Every city needs a place where you can order hot pastrami, a bowl of matzo ball soup and a chicken-fried steak with cream gravy at the same table, and nobody blinks. In Dallas, that place is Cindi’s NY Deli.
Cindi’s calls itself one part New York neighborhood deli, one part 1950s coffee and pancake house and one part Southern mom-and-pop diner. That describes the menu, and it describes the woman behind it.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Saturday morning on Hillcrest Avenue, the drive-thru line at Bubba’s Cooks Country starts stacking up before most of University Park has had its coffee. Inside, the cinnamon rolls are already out, the biscuits are coming off the sheet pans, and somebody at the counter is asking how long until the lunch menu kicks in.
The answer is 11 a.m., and the timing is worth knowing. Bubba’s runs its breakfast menu from 6:30 to 11 every day, then switches over to fried chicken, catfish and chicken fried steak. Show up around 10:30 on a Saturday or Sunday and you can eat both, which is about as close to a weekend brunch as Bubba’s has ever gotten.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Plenty of people who live in Frisco have never walked its Main Street. The city spread north and west so fast that the original townsite, the handful of blocks around the railroad tracks now known as the Frisco Rail District, can feel like something only the old-timers know about.
A lot of those old-timers eat at The Depot Cafe.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
In 1986, Norma Manis sold the Oak Cliff cafe that carried her name. She had been feeding Dallas for decades by then, and the plan, as far as anyone could tell, was to finally sit down.
That plan lasted about two years.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Pull into the lot at Ol’ South Pancake House at three in the morning and you’ll find more cars than you’d expect. TCU students, mostly, plus whoever else in Fort Worth is up at that hour and hungry. Inside, the coffee is on and somebody at a back booth is squeezing lemon over a pancake about the size of a hubcap.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
It’s 3:40 in the morning on West Davis Street, and the lights are on at Metro Diner the way they’ve been on every night since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. A cook flips something on the flattop. A waitress tops off a mug for a guy in scrubs who just got off a shift at Methodist. Nobody looks up when the door opens. In Oak Cliff, that’s just Tuesday.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Plano has spent the last decade filling in with glass towers and corporate headquarters, and somewhere in the middle of that, a small family-run diner on Parker Road kept doing exactly what it has always done. Eddie’s Diner is not trying to be part of the city’s reinvention. It is the thing that reinvention tends to erase, and the fact that it is still standing at 4709 W Parker Road, packed most mornings with regulars who have been coming since their kids were in diapers, says something about what people actually want on a Saturday morning.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
