Juan Contreras saved $3,000 the slow way. As he has told the story over the years, he spent seven years working as a janitor at Love Field and at Tyler Street United Methodist Church before he had enough to lease a little building on West Jefferson Boulevard. In 1989 he opened a café there and named it El Padrino, after a restaurant he had worked at back home in Nuevo Laredo.
Thirty-seven years later, his family has been told to leave.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The whole thing started because two guys couldn’t find anywhere decent to watch the World Cup.
That was 2010 in Dallas. Rich Hicks and his business partner were sitting in a Hooters when one of their employees set down his beer and said they needed a place like this, for us. Meaning for Latino sports fans. Meaning somewhere the fútbol was on the main screen instead of buried on a corner TV with the sound off.
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El Molino is opening a second Dallas location, and this one comes with more room to work with. Vandelay Companies opens the new restaurant in Preston Royal Shopping Center on Monday, August 10, a little over a year after the original debuted in Snider Plaza.
The new spot sits at 6025 Royal Lane, Suite 250, taking over the roughly 6,000-square-foot space that formerly housed Vandelay’s own Anchor Sushi Bar. That’s a real jump in size from the Snider Plaza original, and it’s intentional. Vandelay CEO Hunter Pond said the company opened Anchor Bar in two different footprints specifically to test which format worked best for each concept, and concluded Anchor belongs in a smaller, more intimate room while El Molino’s high-energy Tex-Mex style needed the bigger stage Preston Royal offers.
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Every taco al pastor in Dallas traces back to a wave of immigration nobody puts on the menu. In the final years of the Ottoman Empire, as the empire crumbled and conscription, violence, and economic collapse pushed people out of the region, waves of Lebanese, Syrian, and Iraqi families left the Middle East for the Americas. A significant number landed in Puebla, Mexico, by the early 20th century, and they brought a cooking method with them that had nothing to do with Mexican food at the time: shawarma, meat stacked on a vertical spit and shaved off in thin, charred strips as it turned.
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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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There’s a category of restaurant that exists in every city — the place that’s been quietly doing the same thing well for a quarter century, sitting behind a strip center where even Uber drivers occasionally lose the plot trying to find it, serving a neighborhood that has long since stopped needing directions. Angela’s Cafe, at 7979 Inwood Road near Lovers Lane, is exactly that kind of place. Twenty-five years in, it’s still mostly known to the people who live within a mile of it, and that’s a shame, because the food is better than a strip-center breakfast spot has any obligation to be.
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Most people don’t know what a botanería is. That’s fine. Go to Sor Juana and you’ll figure it out in about five minutes.
The concept is Mexican in origin and as old as the idea of a neighborhood bar. In a traditional botanero, your drinks come with food — not food you order separately, not food with an upcharge, just small plates that arrive alongside whatever you’re drinking. Botanas. Bar bites. The Mexican cousin of tapas, built on the same logic that says drinking and eating together is not indecision but civilization. The tradition is deeply social, deeply rooted in Mexican cantina culture, and almost entirely absent from Dallas until now.
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Chinese-Mexican fusion sounds like a joke until you understand where it comes from. In the late 1800s, Chinese laborers working on the railroads and in the mines of northern Mexico put down roots rather than returning home. Over generations they built communities — in Mexicali, in Sonora, in Baja California — and their food blended with the Mexican cooking around them in ways that produced something completely its own. Birria and dim sum. Chile heat and wok smoke. Tacos with fillings nobody in either tradition had tried before. It’s a genuine culinary history, and most people in Texas have never encountered it.
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