Tag Archives: Plano

The Best $10 Happy Hour Burgers in Dallas Right Now

Happy hour burgers have a bad reputation, and most of them earn it. A restaurant slaps a discount on a sad, dry patty for two hours a day and calls it a deal. You end up paying half price for something you wouldn’t order at full price either.

That’s not what’s happening at the five places below. There’s a difference between a bar burger going cheap and a real restaurant discounting the same burger it serves all night, made the same way, by the same kitchen, just priced lower for a stretch of the afternoon. These are the second kind. And sometimes only a great burger will hit the spot.

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Whisk Crêpes Café’s Bishop Arts Home Is Worth the Trip

Most crepe menus hand you a finished idea and expect you to accept it. Whisk hands you the whole kitchen instead.

Julien Eelsen grew up in Paris, where crepes were as ordinary as a street snack and as elevated as a real sit-down dinner, depending on where you got them. He wanted Dallas to have both versions in one place, so he opened Whisk Crêpes Café in 2015. A decade later, the concept has outgrown its first address twice over. Whisk started in Sylvan Thirty, moved to Bishop Arts in early 2025, and has since spread well past Dallas, with locations now open in Nashville’s Assembly Food Hall and Plano’s Legacy Food Hall.

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Hospitality Duo Opens Third Location in a Year – Cafe Olivita

Torry Cray and Adrian Verdin (we’ve followed Verdin through his hospitality career and he’s a keeper) have been on quite a run. Three restaurants in one year, all under the Café Olivia name, and this one might be the most interesting of the bunch. Café Olivita opens in early October at Park Center in Plano, and it’s not just a smaller version of the original. It’s Café Olivia rethinking what it means to serve an office building.

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The Smashburger Spot in Plano That’s Secretly a Story About a 1940s Band

Bonnie Shea spent years just trying to make sure her mother’s story didn’t disappear. Patty Lou Peters fronted an all-female western swing band called Patty Lou and the Texas Sweethearts back in the 1940s and 50s, back when female touring groups almost never existed. They piled into a convertible and drove routes stretching from Chicago to California, playing gigs along the way. Shea wanted people to know who her mother was. So she built her a restaurant.

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Yang’s Smokehouse Is Cooking Guizhou Province in a Plano Strip Mall

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.

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Eddie’s Diner Is the Last Real Diner Left Standing in Plano

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.

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The Uyghur Corridor: Four Stops from Preston Road to Plano

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.

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Ye Olde Butcher Shop: Fifty Years of Fresh-Ground, Wild-Game Burgers

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.

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