The old ice plant on East Clarendon Drive has a restaurant again, and it comes with a chef Oak Cliff already knows well.
Barro y Fuego is now serving in Suite 100 of East Dock, the restored industrial complex at 900 E. Clarendon Dr. The name means “clay and fire,” and the kitchen belongs to Eric Spigner, who spent eight years cooking at Nova in Oak Cliff before winning Food Network’s Chopped.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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
Somewhere around 1921, on the southwest corner of Fort Worth Pike and Chalk Hill Road in West Oak Cliff, Jesse G. Kirby started carrying pork sandwiches out to people sitting in their cars.
That corner sat past the edge of Dallas back then. Fort Worth Pike is Davis Street now. Most histories put the opening in September 1921, though court records from a lawsuit a few years later list April 15, 1922. Nobody involved seems to have thought they were making history, so nobody wrote the date down carefully.
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From the sidewalk on West 8th Street, the house at 240 still looks like what it is: a 1940s bungalow on a quiet block in Bishop Arts. Behind the porch, it is something else entirely now. The structure had to be rebuilt from the ground up, and because the lot sits inside a conservation district, the crew had to do it without changing the face the neighborhood has known for decades.
That house is about to become Trapèze, a French bar and restaurant from Peter Novotny and Dan Murry, the partners behind Ruins and Armoury D.E. in Deep Ellum. Their third project lands six miles southwest of the other two, and the reason has as much to do with history as real estate.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Pillar, chef Peja Krstic’s bistro in the Bishop Arts District, is gone after less than two years. It closed on September 30, the same day its landlord locked the doors.
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Ask Cindy Pedraza about her mother’s first job and she’ll tell you the detail that stuck: she always smelled like chocolate.
That was the 1980s. Andrea Pedraza had taken a part-time job at Dallas’ first chocolate shop, and it turned into a 25-year career. She learned European technique, rose to head of production and became a master chocolatier. Then the recession hit, and mother and daughter lost their jobs around the same time.
In 2009, they opened a shop of their own and called it CocoAndré.
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Sunday in Bishop Arts moves at its own speed. Dogs outnumber cars on some blocks, every patio seems to have a spritz on it, and around 2 o’clock you can hear a brass band before you can see it. Nobody is in a hurry, and that is exactly the right way to do it.
Here is how to spend an easy Sunday in the neighborhood, with a few places to eat at different price points, a couple of stops for shopping, and the best spots for a drink. Wear comfortable shoes. Everything here is walkable, which is the whole reason Oak Cliff folks guard this place like a family recipe.
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La Calle Doce opened on September 15, 1981, in a renovated house on West 12th Street in Oak Cliff. Oscar and Laura Sanchez ran it, and they served Mexican seafood at a time when most people in Dallas ordered a cheese enchilada plate and called it a night. That was 45 years ago last week. The house is still there. So is the fish soup.
The anniversary happens to fall on the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month, which gives anyone looking for an excuse a pretty good one.
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