Every city needs a place where you can order hot pastrami, a bowl of matzo ball soup and a chicken-fried steak with cream gravy at the same table, and nobody blinks. In Dallas, that place is Cindi’s NY Deli.
Cindi’s calls itself one part New York neighborhood deli, one part 1950s coffee and pancake house and one part Southern mom-and-pop diner. That describes the menu, and it describes the woman behind it.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Saturday morning on Hillcrest Avenue, the drive-thru line at Bubba’s Cooks Country starts stacking up before most of University Park has had its coffee. Inside, the cinnamon rolls are already out, the biscuits are coming off the sheet pans, and somebody at the counter is asking how long until the lunch menu kicks in.
The answer is 11 a.m., and the timing is worth knowing. Bubba’s runs its breakfast menu from 6:30 to 11 every day, then switches over to fried chicken, catfish and chicken fried steak. Show up around 10:30 on a Saturday or Sunday and you can eat both, which is about as close to a weekend brunch as Bubba’s has ever gotten.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The saddles at the counter are real. Somebody wore that leather smooth a long time before you sat down, and the stools at the Old Spanish Trail in Bandera have been holding up ranch hands, bikers, dude ranch guests and road-trippers for the better part of a century. Order the chicken fried steak. Everybody does.
Locals just call it the OST. It opened in 1921 on Main Street, in a building that went up in the 1870s as a general store and later spent the 1930s and ’40s as a dance hall. The name comes from the Old Spanish Trail highway, an early coast-to-coast route meant to run from St. Augustine, Florida, to San Diego, with a stretch that carried motorists through the Hill Country. Interstate 10 eventually took the traffic. The restaurant stayed put, and today it calls itself the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Bandera County. You’ll also hear it described as the second oldest in Texas.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
In 1986, Norma Manis sold the Oak Cliff cafe that carried her name. She had been feeding Dallas for decades by then, and the plan, as far as anyone could tell, was to finally sit down.
That plan lasted about two years.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Pull into the lot at Ol’ South Pancake House at three in the morning and you’ll find more cars than you’d expect. TCU students, mostly, plus whoever else in Fort Worth is up at that hour and hungry. Inside, the coffee is on and somebody at a back booth is squeezing lemon over a pancake about the size of a hubcap.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The whole thing started because two guys couldn’t find anywhere decent to watch the World Cup.
That was 2010 in Dallas. Rich Hicks and his business partner were sitting in a Hooters when one of their employees set down his beer and said they needed a place like this, for us. Meaning for Latino sports fans. Meaning somewhere the fútbol was on the main screen instead of buried on a corner TV with the sound off.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There’s a restaurant style Dallas doesn’t make anymore, the kind with mismatched art on the walls, bottomless coffee that never seems to stop coming, and a crowd that ranges from college kids nursing a hangover to grandparents who’ve been coming since the place opened. Cafe Brazil is one of the last ones still doing it exactly right, and it’s been doing it since December 1991.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
It’s 3:40 in the morning on West Davis Street, and the lights are on at Metro Diner the way they’ve been on every night since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. A cook flips something on the flattop. A waitress tops off a mug for a guy in scrubs who just got off a shift at Methodist. Nobody looks up when the door opens. In Oak Cliff, that’s just Tuesday.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
