Every serious restaurant city has a handful of names that actually run the place, not just cook in it. San Antonio’s list runs deeper than most people outside Texas realize, chefs who took their own name and put it on the door instead of climbing someone else’s ladder, then kept building long after the first restaurant found its footing. Here are five of them, and what they’ve built.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Ye Olde Butcher Shop sits in a Plano strip mall next to a church, and nothing about the storefront prepares you for what’s actually happening inside. The shop has been running since 1974, with the current owner taking over in the 1980s, part butcher counter, part game processor, part burger joint that regulars swear is doing the best burger in Collin County. Step through the door and you’re surrounded by red and white gingham tablecloths, antique butchery equipment, and mounted longhorn and buffalo heads watching over the dining room, the kind of unapologetic small-town Texas atmosphere that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the metro.
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Charlie’s Creole Kitchen has been serving Cajun and Creole food on Lower Greenville since 1989, longer than almost anything else on that stretch of Greenville Avenue, and for most of that history it wasn’t called Charlie’s at all. Owner Charlie McGuinness, a New Orleans transplant, opened the restaurant as Dodie’s, naming it after the childhood nickname of his son, Chris. For nearly three decades, Dodie’s built a loyal following on Cajun classics served under checkered tablecloths and a ceiling of beer signs and crawfish decorations, the kind of place families claimed as their own for a birthday dinner or a random Tuesday.
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Kreuz Market sits in Lockhart, a town of roughly 15,000 people about thirty minutes southeast of Austin that has somehow earned the unofficial title of Barbecue Capital of Texas. The market’s own history stretches back to 1875, when Jesse Swearingen opened the town’s first meat market. Charles Kreuz Sr. bought it in 1900 and put his name on it, and by 1948 the business had passed to a longtime butcher named Edgar Schmidt, whom everyone called Smitty.
For decades under Smitty and later his sons, Kreuz Market did one thing and did it without apology: meat smoked over post oak, sliced and served on butcher paper, no sauce, no forks, no sides beyond crackers, pickles, and onions.
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Rodeo Goat’s in-house “Battle of the Burger” competition heats up in August with the return of the popular “Hatch Me if You Can” burger battling the spicy “Radio G.O.A.T.” through August 26.
White cheddar Hatch chile queso, tortilla strips, roasted Hatch green chiles, bronzed onions and avocado ranch on a brioche bun makes the Hatch Me If You Can an all-time favorite ($12.99). The over-the-top Radio G.O.A.T. features a beef patty, double pepper jack, roasted green chiles, prickly pear BBQ sauce, cactus fries and micro cilantro ($13.99).
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Text the group chat, pick a starting point, and let the day figure itself out. There’s a particular kind of Saturday that starts with “let’s just grab one drink” and ends somewhere around sunset with a group photo nobody remembers taking, and Dallas has more than enough patios built for exactly that. The trick is picking a spot with room to stay a while, food worth ordering more than once, and a vibe that doesn’t crash the second the sun gets too bright to sit outside comfortably.
These five deliver on all three, whether the crew wants live music in the background, a rooftop view of downtown, or a patio small enough that everyone ends up in one conversation instead of scattered across three tables. Grab whoever’s free, don’t overthink the plan past “let’s meet at noon,” and let one of these carry the rest of the day.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Kostas Lazanas describes himself as half Greek and half redneck, and that combination turns out to be exactly what Rowlett needed. He grew up training under Charlie Venetis at Opa Grille as a kid, spent years working the floor and the kitchen at other Greek restaurants around Dallas, and in 2013 finally opened a place of his own on Lakeview Parkway, a space that used to be a Chinese restaurant. He picked the name for what it means, not for any connection to the place he trained, and thirteen years later it’s still one of the most reliably good Greek kitchens in the eastern suburbs.
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The building at 9812 Camp Bowie West Blvd. has already played a restaurant on television. It was the Patch Cafe on Taylor Sheridan’s “Landman,” the Paramount+ series with Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Hamm, and Demi Moore, filmed on location in the Westland Shopping Center before the crew packed up and left the storefront empty again. Now it’s becoming an actual restaurant, and the family behind it already runs one of the most recognized names in Fort Worth hospitality.
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