Avner Samuel is cooking in Addison now, at La Stella Italian Steakhouse and Music Lounge, and his latest tasting menu reads a lot like the old days on Oak Lawn. There’s live scallop with osetra caviar, scrambled eggs under black truffles, foie gras on Wagyu. The six courses he recently served are headed for the regular menu soon.
If you dined at Aurora, you’ll see it right away. If you didn’t, some background helps.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Ask Cindy Pedraza about her mother’s first job and she’ll tell you the detail that stuck: she always smelled like chocolate.
That was the 1980s. Andrea Pedraza had taken a part-time job at Dallas’ first chocolate shop, and it turned into a 25-year career. She learned European technique, rose to head of production and became a master chocolatier. Then the recession hit, and mother and daughter lost their jobs around the same time.
In 2009, they opened a shop of their own and called it CocoAndré.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Let’s get one thing out of the way. If your idea of opera is a man in a horned helmet singing for four hours about doom, this is not that opera. (Save the Wagner for March, when The Dallas Opera brings in Lohengrin.)
This one is about a lovesick small-town mechanic, a schoolteacher who is a little too smart for him, a swaggering American soldier, a con man peddling fake medicine, and a bottle of cheap red wine that half the village believes is a magic love potion. Nobody dies onstage. Somebody gets tipsy. Everybody goes home happy. If it were a movie, it would star Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, and you’d stop to watch it every time it came on cable.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Most Dallas diners can name a favorite Lebanese spot, a go-to Indian buffet and three Persian kebab houses without thinking twice. Afghan food rarely makes the list. That’s a shame, because it’s some of the most generous, comforting cooking in the city, and right now you can find it from Lower Greenville to the Sycamore neighborhood of south Fort Worth.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
In 1978, Lower Greenville Avenue was not the place it is now. There wasn’t much business on the strip at all. That year, Pat Snuffer opened a small burger joint next to the Granada Theater with one dining room that seated 55 people. What he had in mind was simple: a fun place where SMU students could get a burger and a cold beer.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
North Texas doesn’t do quiet weekends in late September, and this one might be the busiest of the fall. The State Fair opens Friday. There’s a German festival in McKinney, a Broadway legend at the Meyerson, a honky-tonk headliner at Billy Bob’s, a baseball team that dances between pitches and the Indigo Girls downtown on Sunday night. Here’s how to pace yourself, where to eat and a few tips that’ll save you money and aggravation.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Austin’s MML Hospitality spent years eyeing Dallas. Now it’s here, and it has a list.
The company is run by Larry McGuire, Tom Moorman and hotelier Liz Lambert. McGuire and Moorman opened their first Austin restaurant, Lamberts, in 2006. Today MML runs more than 25 properties in Austin, including the Michelin-recommended Jeffrey’s, plus hotels in New York and New Orleans and restaurants in Houston, Aspen and California.
McGuire has laid out the Dallas plan in order. Neighborhood Sushi comes first, then June’s All Day, then Clark’s Oyster Bar, then three Swedish Hill bakeries. That’s six restaurants in under 18 months, and he has said this could be the group’s last big expansion push.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Sam and Gabby Lopez had the résumés for a traditional path. Both trained at The Culinary Institute of America. Both put in time at The French Laundry and Bouchon Bakery. Then they left corporate kitchen jobs in Chicago in January 2022, moved to Sam’s hometown of Denton and opened a food trailer.
They called it Insurgent, and it’s finally getting walls. The husband-and-wife chefs are opening their first permanent restaurant at the Dallas Farmers Market in late October, in the space at 920 S. Harwood St. that last housed Caribbean Cabana.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
