Two years is a long time for a restaurant to sit half-announced. Docent Steak & Lounge first surfaced in Dallas back in the spring of 2024, promising samurai armor, a Kobe beef program, and a “museum-like” dinner unlike anything else in the Harwood District. Then it went quiet. The website stalled on a summer 2024 opening date that never happened, the socials went dark, and for a while it looked like the whole thing had quietly stalled out. It hadn’t. Docent is finally opening this fall, and Harwood Hospitality Group held onto every bit of ambition from that original announcement.
Francesco Farris was thirteen years old the first time he cooked for anyone other than his own family. It was New Year’s Eve, and he’d decided, the way only a thirteen-year-old can decide something like this, that he was going to make dinner for his friends. He remembered his mother’s simple pasta, just olive oil, garlic, and one long, thin chile pepper. He went to the market in Sardinia looking for that pepper. He couldn’t find one that size. So he grabbed ten of the small ones instead, figuring the math would work out.
Élephante opens its doors in Uptown Dallas on September 1, and the whole idea behind it traces back to a rock. Back in the summer of 2014, Wish You Were Here Group founder Nicholas Mathers was traveling through Pantelleria, a small volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, when he came across a natural stone formation called the Arco dell’Elefante, a shape carved by wind and water that stretches out into the sea like an elephant reaching for a drink.
That image stuck with him. It became the name, and more than that, it became the whole feeling the restaurant has spent years trying to bottle: long afternoons, unhurried food, the particular kind of ease that only shows up when nobody’s checking a watch.
Al Biernat’s is finally doing something it hasn’t done in almost thirty years: crossing over into Fort Worth. The Dallas steakhouse just signed a lease on a building at 913 Houston St., across from the Flat Iron Building and directly opposite where the city’s new Convention Center ballroom is going up. It’ll be the restaurant’s third location, and its first outside Dallas proper.
Downtown Dallas has never had much in the way of Indian food, and if you’ve noticed that too, you’re not imagining it. Most of the city’s best options sit out in Irving, Plano, Richardson, and Frisco, which makes sense given where a lot of Dallas’s Indian community has settled, but it’s always meant a drive if you wanted a proper curry after work. Gymkhana just changed that math.
The whistle sounds before you see the smoke. Then the smoke comes, curling up over farmland that Amish families have worked for generations, and a locomotive built for a different century pulls slowly into view. This is Strasburg, Pennsylvania, home to the oldest continuously operating railroad in the country, chartered in 1832. What happens over the following days is where the real trip lives.
A word of honesty before anything else: Strasburg Rail Road is not an overnight sleeper train. The signature excursion is a 45-minute, nine-mile round trip through 2,500 acres of Lancaster County farmland, out to Paradise, Pennsylvania, and back. There are no berths, no sleeping cars, nothing resembling the Orient Express. What Strasburg offers instead is something quieter and, in its own way, harder to replicate: a working piece of American railroading history, still running on steam, still passing through the same Amish countryside it always has. Built around three days, this is everything worth knowing before you go.
Houston is trying to copy something Dallas built almost by accident. 55 Seventy started four years ago as a place for Preston Center residents to store wine they didn’t have room for at home. Members would rent space, open a bottle on the couches while they were there, and eventually didn’t want to leave. Owner Tommy Shuey didn’t set out to run a restaurant. He built one anyway because that’s what the members actually wanted.
Sunday’s at Lovers Seafood & Market run from 11 in the morning until 8 at night, one long stretch where lunch and dinner just blend into each other. That’s really brunch here, not a separate menu with a name on it, just the regular lineup served early enough that mimosas make sense with it.
