Salt & Straw opened this morning on Henderson Avenue. If you’ve heard the name and wondered what the fuss was about, today is a good day to find out.
The Portland-based ice cream company set up at 2323 N. Henderson Ave., Suite 107 — right next door to Gemma, open daily from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. The phone is (214) 716-2440. You can walk up or order ahead at order.thanx.com/saltandstraw.
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There is a pastry that launched a bakery. Not a concept, not a business plan — a single bite of kouign-amann at a New York patisserie that Alison Weinstein and her teenage daughter Ashley shared years ago, looked at each other across the table, and decided that Dallas needed one. That moment is how Sugar and Sage Bakery came to exist at 4314 Lovers Lane in University Park, and the kouign-amann is still the reason to go.
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The Design District keeps stacking up new restaurants like it has something to prove, and at this point it basically does. Carbone, Delilah, Ospi, Maroma — the neighborhood has become its own dining destination in a way that would have been hard to predict five years ago. Alára, the new modern Mediterranean from Turkish-born chef Onur Akan, opened quietly into all of that noise about three weeks ago, and it may be the most personal restaurant in the bunch.
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Summer in Dallas is not for the timid. It is hot, it is relentless, and it demands a game plan. If you are hosting a pool party this season, the smartest thing you can do is stop trying to play bartender the whole afternoon and make one great batch cocktail that does the work for you. Then fill a tray with a few things people will actually talk about. Here is our version of a proper Crave-worthy pool day.
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Matt Balke grew up in Uvalde, a small ranching town near San Antonio where the Spanish name for the place was once Encina — holm oak. He left for Texas Tech, then changed course and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America, graduating salutatorian in 2007. None of that is what shaped him most. That came later, working under James Beard Award winner Sharon Hage at York Street in Dallas — the woman Balke credits as his real culinary education. After York Street, his path ran through Bolsa, The Rustic, SMOKE, and back to Bolsa as executive chef until its closure in early 2020.
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Meridian has been on a quiet roll since reopening at The Village Dallas last fall under executive chef Eduardo Osorio, and now the restaurant is doing something genuinely interesting with the momentum. Starting this month, Meridian is launching the Chef Collective, an ongoing dinner series built around the relationships Osorio has curried in the Dallas dining scene over the past few years. One-night-only events, different collaborators each time, no two dinners the same.
It’s a smart move. Osorio came up through serious kitchens — Catch Hospitality, the 50 Eggs group, Yardbird — and he’s spent enough time in Dallas now to have a real network. This series is the payoff on that. Not a marketing exercise dressed up as a dinner. The chefs on this list are people he actually cooks with, eats with, respects.
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Austin gets the credit. It always does. The breakfast taco conversation in Texas starts and ends there, and if you want to argue about it you’ll lose, because Juan in a Million has been in East Austin since 1980 and the Don Juan — eggs, potato, bacon, cheese, refried beans, wrapped in a flour tortilla the size of your forearm — is legitimately one of the great morning meals in the state. Veracruz All Natural built an empire out of a food truck. The whole city treats breakfast as a competitive sport and it shows.
But Dallas has been doing its own thing quietly for years, and the breakfast burrito scene here rewards people who know where to look. These aren’t the places that show up in hotel concierge guides. Most of them have small parking lots and a line out the door by 8 a.m. on Saturday, and that is exactly the point.
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Pascal Cayet grew up in Argenteuil, just outside Paris, and trained at the Médéric culinary school before landing his first real job at La Tour d’Argent — the legendary Paris restaurant perched above the Seine with Notre Dame Cathedral. He was in his twenties and cooking in one of the most storied rooms in the world. Then he came to America, worked in Indianapolis alongside a young Wolfgang Puck at a restaurant called La Tour, spent a year in the French Army, five years running food and beverage in Bermuda, and arrived in Dallas in 1982 with a clear idea of what he wanted to build.
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