In 1981, Ana and Tiburcio Enriquez opened a small Tex-Mex restaurant on Lemmon Avenue. They had spent years managing El Chico locations and knew the business from the inside out. What they built at Mia’s was something different — a room that felt like family because it was family, named after their daughter, anchored by recipes that didn’t come from a corporate playbook.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Hendy’s on Henderson just launched its spring menu, and if your last visit was a while ago, this is a reasonable excuse to go back. The restaurant opened last summer in the former Sfuzzi space — walls knocked out, sliding glass doors installed on both sides, the whole building opened up to the patio in a way the old layout never allowed. The back room has dark green walls, brown leather seating, bookshelves, a working fireplace, and antler chandeliers. It doesn’t look like anything else on Henderson.
Chef Peja Krstic — the same Michelin Bib Gourmand chef behind Mot Hai Ba and Pillar — built the original menu. Executive Chef Fares Hussein handles the day-to-day kitchen. Together they’ve put together a spring refresh that keeps prices sensible, most dishes landing between $12 and $26.
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There’s no sign outside. You pull up to Hi Line Drive, the valet points you toward a door, and you walk through velvet drapes into Tango Room. Sixty seats. Mahogany walls, burgundy booths, brass fixtures, and original Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha pieces from Tim Headington’s personal collection. The room feels like somewhere a lot of decisions get made over a lot of good wine.
Headington — The Joule, Forty Five Ten, Commissary, CBD Provisions — built this one with Simon Roberts, who owns Graileys, the members-only wine club where the two met. Roberts runs the wine program himself here, works the floor with sommelier Nick Burns, and the list reflects that personal investment. People come in having already decided what they want to drink and build dinner around it. The room accommodates that without making you feel like you’re doing it wrong.
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Bill Katz flew Blackhawk helicopters for the U.S. Army for twenty years. His wife Johnnie spent twenty years in banking. They spent nine of those years overseas — Europe, Asia, moving every few years the way military families do. When Bill retired in 2001 they settled in the Dallas area, got regular jobs, and then Johnnie decided she wanted something of her own. In December 2003 they bought a sports bar on McKinney Avenue called Frankie’s. Within four years they had tripled the sales and turned it into the top sports bar in DFW.
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When Malai Kitchen opened in West Village in January 2011, the landlord pulled Braden and Yasmin Wages aside and told them he didn’t think the concept had legs. Thai and Vietnamese food in a full-service room — real cocktails, a wine list, actual service — wasn’t something Dallas had done before at this level. Opening night was dead. The two restaurants very close had lines. Malai sent staff over with drink coupons to poach customers from the wait. Fifteen years later, those restaurants are gone. Malai has four locations, its own brewery, and the landlord still comes in for dinner.
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Before there was a Sonny Bryan’s, there was a Thunderbird. A 1955 Ford with a continental kit on the back. There was also a house, and a collection of antique Colt firearms that had taken years to build. In 1957, William Jennings Bryan Jr. — everybody called him Sonny — sold all of it. He and his wife Joanne, who had won the Miss Dallas pageant a decade earlier, raised $6,500 and hired an old carpenter named Don Hoenstein to build a smokehouse at the corner of Inwood Road and Harry Hines Boulevard.
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Preston Center has been missing a rooftop bar for about twenty years. CRAFT Restaurant & Beer Market showed up on April 1 and fixed that, along with a few other things the neighborhood did not know it needed.
The concept started in Calgary in 2011, built by PJ L’Heureux into nine Canadian locations before he decided Dallas was where to make the American move. His partner here is Tom Gaglardi — owner of the Dallas Stars, the man who brought Moxie’s to Dallas years ago and knows how to read this market. The two of them landed at 5974 W. Northwest Highway in the old medical office space across from the Starbucks on Kate Street, gutted it, and built a 10,500-square-foot room with a 360-degree bar at the center and 5,250 square feet of rooftop patio on top. The rooftop is one of the first of that size in Preston Center. On a clear May evening it is the best outdoor seat in this part of Dallas.
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The building at 814 West Davis Street in Oak Cliff started as an automotive garage. A man named Ron Patterson eventually bought it, spent years turning it into a private room — dark, personal, built around the things he liked — and lived in the house just behind it. When Patterson died in 2021, Feargal McKinney acquired the property. He walked in, looked around, and largely left it alone. McKinney said he figured Patterson would have found a favorite stool and never left. He named the bar after himself and opened it in March 2026. That is how Kilmac’s came to exist.
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