Brunch here has drifted toward the reservation, the bottomless carafe and the seventy-dollar table for two. Some mornings do not call for any of that. Five Dallas rooms where the coffee keeps coming, the plates land fast and nobody upsells you a thing.
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The elevator does the work of an overture. You step in at ground level in a parking structure off Reunion Boulevard, the doors close, and by the time they open again the city is 561 feet below and coming at you through glass on every side. On a Sunday morning that light is low and eastern and it fills the whole round room at once. Somebody hands you a mimosa before you have taken off your sunglasses.
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This is the latest in our weekly Dish Explained series, where we take one dish from one culture and break down what it is, where it came from, and where to actually eat it in Dallas.
Khachapuri is Georgian cheese bread, and the name tells you exactly what you’re getting. Khacho means cheese. Puri means bread. The most famous version, called adjaruli, shapes the dough into a little boat, fills it edge to edge with melted cheese, then cracks a raw egg yolk and a pat of butter right into the middle before it hits the table. You tear off pieces of the crust and drag them through that molten well in the center. That’s it. That’s the whole ritual, and it’s every bit as good as it sounds.
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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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Crystal Smith grew up on Georgia’s favorite brunch dish, and by 2020 she’d decided it deserved a restaurant built entirely around it. She opened the first Johnny’s Chicken and Waffles in College Park, outside Atlanta, with then-husband Ne-Yo and Love & Hip Hop’s Karlie Redd backing the idea. Six years and a handful of states later, the plates are still enormous and the waffles are still stacked with more toppings than seems reasonable. Johnny’s now has two DFW locations: Dallas, open since May 2024, and Fort Worth, open since July 2025, and both are worth the drive on an empty stomach.
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Twenty-three years is a long time to keep a restaurant open, and longer still to keep it feeling like the same place it was on day one. Besa’s has managed both. Garland’s own tourism site sums up owner Al Shala in one line: he waits on guests like he’s running a five-star restaurant instead of a casual Italian spot. Anyone who’s eaten there more than once knows exactly what that means.
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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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Hudson House started as one restaurant in Highland Park. It’s about to open its twelfth, and this time it’s landing in Southlake, a city that says a lot about how far this brand has traveled from its first neighborhood spot.
The new location opens Friday, September 11, at 1131 E. Southlake Blvd., roughly 5,000 square feet of the same East Coast sensibility Hudson House built its name on, just with more room to stretch out. Hudson House comes from Vandelay Companies, the Dallas group founded by Hunter Pond, and Pond isn’t shy about why growth here has been slow and deliberate rather than fast. He picked Southlake for its energy and its appetite for real hospitality, and he’s said the goal was never just adding another location to a map. It was making sure every Hudson House feels like it’s always belonged to its block.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
