has said.

She went on to study Spanish and Iberian culture and history at SMU. In 1989 she noticed a lease sign in a window on Travis Street and did something very practical. She measured the drive from her house. It came to 1.8 miles. She wanted to stay close to home, and that was close enough. The following year she opened Cafe Madrid at 4501 Travis St., at the corner of Armstrong, one block south of Knox.

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The Chefs Behind Midcult Society Waited for It, and Now It’s Almost Here

Mike Stites and Evan Pemberton met in 2017 in Stephan Pyles’ kitchen at Flora Street Cafe. Stites had come up from Corpus Christi the year before to go to culinary school and work for Wolfgang Puck. Pemberton grew up in Dallas and already had plenty of miles on his knives. The two became friends, and over time the friendship settled into something closer to mentor and student.

In 2019 they moved to Chicago together to cook at Roister, the Alinea Group’s open-hearth restaurant in Fulton Market. A year later they went their separate ways.

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Mary’s Cafe in Strawn Still Cooks the Chicken Fried Steak People Drive Hours For

Mary’s Cafe sits on Highway 16 on the south side of Strawn, a Palo Pinto County town of about 600 people. Most days the parking lot is full of pickups and motorcycles, and the extra cars park across the road. People drive in from Fort Worth, Abilene and well beyond for one dish, the chicken fried steak.

With Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day coming up on Oct. 26, this is a good week to make the trip.

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