Summer in Dallas is not for the timid. It is hot, it is relentless, and it demands a game plan. If you are hosting a pool party this season, the smartest thing you can do is stop trying to play bartender the whole afternoon and make one great batch cocktail that does the work for you. Then fill a tray with a few things people will actually talk about. Here is our version of a proper Crave-worthy pool day.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Hendy’s on Henderson just launched its spring menu, and if your last visit was a while ago, this is a reasonable excuse to go back. The restaurant opened last summer in the former Sfuzzi space — walls knocked out, sliding glass doors installed on both sides, the whole building opened up to the patio in a way the old layout never allowed. The back room has dark green walls, brown leather seating, bookshelves, a working fireplace, and antler chandeliers. It doesn’t look like anything else on Henderson.
Chef Peja Krstic — the same Michelin Bib Gourmand chef behind Mot Hai Ba and Pillar — built the original menu. Executive Chef Fares Hussein handles the day-to-day kitchen. Together they’ve put together a spring refresh that keeps prices sensible, most dishes landing between $12 and $26.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Bill Katz flew Blackhawk helicopters for the U.S. Army for twenty years. His wife Johnnie spent twenty years in banking. They spent nine of those years overseas — Europe, Asia, moving every few years the way military families do. When Bill retired in 2001 they settled in the Dallas area, got regular jobs, and then Johnnie decided she wanted something of her own. In December 2003 they bought a sports bar on McKinney Avenue called Frankie’s. Within four years they had tripled the sales and turned it into the top sports bar in DFW.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
When Malai Kitchen opened in West Village in January 2011, the landlord pulled Braden and Yasmin Wages aside and told them he didn’t think the concept had legs. Thai and Vietnamese food in a full-service room — real cocktails, a wine list, actual service — wasn’t something Dallas had done before at this level. Opening night was dead. The two restaurants very close had lines. Malai sent staff over with drink coupons to poach customers from the wait. Fifteen years later, those restaurants are gone. Malai has four locations, its own brewery, and the landlord still comes in for dinner.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Preston Center has been missing a rooftop bar for about twenty years. CRAFT Restaurant & Beer Market showed up on April 1 and fixed that, along with a few other things the neighborhood did not know it needed.
The concept started in Calgary in 2011, built by PJ L’Heureux into nine Canadian locations before he decided Dallas was where to make the American move. His partner here is Tom Gaglardi — owner of the Dallas Stars, the man who brought Moxie’s to Dallas years ago and knows how to read this market. The two of them landed at 5974 W. Northwest Highway in the old medical office space across from the Starbucks on Kate Street, gutted it, and built a 10,500-square-foot room with a 360-degree bar at the center and 5,250 square feet of rooftop patio on top. The rooftop is one of the first of that size in Preston Center. On a clear May evening it is the best outdoor seat in this part of Dallas.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The building at 814 West Davis Street in Oak Cliff started as an automotive garage. A man named Ron Patterson eventually bought it, spent years turning it into a private room — dark, personal, built around the things he liked — and lived in the house just behind it. When Patterson died in 2021, Feargal McKinney acquired the property. He walked in, looked around, and largely left it alone. McKinney said he figured Patterson would have found a favorite stool and never left. He named the bar after himself and opened it in March 2026. That is how Kilmac’s came to exist.
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Matt Tobin and Josh Yingling were bartenders who didn’t want to become the kind of bartenders who are still pouring drinks at fifty, chain-smoking behind the stick until dawn. So, in 2011 they did what seemed like the logical alternative: they opened a bar. The difference was that this time it was theirs.
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Most places try to be one thing and do it well. Chad and Nellie Montgomery looked at that idea and went a different direction. Civil Pour at 8061 Walnut Hill Lane in Dallas is a specialty coffee shop and a 25-tap rotating craft beer bar in the same room, and the combination works better than it has any right to. It is the kind of place you go in for a morning pour-over and end up back at on a Thursday evening for a beer you have never heard of. Most regulars have done exactly that.
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