Ask Toby Archibald to sum up Dallas dining in three words and he won’t make you wait. “Too much steak”. Then he went back to running one of the most personal restaurants in the city.
That restaurant is Quarter Acre, at 2023 Greenville Ave. on the lowest stretch of Lower Greenville, in the old Rapscallion space. Archibald opened it at the end of December 2022. It has since landed at No. 3 on Texas Monthly’s statewide list of best new restaurants and a spot in the Michelin Guide.
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Some dishes belong to a restaurant the way a song belongs to the voice that made it famous. Other people can sing it. Other kitchens can cook it. But there is a version that is the version, and if you know, you know. At Café Izmir on Lower Greenville, that dish is the grilled lamb chops.
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Lower Greenville is getting another restaurant, and this one has been a long time coming. Chef Aubrey Murphy, who ran the kitchen at SĒR Steak + Spirits atop the Hilton Anatole, is opening his first restaurant of his own. It is called Brute, and it is taking over the old Swizzle tiki bar space at 1802 Greenville Ave., Suite 110, between Via Triozzi and Wabi House. The target is November.
Murphy has been cooking in Dallas for years, and the SĒR run put him on the map. He was part of the team that won Best Food and Beverage Team of the Year, and he was nominated for Chef of the Year Awards. Those are big-hotel, big-production kitchens. Brute will be a different animal entirely.
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Brunch runs every day at Sundown, until three in the afternoon, and the mimosas are two dollars. On Lower Greenville in 2026, that shouldn’t be possible. It’s also not the reason to go, which surprised me.
Sundown at Granada has sat at 3520 Greenville Ave. since 2011, next door to the Granada Theater, both owned by Mike Schoder and Julia Garton. A restaurant attached to a music venue usually cooks like one. This one doesn’t, and it took a second visit to believe it.
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The Pizzeria Testa building on Greenville Avenue has sat with new owners for over a year now, and what’s coming next is finally close enough to talk about.
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Charlie’s Creole Kitchen has been serving Cajun and Creole food on Lower Greenville since 1989, longer than almost anything else on that stretch of Greenville Avenue, and for most of that history it wasn’t called Charlie’s at all. Owner Charlie McGuinness, a New Orleans transplant, opened the restaurant as Dodie’s, naming it after the childhood nickname of his son, Chris. For nearly three decades, Dodie’s built a loyal following on Cajun classics served under checkered tablecloths and a ceiling of beer signs and crawfish decorations, the kind of place families claimed as their own for a birthday dinner or a random Tuesday.
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Tim Goza has spent more than a decade proving Lower Greenville can hold a restaurant. He opened Palapas Seafood Bar there in 2014, in the space that used to be Dallas Tortilla & Tamale Factory, and it’s still standing. In March 2025 he opened a second restaurant right next door with his business partner Gustavo De Los Rios, who also runs Mami Coco. This one isn’t about seafood. It’s about fire.
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Lower Greenville has been waiting for a place like Walkers’ for a while, even if nobody said so out loud. Not another bar. Not another taco concept. Something that works at noon with a sandwich and a glass of wine, and then again at eight o’clock when you want to sit down to something serious.
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