For years, one of my favorite spots to get a quick lunch in Irving has been Desi District, a fast-casual Indian restaurant and grocery with modern branding, scrumptious snacks, fusion “taco-dosas” and a case full of subcontinent-flavored cupcakes.
Today is, apparently, National Hamburger Day. I’m sure this was decided upon by somebody who wanted to sell a lot of hamburgers, and, luckily for them, we all want to eat some. Not like National Rutabaga Mash Day or National Mr. Pibb Day.
What a difference a location can make. Taquero started in West Dallas, in a building with no room for indoor seating and hardly any room for cooking. Chef-owner Fino Rodriguez served meals out of a window to customers who sat at bar stools or on parking spaces which he’d converted into a patio.
his is a big year for Revolver Taco Lounge. For one thing, Dallas’ best Mexican restaurant is headed home. After four years away, Revolver will finally reopen a location in Fort Worth, the city where it began. Chef-owner Regino Rojas, who first opened the Fort Worth taqueria…
Dallas is halfway through electing a new slate of city council members. Most of the seats were decided in the May 1 general election, with six to be decided by runoffs on June 5.
The state of Indiana has given exactly two culinary gifts to the rest of the world. One of them is Wonder Bread, which some of us Hoosiers are apologetic about. But the other one is our hubcap-sized offering to the bar food gods: the fried pork tenderloin sandwich. In theory,…
On an ordinary day, in an ordinary world, someone would probably be singing at D Jackson BBQ right now. Music flows through this shoebox-sized dining room and kitchen in the southwestern reaches of Oak Cliff, just off Cockrell Hill Road.
I’ve been the Dallas Observer’s food critic for five years now, and as you might expect, I’ve gotten some hate mail. After one editorial in 2019, an angry reader blocked me on Facebook (and one restaurant owner wrote a reasoned, non-angry reply for the paper). Restaurant owners and chefs have…
The coronavirus pandemic has been good for parking lots. Well, it’s been good for people repurposing parking lots, for freeing ourselves from the belief that they’re only good for holding cars and generating ungodly summer heat. Across Dallas and its suburbs, restaurants are putting picnic tables in former parking spaces,…
This winter two of the Dallas area’s favorite barbecue spots suffered serious damage, one in a fire and another in the February snowstorm. They’re facing starkly different roads back to recovery. On April 10, Zavala’s Barbecue reopened its doors to customers in Grand Prairie. The spot had been knocked out…
You can sense the excitement in the Dallas restaurant industry: Patio weather is here, thousands of people are getting vaccinated every day and dining rooms are beginning to welcome back customers who’ve previously stuck to takeout. The excitement isn’t limited to current restaurants. In 2021, we’re poised to see a…
The pressure’s on at Encina. This new restaurant a few blocks west of the Bishop Arts District opened in October, seven months into the pandemic, with high expectations. It replaces Bolsa, a beloved neighborhood hangout that drew crowds into the same space for almost 12 years. Now Bolsa is gone,…
OK, fine: Downtown Dallas has a new steakhouse, Nusr-Et, which charges up to $1,000 to grill you a steak and then theatrically bounce too much salt off somebody’s body and onto your meal. Are you happy? Nusr-Et is a global chain of 18 ultra-expensive steakhouses in cities like New York,…
On March 8, 2020, a crowd converged on Four Corners Brewing Co. for a festival dedicated to Filipino food. Popular, rising-star pop-up businesses run by Filipino-American chefs with day jobs served more than a thousand customers that day. At 2 p.m., the wait for a bowl of noodles was 50…
Invasion was supposed to be primarily a sandwich restaurant, with occasional side gigs doing good for the community. Instead, in its first year this tiny East Dallas diner became a hub for goodwill, volunteering and feeding the needy. All that charity started the day before Invasion opened. On Monday, March…
(Note: We’re revisiting some of Brian Reinhart’s picks for our annual list of Top 100 Dallas Restaurants to see how they’re faring in what we hope are the final months of the pandemic.) When the February snowstorm cut power at Joe Zavala’s house, he packed the kids in the car…
One of the biggest differences between eating in Dallas and, say, Austin is Dallas’ relative lack of food trucks and trailers. Yes, our city has a few food truck parks, most notably at Klyde Warren Park. But if you’ve ever traveled to another city and enjoyed food trailers behind breweries,…
(Note: We’re revisiting some of Brian Reinhart’s picks for our annual list of Top 100 Dallas Restaurants to see how they’re faring in what we hope are the final months of the pandemic.) Falafel. Crab cakes. Buffalo wings. Paneer. Escargot. They’re the foods of half the world, and they have…
Eleven months have passed since Dallas dining rooms closed in response to the arrival of the coronavirus. Some of them still haven’t reopened. A small group of restaurant owners have declined to resume dine-in service, instead sticking to takeout, curbside pickup, delivery or outdoor patios. Most of them operate very…
(Note: We’re revisiting some of Brian Reinhart’s picks for our annual list of Top 100 Dallas Restaurants to see how they’re faring in what we hope are the final months of the pandemic.) Sapp Sapp Lao and Thai Kitchen, a 3-year-old Laotian restaurant in downtown Irving, is for sale after…
I have a simple, attainable New Year’s resolution for the year 2021: I want to eat every single thing on the menu at Ngon Vietnamese Kitchen. Ngon, which opened on Greenville Avenue last summer and is pronounced “non,” is maybe the most exciting new restaurant to hit Dallas during the pandemic…
There’s a first-rate new shawarma restaurant in Plano. And if it weren’t for the coronavirus pandemic, it might not have opened. We’ve heard many, too many, stories about restaurants closing because of the virus. Pita Town’s story is the opposite. For years, the business operated at local farmers markets in…
