Over the bar, chef Miriam Jimenez is holding her arms out as wide as her reach can go. It’s a striking photo that spans nearly the length of the wall. The meaning feels crystal clear: Chef Jimenez is ready to wrap the entire restaurant in a vigorous hug.
WHAT IF I TOLD YOU you didn’t need to go to the State Fair of Texas to devour the foods from hell. Enter the gates, passing by the monolith of Big Tex, you will encounter a wagon-red doughnut. What is it? Is it cherry-flavored? Nope. Is it from the darkest deepest…
No offense to American cheese, but the slice of yellow doesn’t win every time. Don’t get us wrong. It’s a perfect bit of yellow creaminess. American cheese melts as expertly as a Salvador Dali clock. Your eyes swirl as you take a bite. None of that means it gets to…
There was absolutely no way a burger was going to be on the menu. Nope. They would not be swayed by the gravity pull from planet beef. No way. The previous owner had a griddled cheeseburger on the menu of this taqueria for years in South Dallas — the building…
There isn’t a better place to sit in the city when you’re there. You’re sitting better than anyone around: The lights behind the bar twinkle, refracting through bottles. The blue-and-white checkered tile is smooth and perfectly accepting of a solo diner. The counter of the Grape Restaurant can only hold…
It’s been six short months since Ernesto and Alfredo Pena opened their family’s burger hut. In restaurant years, five months and change is primordial. It’s still at the cellular level, a tender and fragile age when the slightest predator could gobble it up. The baby-blue joint is huddled against Gus Thomasson…
Paradise is a freestanding pickle bar. The Texas flag is pinned up behind the nursed-for troughs of diced and round onions, dill pickles both chopped and crinkle-cut, jalapeños both whole and sliced and an evenly troweled, cold container of butter. A really good pickles, onions and peppers bar can save…
The Melios brothers are too busy to chat right now. Toast is halved and buttered as fast as hands can move them. The dishes, heaped with crusty hash browns and over-easy eggs, clatter as they drop on the counter. Mike Melios is facing the griddle, skinny in a white shirt…
On the sixth day, Popeyes Louisiana Chicken created a sandwich. They rested the day before, having built monuments of MSG in the people’s bloodstream. Next, Popeyes, in its infinite wisdom, rolled the sandwich out nationwide. It’s out there, lurking, for $3.99, and it’s an awe-striking thing — a stupendous two-hander…
Sandwiches are Kaci and Robert Lyford’s second business. Their first was roving the state and country with buckets of paint. He’d been a chef since pre-Y2K, a graduate of ye olde culinary school, and, somehow, they ended up with an interior painting business. A few things happened next that sent…
The construction team shovels crumbles of scalding hot asphalt into a divot in East Louisiana Street. Just past old downtown McKinney, Cookie’s Mexican Food’s lights are on, despite the street being carved up, and the open sign is askew in the window. Their access, the road near the main thoroughfare,…
There have been whispers — David Haynes has heard the gossip from friends — that he’s restaurant cheating. It’s been about five years since he and wife and business partner Catherine Jacobus opened the doors of a thin-crust pizza joint on the corner of Elm and Good Latimer, and they’re embracing…
How one Dallas family made an empire out of a family pad Thai recipe.
It’s standing room only at Burger House. Lunch is a blur of baskets: Burger drops to paper. Paper is smushed into a ball. Trash is crushed down. For the staff, bunching into the tiny, seven-decades-old kitchen is an Olympic performance. They’ve synchronized burger-flipping, steam-hopping and order-calling. “It’s going to move…
There are whispers from the bar when the bologna sandwich hits the counter. Flanked on each side by a duo of dudes, the sandwich – taller than any bologna sandwich you’ve ever seen, toasted and sturdy as a fortress -elicits genuine utterances of “Wow” on each side. Instinctively, my arms…
In 2019, it’s harder than you’d think to find a diner that serves truly great food — and a truly great burger. Jonathon’s Oak Cliff fits that bill.
As Dallas restaurants source local, more sustainable beef (and pay higher and higher rents), burger prices are on the rise — but you can still find a killer cheap Dallas burger for less than $10.
As burger joints like Liberty Burger have added more beef alternatives to their menus, they’re having a hard time keeping up with customer demand for alternative burgers.
Oh, how we loathe burger quirky burger bun substitutes — except for one: the arepa. Arepa TX and Shoals have proven not just that it can be done, but that it is fantastic.
The Impossible Burger has proven popular in beef-loving Dallas, and the company behind it says other animal proteins like fish and chicken are next. But a product shortage is leaving some Dallas restaurants without the popular lab-grown meat.
May is National Burger Month (yes, that’s a thing) and to celebrate, we’re spending an entire week celebrating what may well be Dallas’ officially unofficial dish: the burger. From April 30 to May 8, writer Nick Rallo will explore every corner of Dallas burgers, from the grass-fed to the uber-greasy…
If Dallas had a singular dish that best represents our culinary past and present, it may very well be the burger, a staple on almost every menu in town, from steakhouses to vegan diners and everything in between. But as Americans are reconsidering their meat consumption, what does the future of Dallas burgers look like?
