Nuri Steakhouse is trying something it’s never done before: a happy hour built around more than just drinks. On Thursday, August 20, from 5 to 7 p.m., the Uptown steakhouse launches Geonbae Hour, a one-night event named for the Korean word for “cheers” that folds cocktails, food, a whisky tasting, and even a beauty consultation into a single ticket.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Some meetings need more than a sandwich at your desk. There’s a particular kind of lunch, the one where the room matters as much as the check, where a client walks in and immediately recalibrates how seriously to take the meeting. Dallas has always been good at this, a city built on handshake deals and long lunches that quietly turn into the real business of the day. Here are seven restaurants that earn their keep in exactly that role, each one bringing something different to the table beyond just good food, whether it’s history, pedigree, pacing, or a room built specifically for the kind of conversation that shouldn’t be rushed.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
El Molino is opening a second Dallas location, and this one comes with more room to work with. Vandelay Companies opens the new restaurant in Preston Royal Shopping Center on Monday, August 10, a little over a year after the original debuted in Snider Plaza.
The new spot sits at 6025 Royal Lane, Suite 250, taking over the roughly 6,000-square-foot space that formerly housed Vandelay’s own Anchor Sushi Bar. That’s a real jump in size from the Snider Plaza original, and it’s intentional. Vandelay CEO Hunter Pond said the company opened Anchor Bar in two different footprints specifically to test which format worked best for each concept, and concluded Anchor belongs in a smaller, more intimate room while El Molino’s high-energy Tex-Mex style needed the bigger stage Preston Royal offers.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Text the group chat, pick a starting point, and let the day figure itself out. There’s a particular kind of Saturday that starts with “let’s just grab one drink” and ends somewhere around sunset with a group photo nobody remembers taking, and Dallas has more than enough patios built for exactly that. The trick is picking a spot with room to stay a while, food worth ordering more than once, and a vibe that doesn’t crash the second the sun gets too bright to sit outside comfortably.
These five deliver on all three, whether the crew wants live music in the background, a rooftop view of downtown, or a patio small enough that everyone ends up in one conversation instead of scattered across three tables. Grab whoever’s free, don’t overthink the plan past “let’s meet at noon,” and let one of these carry the rest of the day.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Edoardo Seghesio left his family’s vineyards in Piedmont, Italy, in 1886 and landed in Sonoma County with nothing but the same skill he’d grown up with. He found work at the Italian Swiss Colony, one of the region’s earliest wine operations, and did well enough there to marry his boss’s niece, Angela. Together they bought 56 acres of land with one goal: plant their own vineyard and make their own wine. In 1895, Edoardo put Zinfandel vines into what the family still calls the Home Ranch, in Alexander Valley, and some of those original vines are still alive and still being harvested today, a hundred and thirty years later.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Sketches of Spain served its last pintxo on July 19, closing the book on six years as Oak Cliff’s only pincho bar. The Bishop Arts spot built its following on Basque-style small plates meant to be pierced with a toothpick and shared across a table: patatas bravas, boquerones, ham and cheese croquettes, quail egg-topped chorizo, and a paella that regulars treated as the closest thing to a trip to Spain available in Dallas. The send-off came the Sunday before closing, an informal goodbye party where $20 bought unlimited pintxos and a glass of sangria alongside, presumably, a lot of stories about the place.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
DFW Restaurant Week has been running long enough to outlast most of the restaurants that participated in its first year, and this August it hits a real milestone: 30 years, making it the second-longest-running restaurant week campaign in the country. The main event runs August 10 through September 7, with a Preview Weekend August 6 through 9 for anyone who doesn’t want to wait for the official kickoff. Reservation Day landed July 16, which means the full list of participating restaurants, expected to run past 160 across Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and Denton counties, is already public and booking is open now through DFWRestaurantWeek.com.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Kostas Lazanas describes himself as half Greek and half redneck, and that combination turns out to be exactly what Rowlett needed. He grew up training under Charlie Venetis at Opa Grille as a kid, spent years working the floor and the kitchen at other Greek restaurants around Dallas, and in 2013 finally opened a place of his own on Lakeview Parkway, a space that used to be a Chinese restaurant. He picked the name for what it means, not for any connection to the place he trained, and thirteen years later it’s still one of the most reliably good Greek kitchens in the eastern suburbs.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
