Welcome to The Heat Check, CraveDFW’s weekly list of the places Dallas-Fort Worth can’t stop talking about. Every spot on it is open right now. The Dallas side is ranked from splurge to cheap thrills, and Fort Worth gets its own list at the bottom, because buzz doesn’t care what you spend or which side of the Metroplex you live on. It changes every Friday.
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At this very moment, somebody in a Hutchins BBQ kitchen is probably hollowing out a very large jalapeño.
That pepper has a big day ahead. It’s about to be stuffed with chopped brisket and cream cheese, wrapped in thick-cut bacon and sent to the smoker. At Hutchins BBQ, they call it the Texas Twinkie, and on Friday, October 16, the restaurant celebrates it with its fourth annual National Texas Twinkie Day.
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Before Torchy’s, before Velvet Taco, before every bar in town put a fried avocado on a tortilla and called it a special, there was Tin Star.
Rich Hicks opened the first one in Uptown in 1999. He’d come up through Macaroni Grill, where he was an area director at 25, and his idea was simple: take the taco seriously, put it in a fast-casual room, and charge accordingly. Brisket and queso. Pork and kimchi. A portabella taco with roasted corn and sweet potatoes that people still bring up by name. In North Texas at the time, that was a strange way to sell tacos.
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Khanh Nguyen started Zalat Pizza in Dallas back in 2015, and eleven years later the company is opening its 31st Texas location, this time in McKinney’s Heritage Village at 1720 N. Central Expressway, Suite 210, just south of Highway 380 on U.S. 75. For a brand that’s grown this far this fast, Zalat has held onto the same personality it launched with, which says something about how deliberately Nguyen has grown it.
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Oak & Stone opened its first Texas location in McKinney on May 19 — the Florida-based restaurant’s debut outside the Southeast after eight successful locations back home — and it has spent its first few weeks establishing itself as something McKinney didn’t quite have before: a 6,000-square-foot social restaurant built around the idea that eating and drinking should be interactive, unhurried, and a little unpredictable. Now, just a month in, the kitchen and bar team have introduced a summer cocktail program that leans into all three of those qualities. They’re calling them Poptails, they’re $15 each, and they involve a gourmet popsicle served directly in the glass.
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by Cassidy Everett
Some weekends are made for catching up on chores. This is not one of them.
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McKinney’s historic square is about 30 miles north of Dallas and worth every one of them. The buildings date to the 1800s, the shops are locally owned, and on a good weekend the whole thing hums in a way that’s hard to manufacture and easy to enjoy. Two days here goes fast.
The historic downtown square is the whole point of the trip — more than 120 shops and two dozen-plus restaurants packed into a walkable stretch of 19th-century buildings. Come on a Friday. Stay through Sunday. You won’t run out of things to do.
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Most people who end up at Square Burger in McKinney did not plan to be there. They were walking around the downtown square, realized they were hungry, and pushed open the door of a 1929 building on the corner of Kentucky and Virginia streets. What they found inside surprised them. It still does.
Brandon Horrocks and Craig Brundege opened this place in June 2010 with credentials that had no business ending up in a burger joint. Horrocks graduated at the top of his class from the Culinary Institute of America, did a fellowship at Wolfgang Puck’s Granita in Malibu, cooked in Mexico City, and worked Dallas rooms like Patrizio’s and Café Pacific. Brundege came through serious kitchens in San Francisco and Los Angeles — Providence, one of the best seafood restaurants on the West Coast, was on his résumé. They chose burgers. Specifically, they chose McKinney.
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