Ask anybody who grew up in Dallas before the 2000s about Prince of Hamburgers, and watch what happens to their face.
First comes the smile. Then the story. Maybe it was the back seat of a station wagon on a summer night, windows down, waiting for a carhop to come back across the lot with a tray. Maybe it was a first car and a first date, or a Saturday night with a car full of friends circling Lemmon Avenue just to see who else was out. Everybody seems to have one.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Sit down at just about any Tex-Mex place in Dallas and a basket of warm chips hits the table before the server asks about drinks. There’s a bowl of salsa next to it. Nobody ordered either one, and nobody is going to put them on the check. Empty the basket and another one comes.
We take it for granted around here. The free basket hasn’t always been part of the deal, though, and the way it got here has more to do with the snack aisle than with tradition.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Somewhere around 1921, on the southwest corner of Fort Worth Pike and Chalk Hill Road in West Oak Cliff, Jesse G. Kirby started carrying pork sandwiches out to people sitting in their cars.
That corner sat past the edge of Dallas back then. Fort Worth Pike is Davis Street now. Most histories put the opening in September 1921, though court records from a lawsuit a few years later list April 15, 1922. Nobody involved seems to have thought they were making history, so nobody wrote the date down carefully.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Dinner was built into Harry Truman’s poker afternoons in Key West. Cards usually began around 4 p.m., with dinner served at 7. Sometimes the president and his guests returned to the south porch afterward and played until midnight or later. That schedule captures something familiar about poker gatherings: the meal has its own place in the evening, giving everyone time to leave the cards and talk over food.
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Ask someone from Philadelphia what to eat and you’ll have an answer before you finish the question. Same in Buffalo. Same in Louisville. Ask someone in Dallas and you get a pause, then a list, then an argument.
That pause deserves a closer look. Dallas has fed the country more than it gets credit for, and it has never settled on the one plate it would put on its own flag. So let’s try.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
In 1978, Lower Greenville Avenue was not the place it is now. There wasn’t much business on the strip at all. That year, Pat Snuffer opened a small burger joint next to the Granada Theater with one dining room that seated 55 people. What he had in mind was simple: a fun place where SMU students could get a burger and a cold beer.
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Ask a room full of Dallas people where they ate as kids and you will hear the same dozen names. Some of those places are gone. A surprising number are not.
Your grandparents may have ordered these plates on a first date. Your parents probably bribed you with them after a dentist appointment. The dining rooms have been repainted and a few have changed hands, but the food would still look familiar to anyone who sat down there in 1965.
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For 95 years, a good many Dallas family meals started with picking up a tray. You slid it along the rail, read your way past a wall of American presidents, and tried to make up your mind before you reached the squash casserole. Highland Park Cafeteria fed this city from 1925 until the spring of 2020, and anyone who ate there can still tell you what they ordered.
Plenty of Dallas diners never stood in one of those lines, so a word about what this place was. Say cafeteria today and most people picture a school lunchroom. The old Southern cafeteria ran on its own rules. You picked up a tray and worked your way down a long counter of salads, entrées, vegetables, breads, and desserts, pointing at what you wanted while the staff behind the glass filled your plates. Everything came from scratch out of the kitchen behind the line, and you paid at the far end. At Highland Park Cafeteria, a staffer would help carry your tray to the table.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
