Omar Flores grew up in El Paso helping his father run family restaurants. Not as a dishwasher, not clearing plates — actually in the kitchen, learning how things worked from the time he was old enough to hold a knife. That early start shaped everything that came after.
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Dock Local, the premium casual coastal cuisine concept founded by Chef Brett Curtis, is expanding its Dallas footprint with a highly anticipated new location at the Dallas Farmers Market opening Summer 2026. This marks the fourth DFW location for Dock Local and the fifth location nationwide (one other location in Nashville). The brand will introduce its signature East Coast–inspired seafood dishes and genuine hospitality to one of the city’s most frequented culinary hubs.
Known for delivering fresh, high-quality seafood in landlocked markets, Dock Local has built a loyal following across Dallas-Fort Worth and in Nashville.
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Jeff Bekavac opened Goodwins in May 2024 in the old Blue Goose space on Greenville. He named it after the cross street. He’s been in Dallas kitchens for years — Neighborhood Services, Cane Rosso — and this is his first real shot at doing it his own way. The room is warm, the bar is brass, the back bar is darker and better for a martini. It fills up fast on weekends and most weeknights aren’t far behind.
Filed under Steven Doyle
Wyl Lima grew up in Keene, Texas, which is not a place most people have heard of. It’s a small town built around Southwestern Adventist University, a school that draws students from over a hundred countries. Lima was born in Angola, moved to Texas at ten, and spent his formative years eating food that had nothing to do with what was on most Dallas menus — flavors from Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, South America, all of it cycling through a neighborhood that looked nothing like it from the outside.
He went to Chicago to learn technique. Michelin-starred Temporis, where he worked as chef de cuisine, gave him the structure. What he’d grown up eating gave him the instinct. When he came back to Dallas, first at Sister and then at The Charlotte, those two things finally got to work together in the same kitchen.
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Wan Kim knows both ends of the dining spectrum. He runs Smoothie King, a chain with over a thousand locations worldwide. He also built Nuri Steakhouse in Uptown Dallas — a $20 million Korean steakhouse that the Wall Street Journal named one of three in the country worth splurging on, and one of two Dallas restaurants to land on the World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants list in 2025. The man operates at a very high level regardless of the price point. That context matters when you’re trying to understand what Flock & Fresh actually is.
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Most Oak Lawn restaurants don’t make it to their fifth year. Parigi just hit 42. Not coasting on nostalgia, not trading on a legacy — actually cooking, actually full, actually relevant. That doesn’t happen without someone very good at the wheel.
Janice Provost was selling long-distance service in the late 1980s and early ’90s, cold-calling businesses across Dallas and Fort Worth, working her way up through a telecom career she was good at but never loved. The problem wasn’t the work ethic. It was that she’d close a deal and then lose control of the outcome. The product went out the door and what happened next was somebody else’s problem. After twelve years, she was done.
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Tiffany Derry’s Radici Wood Fire Grill has been one of the more interesting stories in DFW dining since it opened — an Italian concept built around a wood-fired grill, handmade pastas, and a chef who has never been shy about folding Texas into everything she does. May is a good month to pay attention to what both locations are doing.
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There is a restaurant in Denton called Osteria Il Muro with 22 seats, a backyard garden, and a menu that changes every single day. It is one of the hardest reservations in North Texas. People set calendar alarms for the last Monday of each month — the one morning the next month’s tables are released — and still don’t always get in.
The chef who runs it is a James Beard finalist for Best Chef: Texas. His name is Scott Girling. Most of Dallas has never heard of him.
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