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.
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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.
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J. Rae’s is coming home. The bakery, known across North Texas for its hand-decorated sugar cookies, opens its new Fort Worth location on Thursday, July 16 at 3330 West 7th Street, and the address is no accident. The original J. Rae’s opened on West 7th in 2008, which makes this less an expansion than a homecoming, right down to the street.
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Le Rêve has a second address in Dallas, and this one comes with a train running past the window. The gelato and pastry shop that built a following in North Dallas’s Preston Valley Shopping Center has opened at Mockingbird Station, taking over the space that closed as Milk and Honey ice cream shop last year.
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There is a small building on Blackwell Street, just off Northwest Highway by the Half Price Books, that has been quietly doing things the right way for over fifty years. Henk’s European Deli & Black Forest Bakery was founded by a Dutch immigrant named Henk, and his sons and daughter — Hanneke, who has been described by more than one regular as one of the finest servers in Dallas — still run it today. The tagline on the website says “A little bit of Amsterdam in Dallas.” That is not a stretch.
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Before Carlos Branger opened a restaurant, he threw dinner parties. He’d moved to Texas from the Andean region of Venezuela, near the Colombian border, and when friends came over he cooked the things he grew up eating — arepas stuffed with shredded beef, cachapas rolled off the griddle, queso blanco, the family recipes he’d carried north like a piece of luggage. The food disappeared before the evening did, and people kept asking where they could get more of it.
Dallas had Tex-Mex on every corner and excellent taquerias in every neighborhood, but the food of Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, and the Caribbean islands was essentially nowhere. On May 9, 2002, Branger opened Zaguán Latin Café and Bakery at 2604 Oak Lawn Avenue, and the dinner party never really stopped.
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The team behind Mamani earned a Michelin star 48 days after opening. That’s not a typo. Forty-eight days. Brothers Brandon and Henry Cohanim built Feels Like Home Hospitality with a talent-scouting instinct that has been almost unsettling in its accuracy — they recruited Paris-born chef Christophe De Lellis, formerly of Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas, to run Mamani’s kitchen, and bar director Rubén Rolón, whose cocktail program at Bar Colette was nominated for Best New Bar by the James Beard Foundation.
When people who know Dallas dining tasted the bread service at Mamani — a rotating selection of freshly baked loaves served with Rodolphe Le Meunier butter flown in from France — the question wasn’t whether a bakery was coming. It was when.
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There is a pastry that launched a bakery. Not a concept, not a business plan — a single bite of kouign-amann at a New York patisserie that Alison Weinstein and her teenage daughter Ashley shared years ago, looked at each other across the table, and decided that Dallas needed one. That moment is how Sugar and Sage Bakery came to exist at 4314 Lovers Lane in University Park, and the kouign-amann is still the reason to go.
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