For eight years, the only way to get a loaf from Kuluntu Bakery was to order ahead and pick it up from a house in North Oak Cliff, sometimes off a basket lowered from a second-story balcony so nobody had to touch anything during the pandemic. This summer, that finally changed. Kuluntu opened its first real storefront in June, and the wait tells you something about how this bakery actually operates: slow, deliberate, and never in a hurry to be bigger than it needed to be.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
It’s 3:40 in the morning on West Davis Street, and the lights are on at Metro Diner the way they’ve been on every night since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. A cook flips something on the flattop. A waitress tops off a mug for a guy in scrubs who just got off a shift at Methodist. Nobody looks up when the door opens. In Oak Cliff, that’s just Tuesday.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The food conversation in this town rarely makes it south of the Trinity, which is how a restaurant like Mi Sazon can cook honest Mexican food on South Polk Street for the better part of two decades without the attention it deserves. The regulars have never needed anyone’s permission to fill the place. The rest of us are late.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
An alebrije is a fantastical creature from Oaxacan folk art — part jaguar, part butterfly, part something that exists nowhere in nature, painted in colors that have no business working together and somehow do. The name is a good one for a cafe that looks like nothing else on West Clarendon Drive, because nothing else on West Clarendon Drive looks like it either. Alebrijes Cafe sits at 1323 W. Clarendon Drive in Oak Cliff, a few blocks from the Dallas Zoo, in a room decorated with the colorful folk art the name promises, run by a couple who greet regulars by name and first-timers like they’ve been expected.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The building at 814 West Davis Street in Oak Cliff started as an automotive garage. A man named Ron Patterson eventually bought it, spent years turning it into a private room — dark, personal, built around the things he liked — and lived in the house just behind it. When Patterson died in 2021, Feargal McKinney acquired the property. He walked in, looked around, and largely left it alone. McKinney said he figured Patterson would have found a favorite stool and never left. He named the bar after himself and opened it in March 2026. That is how Kilmac’s came to exist.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
In February 1940, a teenage girl from Houston named Josephine Powell appeared on the cover of Life magazine. She was wearing a drum majorette outfit with very short shorts, a plumed hat, and boots. She was holding a tray. She was a carhop at a drive-in restaurant called Sivils, and after that issue hit newsstands, Louise Sivils started receiving letters from young women all over the country asking for a job.
Four months later, J.D. and Louise Sivils brought their operation to Dallas.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Bishop Arts gets the press. It gets the food tourists, the Instagram posts, the out-of-town write-ups that call it charming and walkable and full of independent spirit. All of that is true. But a few blocks away, running parallel and older and considerably less interested in your approval, is Jefferson Boulevard — and it has been feeding Oak Cliff longer than most of those Bishop Arts restaurants have been alive.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Mardi Gras in Dallas carries a rhythm all its own, and nowhere is that more evident than at the Oak Cliff Mardi Gras Parade. Set for Sunday, February 15, 2026 at 1:00 p.m., the annual celebration transforms Davis Street into a colorful corridor of music, movement, and neighborhood pride. The route runs from near the Kessler Theater down toward the Bishop Arts District, drawing thousands of spectators who line the sidewalks to take in one of North Texas’ most spirited Carnival traditions.
Continue readingFiled under Crave
