Pomegranates come into season here right about the time the evenings finally drop below ninety, and the two things belong together. This is a drink for that stretch, when it’s still warm enough to sit outside but the light’s going earlier every week.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Crystal Smith grew up on Georgia’s favorite brunch dish, and by 2020 she’d decided it deserved a restaurant built entirely around it. She opened the first Johnny’s Chicken and Waffles in College Park, outside Atlanta, with then-husband Ne-Yo and Love & Hip Hop’s Karlie Redd backing the idea. Six years and a handful of states later, the plates are still enormous and the waffles are still stacked with more toppings than seems reasonable. Johnny’s now has two DFW locations: Dallas, open since May 2024, and Fort Worth, open since July 2025, and both are worth the drive on an empty stomach.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Crave
The Oasis on Lake Travis started as a hamburger stand. In 1982, Houston entrepreneur Beau Theriot bought 500 acres of ranch land perched above the lake with no grander plan than a small burger joint to serve the view. More than four decades later, that idea has grown into what’s billed as the largest outdoor restaurant in the country, a sprawling, Tuscan-inspired village of terraced decks built into a cliff 450 feet above the water, with a capacity to seat as many as 2,500 people across more than 40 separate patios and dining levels.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Text the group chat, pick a starting point, and let the day figure itself out. There’s a particular kind of Saturday that starts with “let’s just grab one drink” and ends somewhere around sunset with a group photo nobody remembers taking, and Dallas has more than enough patios built for exactly that. The trick is picking a spot with room to stay a while, food worth ordering more than once, and a vibe that doesn’t crash the second the sun gets too bright to sit outside comfortably.
These five deliver on all three, whether the crew wants live music in the background, a rooftop view of downtown, or a patio small enough that everyone ends up in one conversation instead of scattered across three tables. Grab whoever’s free, don’t overthink the plan past “let’s meet at noon,” and let one of these carry the rest of the day.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Javier García del Moral and Paco Vique met as civil engineers, which is not the résumé line most people would guess for the two men behind Dallas’s most quietly influential bookstore. Both are Spanish, both landed in Texas separately, del Moral in Austin in 2008 and Vique in Dallas a year later, and both carried the same memory from home: Tipos Infames, a bookstore and wine bar in Madrid where literature and drinking shared the same room without either one feeling like an afterthought. When del Moral moved to Dallas in 2011, the two friends started planning a version of that idea for Oak Cliff, and on February 28, 2014, The Wild Detectives opened its doors in a 1940s Craftsman house on West 8th Street, just off the edge of Bishop Arts.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Dallas has always had good bars. What it has right now is something more specific — a cocktail scene that’s earning national attention, with a handful of rooms that are genuinely doing something interesting. Whether you’re looking for a statement night out, a well-made drink at a reasonable price, or a cold pint in a room with character, here’s where to go this weekend.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
