Dallas has always had good bars. What it has right now is something more specific — a cocktail scene that’s earning national attention, with a handful of rooms that are genuinely doing something interesting. Whether you’re looking for a statement night out, a well-made drink at a reasonable price, or a cold pint in a room with character, here’s where to go this weekend.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
If you are going to spend a Saturday afternoon in Dallas in July, you want shade, something cold in your hand, food that encourages you to stay, and a room that doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard. Paradiso in Bishop Arts checks every one of those boxes and then keeps going.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Halcyon has been doing its thing at 2900 Greenville Avenue long enough that it’s become part of the Greenville Avenue furniture — a coffee bar, full bar, all-day café, and weekend brunch room that somehow covers every hour of the day without losing its identity. It started in Austin in 2002, expanded to San Antonio, and landed on Greenville with the same formula: serious espresso, a full cocktail program, food that goes further than the room suggests, and an atmosphere that works equally well for a solo laptop afternoon or a table of six who’ve been talking about brunch since Thursday.
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The Cortez family already has a Michelin recommendation. Two of them, back to back, in 2024 and 2025, for a taqueria on East Rosedale that does one thing and does it as well as anywhere in Texas. Now they’re opening a second restaurant, and if the first one is any indication of how they operate, Fort Worth should pay close attention.
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About four hours south of Dallas, in a bend of the Texas Hill Country where limestone cliffs and centuries-old cypress trees hang over cold, clear water, the Guadalupe River has been the answer to a Texas summer for as long as anyone can remember. The stretch between Gruene and New Braunfels is the most popular tubing corridor in the state — a million people float it annually — and the 4th of July weekend is when that number becomes very real, very quickly. Book everything in advance. Show up early. Then get in the water and forget you were ever hot.
There is something about cold water in July that resets everything. The Guadalupe runs spring-fed out of the Hill Country limestone and stays genuinely cold regardless of what the air temperature does, and the moment you slide off the bank and into the current, the afternoon reorganizes itself around the only thing that matters: getting downstream slowly, under the cypress trees, past the rope swings and the limestone banks, with no particular plan and nowhere to be. The river moves at its own pace and takes you with it.
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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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Sergio Quijano grew up in Mexico City and worked his first job at a place called Dulcería El Metro — a candy shop near one of the city’s subway stations, which is where the name of his restaurant comes from. Not just the subway iconography covering the walls, though that’s there too, the colorful maps and signage of the Sistema de Transporte Colectivo rendered as decor in a Northwest Dallas strip center on Walnut Hill Lane. It comes from something more personal than that — a first job, a city, a specific kind of memory about where food fits into a life.
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Chef Tiffany Derry and Tom Foley are hosting the Annual Crawfish Boil at Roots Southern Table on Sunday, June 28, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. — and if you know anything about what Sunday afternoons look like at this restaurant in Farmers Branch, you already know this is worth clearing your calendar for.
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