Nostalgia is like cocaine: It's addictive, and the happy memories build, but might not be all that happy when confronted with someone else's opinions or, you know, reality. You might understand if you're married and have ever taken your spouse back to your hometown to share your favorite childhood restaurant. My brain has suppressed the name of the Nacogdoches restaurant that my East Texan wife swore was God's chosen Tex-Mex joint, but my stomach recalls the meal from 30 years ago, and it is NOT a happy memory. To be fair, my wife still makes retching noises whenever our visit to my beloved hometown barbecue shack in backwoods Illinois comes up. But she's my wife; obviously, she has questionable taste.
With that in mind, here are some suggestions for additions to the list from our readers on social media:
Shawn from Facebook:
I will date myself and say York Street and Star Canyon ...Hank's reply:
Yeah, I forgot about Star Canyon, but then again, there are so many restaurants that the list of 50-odd places just scratches the surface. And I have an old brain, of course.Prompted this from our restaurant writer Chris Wolfgang:
I totally forgot about Star Canyon... first splurge meal when I moved to Dallas.Coincidentally, Star Canyon, the restaurant in the Centrum that helped bring Stephan Pyles national fame, was our first splurge meal when my wife and I moved to Dallas in 1997. My old brain remembers the cool Texas-centric decor, a cowboy rib-eye so good it made you want to buy a Stetson and house-made honey vanilla ice cream that's still the best we've ever eaten. Also, we were plainly eating out of our financial league, and the staff seemed to make extra effort to be welcoming and friendly.
sereanwahina on Instagram showed just how attached we get to places that feed us well:
J’s Breakfast & Burgers my former home away from home 😭💔
Nicholas on Facebook:
It’s a scandal Char Bar didn’t make the cut.Scandal seems a bit harsh, but the passion is understood. I mean, I'm not saying that a certain person's wrong opinions about Southern Illinois barbecue genius are enough to make anyone doubt their choice of life partner, but it was close.
Joyce agreed with Nicholas, but questioned Hank's mention of Spaghetti Warehouse:
yeah cuz spaghetti warehouse is disgusting nobody misses that bland marinaraI never ate at Char Bar, the long-time diner on Lower Greenville that closed in 2019, but did eat at Spaghetti Warehouse in the West End once. That was enough.
Some other places our readers thought deserved mention include Tillman's Corner in Oak Cliff, Dixie House on Gaston Avenue (yes ... loved that place) and Peggy Sue's BBQ in Snider Plaza. The baby back ribs and fried okra at the latter were spot-on, but we especially loved the small but loaded salad bar. For the youngsters out there, a salad bar was a self-service style of salad delivery back in the days before the germ theory of disease was widely known. They were great.
Bushwood had a list of missing favorites:
Some good memories. Add: Ferrari's, AquaKnox, Il Sorrento, Green Room, Sambucca (original Elm Street location)Timothy on Facebook touched our mystic chords of memory:
Steak and AleAh, Steak and Ale — another great salad bar (don't judge), the first place I ever tasted a sirloin (I did mention the backwoods of Illinois) and the first place I used my first credit card just out of college in 1984, dining in Amarillo with the woman who eventually would become my wife (yeah, I had game). The Dallas-based chain, founded by casual-dining pioneer Norman Brinker, shut down in 2008, but plans are in the works to bring Steak and Ale back. However, as Culture Map Dallas' Teresa Gubbins reported this month, a franchise intended to open in Grand Prairie won't be happening.
If one does arrive in Dallas, will we visit it? Probably not. Happy memories are precious, and the line between pixie dust and coke is thin. Why risk spoiling them?
See more missed restaurants on our Instagram post:
