Francesco Farris was thirteen years old the first time he cooked for anyone other than his own family. It was New Year’s Eve, and he’d decided, the way only a thirteen-year-old can decide something like this, that he was going to make dinner for his friends. He remembered his mother’s simple pasta, just olive oil, garlic, and one long, thin chile pepper. He went to the market in Sardinia looking for that pepper. He couldn’t find one that size. So he grabbed ten of the small ones instead, figuring the math would work out.
Élephante opens its doors in Uptown Dallas on September 1, and the whole idea behind it traces back to a rock. Back in the summer of 2014, Wish You Were Here Group founder Nicholas Mathers was traveling through Pantelleria, a small volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, when he came across a natural stone formation called the Arco dell’Elefante, a shape carved by wind and water that stretches out into the sea like an elephant reaching for a drink.
That image stuck with him. It became the name, and more than that, it became the whole feeling the restaurant has spent years trying to bottle: long afternoons, unhurried food, the particular kind of ease that only shows up when nobody’s checking a watch.
Al Biernat’s is finally doing something it hasn’t done in almost thirty years: crossing over into Fort Worth. The Dallas steakhouse just signed a lease on a building at 913 Houston St., across from the Flat Iron Building and directly opposite where the city’s new Convention Center ballroom is going up. It’ll be the restaurant’s third location, and its first outside Dallas proper.
Oak & Stone is getting into the Oktoberfest spirit a little early this year, and it’s doing it with beer cheese in nearly everything. Starting September 15 and running through October 31, the McKinney restaurant is rolling out a limited-time menu built around Bavarian classics with an Oak & Stone twist, which mostly means finding new ways to work Shiner Bock and beer cheese into the lineup.
There is a certain type of night that beats dinner every time, and it doesn’t involve an entree at all. It’s the night where you and a friend claim two stools at the bar, order something small and shareable, and let a good cocktail do the rest of the talking. Nobody’s watching the clock. Nobody’s splitting a check three ways over who ordered the extra side. You just eat with your hands, sip something someone actually thought about, and let the evening go wherever it wants to go.
Dallas-Fort Worth has gotten very good at this kind of night lately. Between new openings and old standbys sharpening their bar programs, there’s no shortage of places built for exactly this pace. Here are six worth building a whole evening around, appetizer and cocktail already paired so you don’t have to think too hard about it.
In February 2016, Isaac and Lauren Hadley spent what savings they had on an old ambulance. They hauled it into Isaac’s parents’ backyard, stripped it down, and repainted it into something that no longer looked like it belonged to a hospital. What came out the other end was a food truck, and what it served was Hawaiian-style shrimp plates built on flavors the Hadleys had picked up during four years at BYU-Hawaii, where they’d fallen for the shrimp trucks lining Oahu’s North Shore.
The building at 110 W. Bailey Street in Ponder has been standing since 1903, and for most of the past 78 years it has smelled like fried chicken and hot grease. That smell is back. Ranchman’s, the small-town steakhouse that once pulled Hollywood and literary royalty off the highway, reopened the first week of July under new ownership, and the people running it went out of their way not to mess with what made it famous in the first place.
The whistle sounds before you see the smoke. Then the smoke comes, curling up over farmland that Amish families have worked for generations, and a locomotive built for a different century pulls slowly into view. This is Strasburg, Pennsylvania, home to the oldest continuously operating railroad in the country, chartered in 1832. What happens over the following days is where the real trip lives.
A word of honesty before anything else: Strasburg Rail Road is not an overnight sleeper train. The signature excursion is a 45-minute, nine-mile round trip through 2,500 acres of Lancaster County farmland, out to Paradise, Pennsylvania, and back. There are no berths, no sleeping cars, nothing resembling the Orient Express. What Strasburg offers instead is something quieter and, in its own way, harder to replicate: a working piece of American railroading history, still running on steam, still passing through the same Amish countryside it always has. Built around three days, this is everything worth knowing before you go.
