Shady’s Burgers & Brewhaha started with five neighbors, a backyard fire pit and a few beers.
That was 2012, in the Canyon Creek neighborhood of Richardson. Greg Cooney, Don Bouvier, Anthony Bolner, Dave Swiney and Steve Gumbert were sitting around Bolner’s fire pit talking about what the neighborhood was missing. What they landed on was a place with good burgers, cold beer and a patio where families could hang out on a weeknight. None of them had ever run a restaurant.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The paddlewheel is turning again at Fair Park.
If you grew up going to the State Fair, you know the Old Mill Inn by sight. It’s the timber-and-stone building on Grand Avenue with the big water wheel out front. After the pandemic it went dark and stayed that way for years. This fair season it’s open again as a full-service restaurant and bar, and when the gates open on Friday, September 25, it will be feeding anyone who needs a break from the Midway.
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Plenty of people who live in Frisco have never walked its Main Street. The city spread north and west so fast that the original townsite, the handful of blocks around the railroad tracks now known as the Frisco Rail District, can feel like something only the old-timers know about.
A lot of those old-timers eat at The Depot Cafe.
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The tuba gets there first. Somewhere under a striped tent on Marktplatz, an oompah band finds its footing, and the sound rolls down Main Street past the limestone storefronts. By the time you reach the gate, the air smells like grilled sausage, and a few hundred strangers are getting ready to do the chicken dance together without a trace of embarrassment.
That is Oktoberfest in Fredericksburg, and this year it runs October 2 through 4.
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In 1986, Norma Manis sold the Oak Cliff cafe that carried her name. She had been feeding Dallas for decades by then, and the plan, as far as anyone could tell, was to finally sit down.
That plan lasted about two years.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Pull into the lot at Ol’ South Pancake House at three in the morning and you’ll find more cars than you’d expect. TCU students, mostly, plus whoever else in Fort Worth is up at that hour and hungry. Inside, the coffee is on and somebody at a back booth is squeezing lemon over a pancake about the size of a hubcap.
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The smartest State Fair days do not start at the gate. They start a few minutes away, across I-30 in the Mount Auburn neighborhood, with lunch at Kalachandji’s.
There is a logic to it. The next six hours are going to be fried, battered, dipped, sugared and served on a stick. A plate of dal, rice and fresh vegetables first is less about virtue than about pacing. It also happens to be one of the most peaceful rooms in the city.
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Oktoberfest is underway in Munich, a good excuse to point out that Dallas has had its own German kitchen for 65 years. It is in Snider Plaza, and it is called Kuby’s Sausage House.
By Dallas standards, 1961 is ancient. By the family’s standards, it is recent. In 1728, Friedrich Kuby opened a meat market in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and the recipes passed from father to son for generations. “The original one was bombed in ’44,” Karl Kuby Sr. has said. “It was wiped out.”
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