Review: Woodway's Cafe

This Elm Street eatery has too many lunch specials to mention

Comments (0) By Alice Laussade Thursday, Feb 7 2008

Lunch specials: too many to mention

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Woodways Cafe

711 Elm St.
Dallas, TX 75202-3214

Category: Restaurant > American

Region: Downtown & Deep Ellum

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Details

711 Elm St., No. 102
214-741-3420

Closed Location

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When you mosey into Woodway's Café, your attention is immediately focused on the 50 million menus up on the wall. There's the giant menu, there are letter-sized paper menus that hang from above the register listing specials and then there's a white board with more specials on it. If they don't have what you want for lunch here, you're one picky mother. They have nachos. They have burritos. They have fried fish platters, burgers, pancakes, hot dogs, salads, grits.

I ordered a chicken-fried steak sandwich, fries and a diet Dr Pepper (Did you know the Internet says aspartame can cause epilepsy and brain tumors?) at the register, and they said, "$7.31." I paid, they gave me my number, and while I was waiting I took in the scenery. And I quickly realized that at Woodway's Café, food comes first—and buying the shit for the walls came last. It's like they realized the day before they opened that the 50 menus weren't going to be enough art for the walls, so they raided a poster store. When that wasn't enough they decided to buy all the leftover stuff the interior designers of Chili's and Bennigan's looked at, said, "That shit is tacky," and didn't buy. And when all of that stuff up didn't help, they figured if they wanted this place to be successful they'd better serve really good food. So, they do.

And then I read the sign on the wall that says if you ever feel like it, you can reserve the side room at Woodway's for morning meetings. Fuck yeah. I'll be doing that as soon as possible because morning meetings suck, but morning meetings with a short stack and a couple or 20 sides of bacon? That's what I call bearable.

When I saw my cute little chicken-fried steak sandwich waiting there for me with my seasoned fries, I had to fight the urge to wave to it and say (in that high-pitched baby speak that people without babies do when they talk to babies), "Hey there, little chicken-fried yumness. I'm gonna eatchoo. Yes I am. With my face." At least, I think I fought that urge. It's tough to say whether I really did because after the first bite everything gets kinda blurry, and all of a sudden I looked down at my plate and everything was gone and I felt pleasantly full of lunch.