Dallas has one of the most serious Korean dining corridors in Texas, centered on Royal Lane in the Asian Trade District but spreading well beyond it. The food is specific and regional and worth understanding before you order. Here are the dishes that matter most and where to find the best version of each.
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Todd and Misty David started Cattleack Barbeque in 2010 as something to do in retirement. That plan did not survive contact with the public. Word got out, lines formed, and what was supposed to be a quiet hobby turned into one of the most decorated barbecue operations in North Texas. In 2023, Todd sold the business to Andrew Castelan, a 34-year-old former accountant who had been working there long enough to know what he was getting into. The name is a pun on Cadillac.
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The menu at Taste Community Restaurant has no prices on it. That is not an oversight. It is the entire idea.
Chef Jeff Williams and his wife Julie opened Taste on December 5, 2017, at 1200 S. Main Street on Fort Worth’s Near Southside — the city’s largest food desert — with a straightforward premise: pay what you can, pay what you want, or pay nothing at all. Nobody is turned away. Nobody is asked to explain themselves. You walk in, you order, you eat, and you leave whatever feels right.
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A year ago on July 4th, at 3:30 in the morning, Blair and Brooke Harber sent a text message to their parents. It said: “I love you.” A short time later, the two sisters — Blair, 13, and Brooke, 11 — were swept away by the Guadalupe River as catastrophic floodwaters tore through Hunt, Texas. Their grandparents, Mike and Charlene Harber, were lost in the same waters. When rescuers found Blair and Brooke the following day, fifteen miles downriver, their hands were locked together.
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Justin Fourton grew up going to his grandfather’s ranch in Abilene — a place called Pecan Lodge. The old man taught him how to build a fire, how to manage a smoker, and how to wait. That last part turns out to be the most important. Good barbecue is a function of patience more than almost anything else, and the brisket that comes out of Pecan Lodge in Deep Ellum is eighteen hours of patience made edible.
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Sean Jett grew up a few blocks from where his pie shop now sits. That detail matters more than it might seem to, because Humble: Simply Good Pies doesn’t read like a concept dreamed up by a consultant trying to chase a trend. It reads like a guy who grew up near White Rock Lake and decided the neighborhood needed a place that made pie the way his family always told him pie should be made — from scratch, with real butter, without apology for taking longer than it needs to.
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In 1908, cotton magnate Sheppard W. King and his wife Bertha Wilcox went to Europe and came home with a vision. They wanted a house unlike anything in Dallas — something palatial, something European, something that would stop people cold. They traveled with their architect, collecting antique pieces and authentic fixtures from across the continent. When they built on Turtle Creek Boulevard, they built accordingly.
The result was a Mission Revival manor that became the social epicenter of Dallas almost immediately. President Franklin Roosevelt dined there. Tennessee Williams visited. The house was, as they say in that world, important.
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At some point in the last hundred years, someone decided that two enchiladas, a crispy taco, a scoop of rice, and a ladle of refried beans constituted a complete meal, put it on a plate, and charged you a fixed price for the whole thing. Half the country has been ordering that plate ever since without once asking where it came from. The answer is Texas, and the story is more interesting than the plate.
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