Tag Archives: Restaurant

Six DFW Spots Built Around a Great Appetizer and a Great Cocktail

There is a certain type of night that beats dinner every time, and it doesn’t involve an entree at all. It’s the night where you and a friend claim two stools at the bar, order something small and shareable, and let a good cocktail do the rest of the talking. Nobody’s watching the clock. Nobody’s splitting a check three ways over who ordered the extra side. You just eat with your hands, sip something someone actually thought about, and let the evening go wherever it wants to go.

Dallas-Fort Worth has gotten very good at this kind of night lately. Between new openings and old standbys sharpening their bar programs, there’s no shortage of places built for exactly this pace. Here are six worth building a whole evening around, appetizer and cocktail already paired so you don’t have to think too hard about it.

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The Hawaiian Shrimp Chain That Started in an Old Ambulance Lands in Dallas

In February 2016, Isaac and Lauren Hadley spent what savings they had on an old ambulance. They hauled it into Isaac’s parents’ backyard, stripped it down, and repainted it into something that no longer looked like it belonged to a hospital. What came out the other end was a food truck, and what it served was Hawaiian-style shrimp plates built on flavors the Hadleys had picked up during four years at BYU-Hawaii, where they’d fallen for the shrimp trucks lining Oahu’s North Shore.

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Ranchman’s Is Back in Ponder, and It Still Tastes Like 1948

The building at 110 W. Bailey Street in Ponder has been standing since 1903, and for most of the past 78 years it has smelled like fried chicken and hot grease. That smell is back. Ranchman’s, the small-town steakhouse that once pulled Hollywood and literary royalty off the highway, reopened the first week of July under new ownership, and the people running it went out of their way not to mess with what made it famous in the first place.

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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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55 Seventy’s Dallas Brunch Just Became the Standard to Beat

Houston is trying to copy something Dallas built almost by accident. 55 Seventy started four years ago as a place for Preston Center residents to store wine they didn’t have room for at home. Members would rent space, open a bottle on the couches while they were there, and eventually didn’t want to leave. Owner Tommy Shuey didn’t set out to run a restaurant. He built one anyway because that’s what the members actually wanted.

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Smokey John’s Hits 50, and the Reaves Family is Still Cooking

Fifty years ago, John Reaves wasn’t running a restaurant. He was running a roofing and construction business, and smoking turkeys and hams in his backyard as thank-you gifts for clients. The gifts got so popular he ran out of room and started storing the extras in his mother-in-law’s bathtub. A friend eventually told him he needed to just open a restaurant. In 1976, he did.

Smokey John’s Bar-B-Que and Home Cooking is still standing at 1820 W. Mockingbird Lane, and this year the family is marking half a century in business. On August 29, the restaurant is opening its parking lot and dining room for a free block party, capping a Customer Appreciation Week that runs August 24 through 29. Frost Bank is presenting the event, with support from the Mark Cuban Heroes Center and the Dallas Stars Foundation.

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6 Dallas Spots Where Summer Actually Means Something Lighter 

Montlake Cut Poke

Dallas summers don’t leave much room for a heavy plate. Once the heat sets in, the better move is something cold, something citrus-driven, something that doesn’t fight you on the way down. Here are six places actually built for that.

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Lovers Seafood’s Sunday Menu Does Double Duty as Brunch

Sunday’s at Lovers Seafood & Market run from 11 in the morning until 8 at night, one long stretch where lunch and dinner just blend into each other. That’s really brunch here, not a separate menu with a name on it, just the regular lineup served early enough that mimosas make sense with it.

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