Willow Bend closed for good on August 31. Nearly every store handed over its keys that day, and most of what’s left inside is headed for the wrecking ball to clear space for a $3 billion redevelopment that could someday include a Dallas Stars arena. Two restaurants stayed behind anyway. Knife Steakhouse and Mexican Bar Company are still open, still serving dinner, inside a mall that’s on its way to being demolished around them.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Seventeen years is a long run for anything in Dallas dining, and DIFFA Dallas brings Burgers + Burgundy back on Thursday, October 1, on the Glen Lawn at The Village Dallas. John Tesar built the thing and still hosts it. The setup hasn’t changed much either. Chefs take stations on a lawn, each one builds a burger, the wine keeps coming, and the money goes to organizations doing HIV/AIDS work across North Texas.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Happy hour burgers have a bad reputation, and most of them earn it. A restaurant slaps a discount on a sad, dry patty for two hours a day and calls it a deal. You end up paying half price for something you wouldn’t order at full price either.
That’s not what’s happening at the five places below. There’s a difference between a bar burger going cheap and a real restaurant discounting the same burger it serves all night, made the same way, by the same kitchen, just priced lower for a stretch of the afternoon. These are the second kind. And sometimes only a great burger will hit the spot.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Hispanic Heritage Month began yesterday, and today, September 16, is Mexican Independence Day. Dallas will mark it with parades and festival stages across the city. Oak Cliff has been marking it every day for years, in a building most of Dallas drives past without a second look.
Juan Gabriel is the first thing you see. Life-size, unmoving, standing guard just inside the door on West Jefferson Boulevard. Past him, nine rooms hold sculpture, ceramics, jewelry, textiles and paintings pulled from more than ten countries, Mexico down through Argentina, each piece chosen by hand rather than ordered by the crate. This is Mercado369, and a city forgets it has a place like this until someone walks them through the door.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
For 95 years, a good many Dallas family meals started with picking up a tray. You slid it along the rail, read your way past a wall of American presidents, and tried to make up your mind before you reached the squash casserole. Highland Park Cafeteria fed this city from 1925 until the spring of 2020, and anyone who ate there can still tell you what they ordered.
Plenty of Dallas diners never stood in one of those lines, so a word about what this place was. Say cafeteria today and most people picture a school lunchroom. The old Southern cafeteria ran on its own rules. You picked up a tray and worked your way down a long counter of salads, entrées, vegetables, breads, and desserts, pointing at what you wanted while the staff behind the glass filled your plates. Everything came from scratch out of the kitchen behind the line, and you paid at the far end. At Highland Park Cafeteria, a staffer would help carry your tray to the table.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Gabe Sanchez saved up for years to open the Black Swan Saloon. When he finally did, in 2010, he put it in Deep Ellum on West Elm Street and built it around a simple idea: artisan cocktails at working-man prices, served by someone who actually knew what he was doing. There was no menu. There was a velvet painting of Clint Eastwood behind the bar. The shelves were lined with house-infused liquors Gabe made himself — cold-brewed with farmers market fruit, nuts, coffee, whatever was right that week. You told him your spirit and your mood and he made something. People drove across town for it. Then they drove across town again.
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Cedar Springs Road at 1:30 in the morning operates on its own set of rules. The bars are still going, the sidewalks are still busy, and at some point everyone on that strip remembers they’re hungry. Most of the kitchens in Oak Lawn have already called it. Zio Al’s hasn’t.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Senegal is about as far west as you can go on the African continent before you hit the Atlantic. Dakar, the capital, is a port city — noisy, packed, ocean-salted, alive. People eat well there. They have for a long time. And the dish at the center of all of it has one of those names that stops people cold the first time they see it on a menu.
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