In 1980, in the city of Guiyang in southwestern China, a widow named Yang lost her husband at 30 years old. She had five children to raise. She started with one charcoal stall.
That stall became Yang’s Smokehouse, now open in Plano at 240 Legacy Dr #306, inside the Mitsuya Marketplace center. The path from a single grill to a Texas strip mall took 40 years, three generations, and one very determined grandmother.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Plano has spent the last decade filling in with glass towers and corporate headquarters, and somewhere in the middle of that, a small family-run diner on Parker Road kept doing exactly what it has always done. Eddie’s Diner is not trying to be part of the city’s reinvention. It is the thing that reinvention tends to erase, and the fact that it is still standing at 4709 W Parker Road, packed most mornings with regulars who have been coming since their kids were in diapers, says something about what people actually want on a Saturday morning.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Start on Preston Road in North Dallas and drive north for twenty minutes, and you’ll pass through one of the more unexpected food corridors in the metroplex. It doesn’t advertise itself. There’s no sign, no branded district, no banner year hung on it by a chamber of commerce. It’s just four restaurants, spread between North Dallas and Plano, all cooking from the same general stretch of the map: the old Silk Road, where China, Central Asia, and the Middle East blur together on a plate.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Ye Olde Butcher Shop sits in a Plano strip mall next to a church, and nothing about the storefront prepares you for what’s actually happening inside. The shop has been running since 1974, with the current owner taking over in the 1980s, part butcher counter, part game processor, part burger joint that regulars swear is doing the best burger in Collin County. Step through the door and you’re surrounded by red and white gingham tablecloths, antique butchery equipment, and mounted longhorn and buffalo heads watching over the dining room, the kind of unapologetic small-town Texas atmosphere that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the metro.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Wu Wei Din Chinese Cuisine started in a tiny Plano storefront around 2016, opened by Taiwan native Todd Hung with a singular focus: bring the wontons, noodles, and dumplings of his home island to North Texas the way they’re actually made there, not the Americanized version most diners had come to expect from Chinese food in the suburbs.
It worked well enough that the original location outgrew itself. Wu Wei Din has since expanded to Lewisville, with a Fort Worth location set to open in July 2026, evidence that Hung’s bet on serving genuinely authentic Taiwanese and Shanghainese cooking paid off far beyond that first small dining room.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Uchiko Plano is running an eight-course prix fixe for DFW Restaurant Week, August 10 through September 7, and at $99 a person it’s one of the stronger values on this year’s list given what’s actually on the menu. Uchiko is chef Tyson Cole’s fire-and-smoke offshoot of Uchi, the James Beard-winning sushi restaurant that’s been anchoring Austin’s dining scene since 2003, and the Plano location at Legacy West has built its own following since opening in 2024 without losing the technique that made the original worth the drive.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Tom Fleming has news worth building a whole morning around. His sticky buns at Crossroads Diner in Plano are now on the menu six days a week instead of a rotating schedule, which means the thing regulars have been driving across town for no longer requires calling ahead to check.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Legacy Hall has added a new tenant, and the timing could not be better. Cheese Lab, the Nashville concept built entirely around grilled cheese, is now open inside the Plano food hall, and its arrival happens to land on National Mac and Cheese Day. Consider that a sign.
This is the second location for Cheese Lab, which got its start inside Assembly Food Hall at Fifth + Broadway in downtown Nashville. Founder and CEO Youssef Koutout built the menu on a simple premise: take the most familiar sandwich in America and refuse to leave it alone.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
