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.
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The paddlewheel is turning again at Fair Park.
If you grew up going to the State Fair, you know the Old Mill Inn by sight. It’s the timber-and-stone building on Grand Avenue with the big water wheel out front. After the pandemic it went dark and stayed that way for years. This fair season it’s open again as a full-service restaurant and bar, and when the gates open on Friday, September 25, it will be feeding anyone who needs a break from the Midway.
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The wind shows up before the mountains do. It comes off the Southern Patagonian Ice Field with nothing to slow it down, flattens the tall grass across the steppe, and leans on the car door hard enough that you have to push back. Then the clouds pull apart for a minute and the towers appear, three gray granite spires standing over Torres del Paine National Park, close enough that you forget how cold your hands are.
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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.
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Kent Rathbun has been one of the defining names in Dallas dining for the better part of three decades. He opened Abacus in 1999, followed it with Jasper’s in 2003, cooked for Queen Elizabeth and the Bush inaugural ball, beat Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America in 2008, and built a reputation that still carries weight in a city that moves on fast. These days he runs a catering operation and a barbecue venture with his wife Tracy, consults for a growing list of clients, and just helped open a restaurant in Burleson that carries his fingerprints all over it.
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Tim Love has opened 20 restaurants across Fort Worth. Steakhouses, barbecue, Mexican, Italian, burgers, a music hall, a hotel. At some point you run out of cuisines to tackle, and Love apparently landed on that point sometime last year. His answer was hummus.
Meraki opened March 17 at 1615 Rogers Road in the TCU corridor, a few blocks west of Woodshed Smokehouse, inside the space that used to house Courtside Kitchen at the Courtside Pickleball complex. Love says he looked around the near west side of Fort Worth and realized there wasn’t a real dedicated Mediterranean restaurant in the neighborhood. So he built one.
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Walk past Cock & Bull on Gaston Avenue and you might not stop. There’s no big sign pulling you in, no neon in the window doing its job. Just a door, and behind it one of the better neighborhood bars in East Dallas.
It’s small in there. One bar, a wall of booths, red walls with paintings of roosters and cattle, a jukebox somebody actually feeds money into. The wood is old. The lighting is low. When the place fills up on a weekend, and it does, you’re aware of everyone in the room. That’s not a complaint — that’s the whole point of a pub like this. People come here because they want to be somewhere, not just somewhere with a drink.
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Fall lands on the calendar this week, even if the thermometer hasn’t gotten the memo. Between a wine festival taking over Grapevine, the Cowboys’ home opener, back-to-back J. Cole shows, a ballet company built around one of history’s more scandalous writers, and a full night of gallery openings across the city, there’s enough here to fill every night through Sunday. Here’s what’s worth building a week around.
This Calander has family friendly options, date night and even singles fun-filled activities available. Check it out.
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