Tag Archives: Chef

Austin’s MML Hospitality Is Coming to Dallas Six Restaurants Deep

Austin’s MML Hospitality spent years eyeing Dallas. Now it’s here, and it has a list.

The company is run by Larry McGuire, Tom Moorman and hotelier Liz Lambert. McGuire and Moorman opened their first Austin restaurant, Lamberts, in 2006. Today MML runs more than 25 properties in Austin, including the Michelin-recommended Jeffrey’s, plus hotels in New York and New Orleans and restaurants in Houston, Aspen and California.

McGuire has laid out the Dallas plan in order. Neighborhood Sushi comes first, then June’s All Day, then Clark’s Oyster Bar, then three Swedish Hill bakeries. That’s six restaurants in under 18 months, and he has said this could be the group’s last big expansion push.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Iconic Dallas Dish: Mia’s Brisket Tacos

Back in the early ’90s, the best thing at Mia’s Tex-Mex wasn’t on the menu. You had to know to ask for it, you had to come on a Wednesday, and you had to get there before it ran out.

Today it has a name, Butch’s Original Brisket Tacos, and it’s the dish Mia’s is known for all over Dallas.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Ham, Gruyère and Fig Chili Jam: Inside Sugar & Sage’s New Cristo Amann

The kouign-amann has been Sugar & Sage Bakery’s calling card since the mother-daughter team of Alison and Ashley Weinstein opened on Lovers Lane in 2023. Now it is doing double duty as a sandwich.

The Cristo Amann is the bakery’s take on a Monte Cristo, and it started the way good ideas in a kitchen usually do, with everyone bringing something to the table. Executive chef Jill Bates, who led pastry at Fearing’s at the Ritz-Carlton before joining the Weinsteins, says it came out of a collaboration party where the whole team pitched ideas. “We made sandwiches, brought sammies and ideas,” she said. From there she kept working on it and sampling it for guests until it was ready.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Ethnic Dish Explained: Vitello Tonnato, The Italian Veal and Tuna Dish, and Where to Find It in Dallas

vitello tonnato

Across Piazza Carignano in Turin, the brick facade of Palazzo Carignano ripples like a curtain in a breeze. The first Parliament of a unified Italy met behind those walls. Directly across the square sits Del Cambio, which opened its doors on October 5, 1757, and has been feeding the city ever since.

Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, the statesman who did more than anyone to stitch Italy together, was a regular here, seated with a view of the Parliament across the way. The Risorgimento room has been carefully restored and still carries its 19th-century bearing, and the original parquet creaks under every step.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Five Dallas Burgers for National Cheeseburger Day, From Two Dollars to Twenty-Nine

Today is National Cheeseburger Day, which is a real, official, calendar-sanctioned holiday, and also an excuse nobody needs twice. Dallas doesn’t have one burger. It has about forty of them, spread across every zip code and every price point, from a couple of bucks at a drive-in that hasn’t changed since Eisenhower to something you’d genuinely think twice about ordering unless someone else is paying. Here are five, cheapest to most ridiculous.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Willow Bend Is Closing, These Two Restaurants Aren’t Going Anywhere

Willow Bend closed for good on August 31. Nearly every store handed over its keys that day, and most of what’s left inside is headed for the wrecking ball to clear space for a $3 billion redevelopment that could someday include a Dallas Stars arena. Two restaurants stayed behind anyway. Knife Steakhouse and Mexican Bar Company are still open, still serving dinner, inside a mall that’s on its way to being demolished around them.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Crave, Steven Doyle

DIFFA Dallas’ 17th Annual Burgers + Burgundy Returns October 1

Seventeen years is a long run for anything in Dallas dining, and DIFFA Dallas brings Burgers + Burgundy back on Thursday, October 1, on the Glen Lawn at The Village Dallas. John Tesar built the thing and still hosts it. The setup hasn’t changed much either. Chefs take stations on a lawn, each one builds a burger, the wine keeps coming, and the money goes to organizations doing HIV/AIDS work across North Texas.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

The Best $10 Happy Hour Burgers in Dallas Right Now

Happy hour burgers have a bad reputation, and most of them earn it. A restaurant slaps a discount on a sad, dry patty for two hours a day and calls it a deal. You end up paying half price for something you wouldn’t order at full price either.

That’s not what’s happening at the five places below. There’s a difference between a bar burger going cheap and a real restaurant discounting the same burger it serves all night, made the same way, by the same kitchen, just priced lower for a stretch of the afternoon. These are the second kind. And sometimes only a great burger will hit the spot.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Crave, Steven Doyle