La Calle Doce opened on September 15, 1981, in a renovated house on West 12th Street in Oak Cliff. Oscar and Laura Sanchez ran it, and they served Mexican seafood at a time when most people in Dallas ordered a cheese enchilada plate and called it a night. That was 45 years ago last week. The house is still there. So is the fish soup.
The anniversary happens to fall on the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month, which gives anyone looking for an excuse a pretty good one.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Somewhere between the fishmonger hurling a forty-pound salmon over your head and the ferry horn cutting through the fog on Elliott Bay, Seattle stops feeling like a city you’re visiting and starts feeling like one you’ve always sort of known. It’s a place built on contradictions that somehow work: a coffee-obsessed, tech-money city that still closes up early, a waterfront town that hosted the Beatles and Led Zeppelin in the same hotel a decade apart, a fine-dining institution that once served burgers from a drive-in when the power went out and didn’t miss a beat.
Four days is enough to get a real feel for all of it: enough time for a ferry ride, a fish market, a splurge dinner, and at least one 2 a.m. burger stop you won’t be able to fully explain to people back home, and won’t want to.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
TJ’s Seafood Market has been selling fresh fish out of the same stretch of North Dallas since 1989, and the restaurant part came second. Jon Alexis took the shop over from his parents, relocated the original location, and eventually turned both the Preston Royal spot and a second one in Oak Lawn into full restaurants built around the fish counter rather than a restaurant that happens to have one in the corner. That backstory matters at brunch, because it’s the reason you can sit down for French toast and also order a dozen oysters on the half shell without either one feeling like an afterthought.
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There’s a martini for a dollar at Walloon’s next month, and the fine print is that you have to eat a dozen oysters to get there. Fair trade, honestly.
The restaurant is throwing its first Yacht Club Week starting Sunday, August 2, and the concept fits a room that was already halfway there. Chef Marcus Paslay opened Walloon’s in the summer of 2023 inside the old Fort Worth National Bank building on Magnolia Avenue, his fourth restaurant under the From Scratch Hospitality banner alongside Clay Pigeon, Piattello, and Provender Hall.
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Dock Local finally has a date. The lobster roll operation that’s been quietly building a following out of Legacy Hall, Harvest Hall, and The Exchange will open its Dallas Farmers Market location on July 16, taking over the space Rex’s Seafood vacated back in May after eleven years on Harwood Street.
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The Cortez family already has a Michelin recommendation. Two of them, back to back, in 2024 and 2025, for a taqueria on East Rosedale that does one thing and does it as well as anywhere in Texas. Now they’re opening a second restaurant, and if the first one is any indication of how they operate, Fort Worth should pay close attention.
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The name makes more sense once you meet them. Chef Hugo Galván runs the kitchen. Hugo Osorio runs the bar. Together they run Hugo’s Seafood Bar at 334 W. Davis Street in Bishop Arts, inside a room with an original stamped tin ceiling, exposed brick, and an octopus painted on the wall. The place seats fewer than 30 people. On a Friday night it feels like twice that, which is not a complaint — it’s the sign of a room that has figured out exactly what it wants to be.
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