First-timers at Queen of Sheba all stall out at the same spot on the menu. They get through the doro wot fine. The tibs, no problem. Then they hit the spaghetti and look up, confused, because there is a full Italian section at this Ethiopian restaurant in Addison, and somebody at the table always says the same thing. Oh, that must be for people who won’t try the real food.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Olivia Genthe has been opening restaurants in Dallas neighborhoods that did not know they needed one since 2020. Fount Board & Table in Uptown. Little Blue Bistro in a 980-square-foot house in Bishop Arts. And now Seegars Deli, which opened this spring at 1910 South Harwood Street in the Cedars, next door to Mike’s Gemini Twin, a few blocks from the Dallas Farmers Market. Three concepts, three neighborhoods, the same instinct every time.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Every so often somebody opens a restaurant in Dallas that has no comparison point, nothing to measure it against, and you find yourself explaining it to friends in fragments. Punk Noir, which opened June 2 in the Design District, is one of those. Twenty courses.Multiple rooms. A Mistress of Ceremonies. Graffiti on the walls and Kaluga caviar on the plates. It should not work. Early word is that it does.
Filed under Steven Doyle
Nobody plans to eat well at an airport. You plan to survive it. But DFW has quietly built one of the better airport dining programs in the country, and if you know where to walk, a layover turns into a legitimately good meal. The trick is the Skylink train, which connects all five terminals inside security and runs every two minutes. Your gate does not have to decide your dinner. Ride to the food.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Hui Lau Shan started in the 1960s as an herbal tea stall in Yuen Long, out in Hong Kong’s New Territories, selling turtle jelly to people who believed in its medicinal powers. Nobody was thinking about mangoes. That came thirty years later, when the founder’s grandson put mango, pomelo, and sago pearls in a bowl together, and Hong Kong lost its collective mind. The chain grew to hundreds of shops. Anthony Bourdain ate there on a layover. At its peak, the company was going through a thousand tons of carabao mangoes a year.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Legal Grounds closed in 2015 and half of Lakewood acted like the world was ending. That was the coffeehouse at Abrams and Gaston where you could get a latte and free legal advice, a combination that made no sense anywhere but East Dallas. When word got out that a restaurant was going in, the neighbors did what neighbors do. They complained. Then The Heights opened, the pancakes survived the transition, and the complaining stopped almost overnight.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Dock Local finally has a date. The lobster roll operation that’s been quietly building a following out of Legacy Hall, Harvest Hall, and The Exchange will open its Dallas Farmers Market location on July 16, taking over the space Rex’s Seafood vacated back in May after eleven years on Harwood Street.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Little Daisy sits on the ninth floor of the Thompson Dallas, inside The National, and the elevator ride up is doing some of the work before you’ve ordered a single thing. Step off and the room opens into hand-drawn wallpaper covering the ceiling, martinis and bow-tied garçons sketched out in a style that leans straight into a Toulouse-Lautrec print. A baby grand piano sits ready to play itself on quiet nights and gets taken over by a live musician on the weekends. Every table gets a candle and one single daisy in a small vase, nothing fussier than that, which is exactly the point of a place trying to feel like a Paris café rather than a hotel restaurant.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
