Eddie Cervantes has been feeding Dallas Tex-Mex since 1981. He opened Primo’s Bar & Grill on McKinney Avenue in 1986 and built it into one of the most loved Tex-Mex cantinas the city has ever had — where locals, chefs, and the occasional celebrity would end up on a Tuesday night over meltdown margaritas and a bowl of queso that nobody wanted to stop eating. Primo’s ran for years. People still bring it up.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Queso is not a side dish in North Texas. It is a belief system. Dallas and Fort Worth have been arguing about it for decades — what goes in it, what goes on top of it, whether it should be served in a bowl or rolled into a tortilla, whether Velveeta is a shortcut or a tradition worth defending. Both cities are right about different things, and both cities have places that the other side has never heard of. What follows is not a ranking of the obvious names. You already know Torchy’s. You already know what you think about El Fenix. This is the list you bring up when the table needs a real conversation — four Dallas bowls and four Fort Worth bowls that hold up under any scrutiny, from the ones that have been doing it since before you were born to the one that does it entirely without dairy and gets away with it.
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Patio season is a real thing in Dallas and it does not last long. By late May the sun starts to win, and by mid-June most of us are hiding indoors until October. That leaves a narrow window where eating outside is genuinely one of the better things you can do with your day, and the question is not really which patio has the best food. The food at a good patio is almost a footnote. What matters is whether the place matches what you are actually trying to do that afternoon or evening.
A first date needs one kind of space. A birthday with twelve people needs another. A long lunch with a friend who has news to tell you needs a third. Here are five patios I keep going back to, sorted by the thing you are actually there for.
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Shell Shack is opening a new Arlington location on April 27 at 4000 Five Points Blvd., Suite 101, with hours running daily from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. It’s the brand’s second location in Arlington, joining the existing spot at Lincoln Square.
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Bishop Arts gets the press. It gets the food tourists, the Instagram posts, the out-of-town write-ups that call it charming and walkable and full of independent spirit. All of that is true. But a few blocks away, running parallel and older and considerably less interested in your approval, is Jefferson Boulevard — and it has been feeding Oak Cliff longer than most of those Bishop Arts restaurants have been alive.
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Dallas and Fort Worth have never had a shortage of great burgers. What they do have is a shortage of people writing about the ones that aren’t already on every list. Here are seven worth knowing about — five in Dallas, two in Fort Worth — that run the full range from a 1950s drive-in to a Choctaw-owned window in the Stockyards.
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Addison already has one of the best Oktoberfests in Texas. This fall, it gets something to match year-round.
Hofbräu Pub, the American offshoot of Munich’s legendary Hofbräuhaus, has announced its first Texas location will open in Addison this fall. The brewery behind it has been around since 1589, and its beer has been brewed to the same Purity Law since 1516 — water, barley malt, and hops. Nothing else. No shortcuts, no watermelon seltzers.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Dallas has quietly produced one of the most interesting careers in American barbecue, and now the rest of the country is about to find out. Tim McLaughlin, chef-pitmaster and founder of Crossbuck BBQ in Farmers Branch, will compete on Food Network’s BBQ Brawl when Season 7 premieres on May 11 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. Episodes stream the following day on HBO Max.
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