Tag Archives: Texas

by | October 20, 2026 · 11:19 am

Sweet Sixteen, Dive Coastal Cuisine Is Still Snider Plaza’s Taste of the Coast

Walk into Dive Coastal Cuisine on Rankin Street on a weekday around noon and you will usually find the same scene. There’s a line at the counter, light pouring through the big front windows, and a neon sign on the back wall telling everyone to dive in. Half the room looks like it came straight from a Pilates class and the other half looks like it came from a closing in Preston Center. Nobody seems to be in a hurry to leave.

Franchesca Nor opened Dive in Snider Plaza in 2010, and it has outlasted a long list of Park Cities restaurants that arrived with more noise and left with less. It is now in its sixteenth year, still chef-owned and still run by the woman whose name is on one of the plates.

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by | October 20, 2026 · 11:00 am

How Kevin Carr Built Community Beer Co. Into a Dallas Institution

Long before he was pouring beer for half of North Texas, Kevin Carr was a guy with a day job in software and a homebrew setup that kept getting more serious. He’s a Dallas native who spent about 25 years starting businesses in financial services, internet technology and manufacturing. One of those was a legal software company that had him traveling constantly, and it was on those trips that he fell for craft beer. He homebrewed for more than 15 years before deciding the hobby deserved a building.

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by | October 19, 2026 · 4:55 pm

Trapèze Brings a Bohemian French Brasserie to a Rebuilt Bishop Arts Bungalow

From the sidewalk on West 8th Street, the house at 240 still looks like what it is: a 1940s bungalow on a quiet block in Bishop Arts. Behind the porch, it is something else entirely now. The structure had to be rebuilt from the ground up, and because the lot sits inside a conservation district, the crew had to do it without changing the face the neighborhood has known for decades.

That house is about to become Trapèze, a French bar and restaurant from Peter Novotny and Dan Murry, the partners behind Ruins and Armoury D.E. in Deep Ellum. Their third project lands six miles southwest of the other two, and the reason has as much to do with history as real estate.

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by | October 19, 2026 · 11:37 am

As Knox Street Grows Up, Cafe Madrid Stays Right Where It Is

Donica Jimenez fell for Spain in a high school classroom. Her Spanish teacher at Hockaday used to come back from trips abroad with slides, and those pictures brought the country to life for her. “I fell in love with Spain before I ever went there,” Jimenez has said.

She went on to study Spanish and Iberian culture and history at SMU. In 1989 she noticed a lease sign in a window on Travis Street and did something very practical. She measured the drive from her house. It came to 1.8 miles. She wanted to stay close to home, and that was close enough. The following year she opened Cafe Madrid at 4501 Travis St., at the corner of Armstrong, one block south of Knox.

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by | October 19, 2026 · 11:19 am

The Chefs Behind Midcult Society Waited for It, and Now It’s Almost Here

Mike Stites and Evan Pemberton met in 2017 in Stephan Pyles’ kitchen at Flora Street Cafe. Stites had come up from Corpus Christi the year before to go to culinary school and work for Wolfgang Puck. Pemberton grew up in Dallas and already had plenty of miles on his knives. The two became friends, and over time the friendship settled into something closer to mentor and student.

In 2019 they moved to Chicago together to cook at Roister, the Alinea Group’s open-hearth restaurant in Fulton Market. A year later they went their separate ways.

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by | October 16, 2026 · 10:40 pm

Saddle Up for the Duke: Chicken Fried Steak at Bandera’s 105-Year-Old OST

The saddles at the counter are real. Somebody wore that leather smooth a long time before you sat down, and the stools at the Old Spanish Trail in Bandera have been holding up ranch hands, bikers, dude ranch guests and road-trippers for the better part of a century. Order the chicken fried steak. Everybody does.

Locals just call it the OST. It opened in 1921 on Main Street, in a building that went up in the 1870s as a general store and later spent the 1930s and ’40s as a dance hall. The name comes from the Old Spanish Trail highway, an early coast-to-coast route meant to run from St. Augustine, Florida, to San Diego, with a stretch that carried motorists through the Hill Country. Interstate 10 eventually took the traffic. The restaurant stayed put, and today it calls itself the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Bandera County. You’ll also hear it described as the second oldest in Texas.

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by | October 16, 2026 · 10:17 pm

Big Tex’s Last Weekend, a Stevie Ray Sunday and Everything Else Worth Doing in DFW

Somewhere around Sunday afternoon, Big Tex is going to say goodbye for another year, and the whole city will feel it a little. This is the last weekend of the State Fair, the first weekend that actually feels like fall, and one of those rare stretches on the North Texas calendar where every corner of the Metroplex has something worth leaving the house for. Here’s how to spend it, and where to eat and drink along the way.

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by | October 16, 2026 · 6:24 pm

Brunch Is an Occasion: Where to Gather and Linger in Dallas

There are two kinds of brunch. One is fuel: eggs, coffee and the check before you’ve finished your second cup. The other is an occasion. You gather a table of people you like, order a round, then another, and look up to find it’s somehow 2:30 and nobody wants to leave.

This list is for the second kind. These are Dallas restaurants where the food is good enough to justify the reservation, the drinks are made with care, and nobody is in a hurry to turn your table.

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