Tag Archives: seafood

On the Rocks Is Open, and Kent Rathbun’s Lobster Shooter Already Has a Trophy

Kent Rathbun has been one of the defining names in Dallas dining for the better part of three decades. He opened Abacus in 1999, followed it with Jasper’s in 2003, cooked for Queen Elizabeth and the Bush inaugural ball, beat Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America in 2008, and built a reputation that still carries weight in a city that moves on fast. These days he runs a catering operation and a barbecue venture with his wife Tracy, consults for a growing list of clients, and just helped open a restaurant in Burleson that carries his fingerprints all over it.

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S&D Oyster Co. Celebrates 50-Year Anniversary

S&D Oyster Company turns 50 on September 16, and it’s throwing itself an anniversary week worth planning around. The Uptown seafood spot has been serving the same stretch of McKinney Avenue since 1976, and five decades in one location is rare enough on its own to be worth celebrating properly.

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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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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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A Four-Day Weekend in Seattle, and Where to Actually Eat While You’re There

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.

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TJ’s Seafood Market Does Brunch the Way It Does Everything Else: With a Fish Counter Right There

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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Dallas Gets Its First Mason’s Famous Lobster Rolls

Dallas has argued about lobster rolls for a long time. We were there when TJ’s griddled its first Connecticut-style bun back in 2012, and the debate has never really cooled since. Now the conversation has a new address, and it happens to sit in one of the busiest corners of the city.

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A Dollar Martini, a Dozen Oysters: Walloon’s Yacht Club Week

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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