Tag Archives: Chicken Fried Steak

The Best Chicken Fried Steak on Greenville Avenue Comes from an Italian Kitchen

Some of the best chicken fried steak in Dallas comes out of an Italian kitchen. That sounds like a setup for a joke, but anyone who has eaten at Prego Pasta House on Lower Greenville knows it is simply true.

Prego has been a Greenville Avenue fixture since September. The roots go back even further. In 1956, Joe Barraco Sr. opened a grocery store at 2919 Bryan St., part of the stretch of bakeries, markets and shops that once made up Dallas’ Little Italy. When the family moved into the restaurant business, Joe’s wife, Rose, brought her recipes with her, and many of them are still on the menu more than four decades later. It is a red-sauce house in the best sense, with garlic bread, crab claws, veal, steak pizzaiola and pastas served with a salad, the way they have been for generations.

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Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day Is October 26. Here Is Where to Start

Monday, October 26, is Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day, and yes, it is official. In 2011 the Texas House of Representatives passed House Resolution 1419, sponsored by state Rep. Ralph Sheffield of Temple, recognizing the date. The push came from Dallas hospitality veteran Jeffrey Yarbrough and singer Jimmy Baldwin, who figured a state that has a holiday for nearly everything ought to have one for its signature plate. The resolution notes that restaurants were already celebrating the second annual observance that fall, so the tradition actually started in 2010.

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Judy’s Kitchen is a Tasty Reason to Visit Garland

Start with the pie case at Judy’s Cafe. Judy bakes them every day, and on a good morning the case holds coconut cream, chocolate cream and cherry, with cakes and cobblers filling in around them. If you want a whole one, call a day or two ahead. They go.

Judy’s has been on West Campbell Road in Garland since 2014, a family-run diner that serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. The menu is where it pulls away from the pack.

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Ranchman’s Is Back in Ponder, and It Still Tastes Like 1948

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.

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Lounge Here Turns Chicken Fried Steak Into a Dinner and a Brunch Dish

Lounge Here hides behind an unmarked strip center on Garland Road, the kind of exterior that gives away nothing about what’s happening inside. Walk through the door and the room drops you into a retro cocktail lounge, all plush banquettes, moody lighting and a mural by Rainer Judd, daughter of artist Donald Judd. Owner Julie Doyle, known around Dallas for co-founding Tripping Daisy and The Polyphonic Spree and running Good Records next door, built the place to feel like a different decade entirely. The kitchen backs that ambition up with some of the more serious Southern cooking in East Dallas.

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Lufkin’s Cafe Del Rio Covers Both Sides of Texas Comfort Food

The name suggests a border town, sun-bleached and dusty, somewhere along the Rio Grande. Cafe Del Rio is actually about as far from the border as Texas gets, sitting deep in the Piney Woods of Lufkin, closer to Louisiana than to Mexico. The name misleads you before you’ve even walked in.

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Why People Drive 2 Hours to a Belton Convenience Store for Chicken Fried Steak

The best chicken fried steak in Bell County is sold next to the beef jerky rack, behind a counter that also rings up gas and lottery tickets, at a family-run convenience store called Expo Quik Stop.

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The Grapevine Restaurant Where You Eat Lunch Under a Vintage Car

There’s a Model T parked over the buffet line at Willhoite’s, and it’s not there for decoration. It’s sitting on the same hydraulic lift that used to raise real cars off the ground when this building was a working garage. You fill your plate with fried catfish and mashed potatoes underneath a car that once got serviced in that exact spot, and nobody who works there thinks that’s strange.

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