Lavendou Bistro Provençal has just picked up its Wine Spectator Award of Excellence again, and the number worth sitting with is the streak behind it. This is the eleventh year in a row the North Dallas restaurant has earned the recognition, a run stretching back to 2015 that puts it in a small club of DFW restaurants that keep their wine programs sharp enough to earn the award annually rather than occasionally.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
TJ’s Seafood Market has been selling fresh fish out of the same stretch of North Dallas since 1989, and the restaurant part came second. Jon Alexis took the shop over from his parents, relocated the original location, and eventually turned both the Preston Royal spot and a second one in Oak Lawn into full restaurants built around the fish counter rather than a restaurant that happens to have one in the corner. That backstory matters at brunch, because it’s the reason you can sit down for French toast and also order a dozen oysters on the half shell without either one feeling like an afterthought.
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Order a bowl of seolleongtang anywhere in North Dallas and the first thing that hits the table isn’t the soup. It’s six or seven small plates you didn’t order, arriving before you’ve said a word past your entree. That’s banchan: a rotating set of shared side dishes, usually cold or room temperature, that come free with every meal and get refilled if you ask. Seasoned bean sprouts, braised potatoes, pickled radish, a few kinds of kimchi. They aren’t appetizers and they aren’t extras tacked onto the bill.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There’s a specific type of Dallas restaurant that never really goes out of style, the one you keep coming back to not because it’s new but because it never stopped being good. Sachet is that restaurant. located in the Shops of Highland Park on Oak Lawn Avenue, it opened in September 2017 as the second act from chef Stephen Rogers and his wife Allison Yoder, the couple behind Gemma, the Henderson Avenue restaurant that’s been one of Dallas’s most beloved dining rooms for over a decade. Where Gemma leans French and intimate, Sachet takes the same obsessive care and points it at the entire Mediterranean coast, pulling from Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, and North Africa without ever feeling scattered.
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Strouderosa BBQ started with a salsa recipe, not a smoker. Back in 2018, the founder was helping a friend run the iBBQ 4U food truck when he started experimenting with a Texas barbecue sauce that had a little more kick than what he’d grown up on. The samples went over well enough that he started canning it and handing it out to anyone who asked for more. That could have stayed a hobby indefinitely, but in January 2020 he was furloughed from his day job, and instead of waiting things out, he leaned all the way into the smoker.
What began as holiday meals for family turned into a Meals of the Week program, then catering, then a full storefront in the Lake Highlands corridor of East Dallas at 9090 Skillman Street.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There’s a version of the Perry’s story that most diners never hear, and it starts with a meat counter, not a dining room. In 1979, Bob Perry opened a small butcher shop on the south side of Houston called Perry’s Butcher Shop and Deli. It was a neighborhood operation, the kind of place people walked into for a Friday roast or a pound of ground chuck, nothing more ambitious than that. What changed the trajectory of the business was Bob’s son, Chris, who by 1986 had talked his father into adding a few tables and chairs to the shop. Customers who came in for meat started staying to eat, and what began as a butcher counter with some seating grew into Perry & Sons Market & Grille.
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There’s a particular restaurant type that opens quietly and gets loud through word of mouth alone, and Bite Sushi & Tapas is shaping up to be exactly that. It landed this spring inside East Dock, the new development stitching itself into the edge of Oak Cliff near Bishop Arts and Trinity Groves, and it did not arrive as a stranger.
The people behind it, chefs Ikki Wu and Mason Ho, spent years running Yume Foods, a catering operation built around Asian cuisine that quietly fed a lot of Dallas before Dallas ever had a name to put to the food. Bite is the first time they’ve built four walls around what they do.
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Every cheesecake that’s ever left Val’s Cheesecakes traces back to a Sunday ritual in a home kitchen. Valery “Val” Jean-Bart spent four years caring for his mother, Marie Jose Labossiere, through terminal breast cancer, and the two of them baked together every week, more than 200 sweet and savory creations over that stretch, cheesecake being her favorite. When she passed in 2012, Jean-Bart, a licensed civil engineer with no formal culinary background, had to decide what came next.
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