Maroma changes as the day goes on, and that is the whole idea. At lunch the room is bright and coastal, the sort of place where a ceviche and a cold glass of something make sense at noon. By dinner the lights come down, the patio glows, and the mesquite grill takes over. Chef Omar Flores calls it daylight to dusk. It is a simple concept, and the kitchen follows through on it.
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Mole is the dish that separates a Mexican kitchen that is cooking from one that is trying. A true mole from scratch can take days. It can call for 30 ingredients or more. It cannot be rushed, it cannot be faked, and when it is done right, there is nothing else like it.
The word comes from the Nahuatl molli, which simply means sauce, but there is nothing simple about what lands on the plate. A mole is built in stages. Dried chiles are toasted, soaked and pureed. Nuts and seeds are ground. Spices are bloomed. Chocolate, fruit, bread or tortillas go in as thickeners. The whole thing is cooked low and slow until every ingredient loses itself in the others. What comes out is a sauce that changes with every bite, starting sweet or smoky, turning earthy, finishing with a slow heat that builds and fades. Most diners know mole poblano, the dark, brick-red sauce from Puebla that shows up on enchiladas across the country. That is one mole out of hundreds.
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Lower Greenville is getting another restaurant, and this one has been a long time coming. Chef Aubrey Murphy, who ran the kitchen at SĒR Steak + Spirits atop the Hilton Anatole, is opening his first restaurant of his own. It is called Brute, and it is taking over the old Swizzle tiki bar space at 1802 Greenville Ave., Suite 110, between Via Triozzi and Wabi House. The target is November.
Murphy has been cooking in Dallas for years, and the SĒR run put him on the map. He was part of the team that won Best Food and Beverage Team of the Year, and he was nominated for Chef of the Year Awards. Those are big-hotel, big-production kitchens. Brute will be a different animal entirely.
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Zalat Pizza opens in Duncanville today, Monday, October 12, and it is a milestone. The new shop at 325 S. Cedar Ridge Drive, in the Cedar Park Shopping Center near Wheatland Road, is the 30th Zalat in Texas.
That number still takes some getting used to. Khanh Nguyen, a former attorney, opened his Vietnamese restaurant DaLat on Fitzhugh Avenue in 2012. When the space next door came open, he turned it into a late-night pizza window for the cooks, servers and bartenders who get off work when most kitchens are closed. That was the first Zalat, in 2015. CraveDFW had the very first slice to come out of that oven, and it is hard to believe how far that little shop has come. With Duncanville, there are now 22 Zalats around Dallas-Fort Worth, six in Houston and two in Austin.
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Weekend brunch at Mercat Bistro feels a lot like a long Saturday in Paris, only with valet parking. It is a European-style bistro in the Harwood District, and Michelin recommended the place and brunch is one of the easiest ways to see why.
Before you order, know one thing that sets this kitchen apart. Mercat cooks only with beef tallow, rendered in-house from the Harwood District’s own premium beef program, and it uses no nut or seed oils at all. The restaurant calls it a whole-animal, zero-waste approach. It matters most with anything fried, so pay attention to the potato galette and the frites.
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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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Tiffany Derry’s duck fat-fried chicken is headed to Las Colinas. Roots Chicken Shak will open this winter at Toyota Music Factory in Irving, giving the entertainment district one more reason to show up hungry before a concert.
Derry needs little introduction around here. The Beaumont native first caught national attention on Season 7 of Top Chef, and since 2025 she has sat at the judges’ table on MasterChef alongside Gordon Ramsay and Joe Bastianich. At home she runs T2D Concepts with business partner Tom Foley. The group is behind Roots Southern Table and Radici Wood Fired Grill in Farmers Branch, the Shef Food + Wine Festival and Roots Chicken Shak, which started as a counter inside Legacy Hall in Plano in 2017.
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Some of the best chicken fried steak in Dallas comes out of an Italian kitchen. That sounds like a setup for a joke, but anyone who has eaten at Prego Pasta House on Lower Greenville knows it is simply true.
Prego has been a Greenville Avenue fixture since September. The roots go back even further. In 1956, Joe Barraco Sr. opened a grocery store at 2919 Bryan St., part of the stretch of bakeries, markets and shops that once made up Dallas’ Little Italy. When the family moved into the restaurant business, Joe’s wife, Rose, brought her recipes with her, and many of them are still on the menu more than four decades later. It is a red-sauce house in the best sense, with garlic bread, crab claws, veal, steak pizzaiola and pastas served with a salad, the way they have been for generations.
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