There is a restaurant in Denton called Osteria Il Muro with 22 seats, a backyard garden, and a menu that changes every single day. It is one of the hardest reservations in North Texas. People set calendar alarms for the last Monday of each month — the one morning the next month’s tables are released — and still don’t always get in.
The chef who runs it is a James Beard finalist for Best Chef: Texas. His name is Scott Girling. Most of Dallas has never heard of him.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Jackson Kalb was 13 years old the first time he walked into a real kitchen. Not his family’s kitchen — his parents, by his own admission, were not good home cooks. The kitchen he walked into was Mélisse in Santa Monica, a two-Michelin-star French restaurant, and he was there because a guest at one of his backyard catering gigs happened to know the chef. That chef was Josiah Citrin. He let the kid in.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Most people don’t think about Plano when they’re planning a serious dinner. That’s their mistake, and Jashan is the reason to correct it.
The restaurant opened quietly at 7401 Lone Star Drive in Legacy North a few months back, and what’s happening inside is unlike anything else in North Texas. The man behind it, Prasanna Singaraju, spent years in tech before he walked away from all of it to do this. He’d been standing in a parking garage near the Dallas North Tollway, staring at an empty retail space, imagining what it could become. That’s not a metaphor. He actually stood there and pictured the restaurant. Now it exists.
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The tortilla is the first thing you need to understand about Molino Olōyō. Not the filling, not the protein, not the salsa. The tortilla. That’s where this whole operation begins, and once you taste one, you’ll understand why chef Olivia López has spent the last five years obsessing over it.
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Dallas and Fort Worth have produced a shelf full of cookbooks worth owning. Not novelty books, not coffee-table objects, not celebrity tie-ins. Real cookbooks, written by real working chefs and food writers who spent decades in the kitchens and markets of this region and had something worth saying about what they found. Here is the list.
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Farmers market season is back, and with it the question every Dallas cook eventually asks: which one is actually worth the Saturday morning. There are dozens of markets in the metroplex, and they are not all the same thing. Some are real producer-only markets where everything sold has to be grown, raised, or made by the person selling it. Others are flea-market hybrids where the produce is mostly resold from a wholesaler and the real action is the soaps and candles. Both have their place. They are not the same place.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Duck is having a moment. Walk through any half-dozen new Dallas menus in 2026 and you will find duck showing up where it was not showing up five years ago — in confit on brunch plates, in kebab form next to flatbread, sliced over grilled endive, glazed and hung in the window of a dumpling shop, served whole on a sharing plate at the most-talked-about new restaurant in town. Chicken is still king. Beef is still beef. But duck has quietly moved up the menu in a way that says something about where Dallas dining is going.
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The drive-in almost disappeared. Texas had nearly four hundred of them in the nineteen-fifties, more than any state in the country, and now there are fewer than twenty. The ones that survived did it on stubbornness, mostly — family-owned places that never stopped believing a warm night and a big screen and a car full of people was a good way to spend a Friday. Some of them have been running the same single screen since 1948. Some have expanded into four and seven screens. They all still tune to FM radio for the sound. They all still sell popcorn that tastes better than it has any right to. And every one of them is worth the drive from Dallas for a weekend.
Here are the five I would point you toward, from the closest one to the furthest.
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