Sit down at just about any Tex-Mex place in Dallas and a basket of warm chips hits the table before the server asks about drinks. There’s a bowl of salsa next to it. Nobody ordered either one, and nobody is going to put them on the check. Empty the basket and another one comes.
We take it for granted around here. The free basket hasn’t always been part of the deal, though, and the way it got here has more to do with the snack aisle than with tradition.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Michael “Mico” Rodriguez died last week. He was 68.
Mico was my friend. For a while now, the two of us had been working on a book about his life, and there is a lot of life to tell. So this isn’t an obituary in the usual sense. It’s a few things Dallas ought to remember about the man who changed how this city eats Tex-Mex.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Back in the early ’90s, the best thing at Mia’s Tex-Mex wasn’t on the menu. You had to know to ask for it, you had to come on a Wednesday, and you had to get there before it ran out.
Today it has a name, Butch’s Original Brisket Tacos, and it’s the dish Mia’s is known for all over Dallas.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Before Torchy’s, before Velvet Taco, before every bar in town put a fried avocado on a tortilla and called it a special, there was Tin Star.
Rich Hicks opened the first one in Uptown in 1999. He’d come up through Macaroni Grill, where he was an area director at 25, and his idea was simple: take the taco seriously, put it in a fast-casual room, and charge accordingly. Brisket and queso. Pork and kimchi. A portabella taco with roasted corn and sweet potatoes that people still bring up by name. In North Texas at the time, that was a strange way to sell tacos.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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
The cheese enchilada is the plate nobody brags about. Two corn tortillas, cheese, chili gravy. Nowhere to hide. You either have it or you don’t.
Tupinamba has it, and has had it longer than almost anybody in Dallas.
The cheese enchiladas come out on a plate hot enough that the cheese is still moving. The gravy is dark and beefy with none of the flat canned taste that ruins this dish all over town, and the tortillas hold instead of dissolving. That’s the test, and most kitchens fail it.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The name suggests a border town, sun-bleached and dusty, somewhere along the Rio Grande. Cafe Del Rio is actually about as far from the border as Texas gets, sitting deep in the Piney Woods of Lufkin, closer to Louisiana than to Mexico. The name misleads you before you’ve even walked in.
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Elvira Leal married Ruben right before he shipped out to fight in World War II, two purple hearts and a bronze star waiting for him on the other side of it. While he was overseas, she was back home learning the restaurant trade from her own parents, who ran a spot called La Rumba in Little Mexico. Her mother cooked at El Fenix. When Ruben came home, the two of them opened Dallas Tortilla & Tamale Factory in 1950, and the same family has been running it ever since.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
