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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Kendall Williams cooked her first Thanksgiving dinner by herself when she was thirteen. Whole meal, whole family, no help. That detail tells you more about the restaurant she just opened than anything on the menu does.
Bluebonnet & Thyme Southern Bistro & Bar is open at 2610 N. Houston St. in Victory Park, in the space that used to be Dirty Bones, right across from the arena. It’s her first brick-and-mortar after a decade of building a name in this city, and she calls the food a Cajun and Texas explosion, which is a fair description of what happens when Louisiana heritage runs into Lone Star cooking in the same kitchen.
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Brunch runs every day at Sundown, until three in the afternoon, and the mimosas are two dollars. On Lower Greenville in 2026, that shouldn’t be possible. It’s also not the reason to go, which surprised me.
Sundown at Granada has sat at 3520 Greenville Ave. since 2011, next door to the Granada Theater, both owned by Mike Schoder and Julia Garton. A restaurant attached to a music venue usually cooks like one. This one doesn’t, and it took a second visit to believe it.
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Another Austin concept is coming up I-35, and this one is at least honest about wanting to be a party.
Guest House opens in October at 1900 Cedar Springs Rd. in Uptown, the fourth location for a brand that started in Austin in the spring of 2024 and has since put rooms in Las Vegas and Scottsdale. Aspen is next. The Dallas announcement went out this morning.
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