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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
You know a brunch spot is working when the valet is full, the front patio is full, and nobody at any of the tables seems in a hurry to leave. That is Beverley’s Bistro & Bar on a Saturday around noon. The food is the reason, but the mood is why people stay. A couple at the bar splitting a plate of caviar latkes and not saying much because they do not need to. A family of six crammed into a corner booth with three kinds of eggs between them. Somebody at the next table ordering a second glass of prosecco before their plates have been cleared. You walk in and you feel like you just showed up at a party that was already going.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
A new Chinese restaurant opened on Preston Road in March and it’s already one of the more interesting things to happen to North Dallas dining in a while. It’s called Uptown Dumpling, and the chef running the kitchen — Hao Wenjie — has cooked at a level most people in this city have never encountered.
Chef Hao is a UNESCO Ambassador of Intangible Culinary Heritage. He personally led three China Day banquets at UN Headquarters in New York, events the Los Angeles Times once called an edible cultural white paper. He was part of the founding team behind the Michelin Guide’s launch in Beijing and holds accreditation as a judge with the World Association of Chefs Societies. He ended up at 18101 Preston Rd., Suite 204c, in a strip mall space that used to be Tian Tian. Dallas does things like that.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
A note before we go further. The French Room itself — the grand gilded dining room that earned its reputation over generations — remains closed for dinner. It still hosts afternoon tea and the occasional holiday service, but if you are picturing a full evening inside that baroque space, set the expectation aside for now.
What is open, and what Dallas should be paying attention to, is the French Room Bar next door. This is a separate, smaller room inside The Adolphus, and it is where the serious eating and drinking is happening right now.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There is a pizzeria in Richardson that most people drive right past. No sign on the building, no marquee, no indication from the street that anything remarkable is happening inside. Just a small space at 514 Lockwood Drive, next door to Lockwood Distilling, where Maen Azzam and Sonia Khan are making some of the most serious Neapolitan pizza in North Texas.
The place is called Farina in Grani. It opened in November 2024 and came out of the pandemic the way a lot of the best food businesses do — from boredom and obsession. Khan started baking during lockdown, moved on to pizza, made it for family and friends, then catered events with a portable oven, then decided to do it for real. The name means “flour in grains” and refers to the whole-grain wheat flour they use in the dough — germ, bran, and endosperm together — which gives the crust its signature golden color and a depth of flavor you don’t get from refined flour.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
