Three days after Chris Jordan and his partners signed the lease on their new steakhouse, a Dodge Challenger ran off White Settlement Road and drove straight through the storefront. The explosion made the local news. A few months later, once repairs were mostly finished, a second Dodge Challenger, nearly identical to the first, did it again.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Every neighborhood should be so lucky as to have its history hold the best corner. In Deep Ellum, that corner is 2551 Elm Street, where the Knights of Pythias Temple has stood since 1916, designed by William Sidney Pittman, Texas’ first Black architect and son-in-law of Booker T. Washington. It was the first commercial building in Dallas built by, for, and with the money of Black citizens, and for more than two decades it served as the social heart of Black Dallas — its top-floor ballroom hosting dances, graduations, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers, its lectern held by the likes of George Washington Carver, while out on the street below, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly were turning Deep Ellum into the blues capital of the Southwest.
Today the building carries its architect’s name as The Kimpton Pittman Hotel, and it remains the best argument in town that a building can change jobs without losing its soul.
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A king walked into a strip mall on Sherman Street this summer, and the people working the counter at Khashoka still talk about it like it happened yesterday.
King Abdullah II of Jordan and Crown Prince Hussein stopped in before the Jordanian national team’s first-ever World Cup appearance, part of a swing through North Texas that put Amman’s food culture directly in front of Richardson strip-mall traffic. The restaurant’s own account of the visit calls it an honor to welcome the players who made history, and owner Mohammad Albakri has said the moment still catches him off guard when he thinks about it.
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The best chicken fried steak in Bell County is sold next to the beef jerky rack, behind a counter that also rings up gas and lottery tickets, at a family-run convenience store called Expo Quik Stop.
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The Design District’s transformation into Dallas’s dinner-and-a-show corridor continues. Juliet, the Houston steakhouse built around a movie-theater fantasy, is coming to 1400 Hi Line Drive, directly next door to Delilah, with a late-summer opening targeted for August.
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Every so often somebody opens a restaurant in Dallas that has no comparison point, nothing to measure it against, and you find yourself explaining it to friends in fragments. Punk Noir, which opened June 2 in the Design District, is one of those. Twenty courses.Multiple rooms. A Mistress of Ceremonies. Graffiti on the walls and Kaluga caviar on the plates. It should not work. Early word is that it does.
Filed under Steven Doyle
Legal Grounds closed in 2015 and half of Lakewood acted like the world was ending. That was the coffeehouse at Abrams and Gaston where you could get a latte and free legal advice, a combination that made no sense anywhere but East Dallas. When word got out that a restaurant was going in, the neighbors did what neighbors do. They complained. Then The Heights opened, the pancakes survived the transition, and the complaining stopped almost overnight.
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Todd and Misty David started Cattleack Barbeque in 2010 as something to do in retirement. That plan did not survive contact with the public. Word got out, lines formed, and what was supposed to be a quiet hobby turned into one of the most decorated barbecue operations in North Texas. In 2023, Todd sold the business to Andrew Castelan, a 34-year-old former accountant who had been working there long enough to know what he was getting into. The name is a pun on Cadillac.
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