Somewhere along the way, H-E-B stopped thinking like a grocery store. The clearest evidence sits inside the company’s Mueller location in Austin, where shoppers can finish the weekly run, order duck fat fried chicken from a Top Chef alum, and settle in at a full bar with a Texas whiskey cocktail before heading home.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Italy has been exporting two things to the rest of the world with particular success for the last several centuries: its cuisine and the conviction that the way Italians eat is worth understanding. Oscar Farinetti built an entire retail concept around that second point when he opened the first Eataly in Turin in 2007 — a marketplace where the food and the knowledge of the food exist in the same room, where the person buying the flour can watch someone make the pasta and sit down to eat it within thirty feet. The idea spread. There are now more than fifty locations worldwide.
Dallas got one on December 9, 2020, and it occupies 48,000 square feet inside NorthPark Center between Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, which is either a deeply ironic location or a perfectly appropriate one, depending on how you feel about Italy’s relationship with luxury.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Nobody talks about Richardson’s Chinatown the way they should. It doesn’t have the density of Houston’s or the fame of San Francisco’s, but what it has is its own story — and that story happens to be one of the more quietly remarkable things that happened to North Texas in the last 40 years.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
H-E-B bought the land for this store in 2015. The Mid-Cities location opens this morning at 6 a.m. at 2105 Rio Grande Blvd in Euless, in the Glade Parks development at the northwest corner of Cheek-Sparger Road and Rio Grande Boulevard. Eleven years from land purchase to ribbon cutting is a long time to wait for a grocery store. The Hurst-Euless-Bedford corridor — which has shared its initials with the chain for decades without actually having one — is finally getting the real thing.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
H Mart hasn’t opened yet, and people are already making the drive to Haltom City.
That’s the thing about H Mart Plaza at 3920 NE Loop 820 — the anchor is still months away, pushed to fall 2026 after supply chain delays on imported fixtures, but the restaurants around it have been opening on their own schedule. The plaza is fully leased, more than 40 tenants deep, and what’s taking shape out there is something Fort Worth hasn’t had before: a real Asian food corridor on the west side of the metroplex.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
For decades, HEB was the grocery store Texans kept a shared secret about. If you grew up in Kerrville, Corpus, or San Antonio, you knew. If you lived in Dallas or Fort Worth, you had to settle for hearing about it from in-laws or picking up a cooler of butter tortillas on the way back from Austin. That era is over.
The San Antonio-based chain now has stores in Plano, Frisco, McKinney, Allen, Mansfield, Prosper, and Fort Worth, with more under construction in Rockwall, Irving, Murphy, Bedford, and Forney. Dallas County itself will not have a full H-E-B until the Irving store opens in late 2026, a detail that says a lot about how carefully the company picks its fights.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
That corner of McKinney and Lemmon in Uptown has been a dead zone for almost a decade. The old Albertsons closed in 2016, and the building has sat dark ever since — a big, empty box in one of the most walkable, food-obsessed neighborhoods in Dallas. Central Market has held the property lease the entire time. Getting something built there has just taken a lot longer than anyone expected.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Dallas shoppers can finally exhale: the long-awaited first H-E-B inside the Dallas city limits is officially happening. No more committing to a half-day pilgrimage to Plano or Frisco, and no more “quick stop” at Central Market that somehow turns into an overflowing cart because the bakery case was too persuasive.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
