Tim Byres isn’t oblivious to the irony. “There’s some independent restaurants up here, but it’s nothing like Uptown,” he says, laying out his reasoning for opening a second location of Smoke in Plano. Most neighborhoods closer to downtown Dallas offer a wide selection of locally owned places to eat, while…
If you stop by the Erdeljac’s new Kessler Park Eating House and don’t order the pierogis, you’re doing it wrong. They’re listed on the menu with the other appetizers like there is nothing special about them, but there is. They should be listed in a bold font, maybe five to…
Wake up and smell the pork’s assorted, Dallas. What is pork’s assorted, you ask? Well, from the look of the brown striated bits, the gray, ventricle-like pieces and the blocks of dark scarlet that occupied the bottom of my cháo bowl, it’s a lot of things, none of which Westerners…
Big Fatty’s Spanking Shack: funny name, serious struggle. “The food has never been the problem,” says Gail Patterson, who originally founded Big Fatty’s as a catering company specializing in spicy foods and barbecue out of her Valley View home in 1996. “It’s always about something else.” She’s not kidding. Gail…
A long time ago, in an office cafeteria far, far away, I developed an all consuming chicken salad habit. I ordered the dressed bird in sandwich form, mostly, and occasionally on a bed of greens minus the bread. This was my lunch order five days a week for at least…
Travis Heim’s passion for meat can be traced from when an early ancestor sneaked into America by way of cattle boat in Galveston, to when Heim attended a barbecue event and chatted up Aaron Franklin, seeking advice on meat-smoking. Soon after, Heim and his wife, Emma, begin their meatopian journey…
Last winter, we told you, reluctantly, that Mr. Max in Irving had closed, seemingly forever. People loved this place, were deeply passionate about it. But the owner had died; there was no succession plan. Down went one apparently great izakaya. But in February, news came that Mr. Max had been…
Nick Rallo eats burgers. Like, a lot of them. I would say that my love of burgers began at the moment of conception, but grew to its modern form in Los Angeles. I was there for a few years after college, working late into those cocktail-cold California nights, and there…
If someone in the know tells you that Ten, the new ramen restaurant from Tei-An’s Teiichi Sakurai, is standing room only, they don’t mean that when the restaurant’s seating is full you have to dine on your feet. They mean there are no chairs or tables in the tiny restaurant…
Every time I visit Sushi Bayashi, the Japanese movie Tampopo jump-kicks into my brain. I think it’s partly because the restaurant’s locale, Phil Romano’s Trinity Groves, was built on a desolate patch of dust that subtly recalls the landscape of so many Western movie scenes. It’s especially apparent if you’re…
I measure all Tex-Mex restaurants by their fajitas. The simple dish of grilled meats and vegetables gives a great window into how the restaurant handles ingredients and, usually, what you can expect from the rest of the menu. So when I walked into the new Primo’s to dine for the…
Tim Pregler is part backyard-barbecue-professor, part wood-fired charity coordinator. A 57-year old tech consultant from Fort Worth, he founded the Karma Que charitable barbecue collective in 2012 with help from his wife Kim. Three years later, Karma Que consists of three competitive barbecue teams that raise money at cook-offs and…
The bartender slams two milkshakes down in front of us. “Bam!” I shoot my date a look as if to say Get a load of this guy. Does he think he’s Emeril? My date volleys back with eyes that say I am going to steal your shake. Oh, how quickly…
The following are transcripts of emails detailing events that began in Dallas, Texas on March 22, 2015. The emails, obtained by the Observer, outline a possible felonious and deepening romantic plot between a food writer, alias Nick Rallo, and a known cheeseburger in the area. The emails have not been…
We have been waiting, however impatiently, for chef Teiichi Sakurai’s ramen joint to open for what seems like forever. We have long been tantalized with visions of $10 bowls of ramen crafted by one of the city’s best chefs, and it looks as if our Dallas nightmare is finally over…
Kathryn DeBruler searches far and wide for DFW’s most interesting breakfast food. Come along. I didn’t have high hopes going into this brunch, and the fact that a manager apologized half an hour after my order was placed didn’t help much. She explained that I was there during Eureka’s first…
Picture your dream hamburger. But not as you know it now — go back to something like the early ’90s, when words like “arugula” and “house-made truffle aioli” were utopian fiction. A time when a greasy burger with American cheese and iceberg lettuce, served on checkered paper in a ramshackle…
I wasn’t expecting much from the pizza I’d ordered at Modmarket. This is a fast-casual chain based in Denver, for starters, and they use an unimpressive gas-fired oven. But there it was on an aluminum tray, with a decent, if dry-looking cornicione. The basil had gone brown, but the tomato…
I don’t get, nor do I deserve, a lot of sympathy in my work. As soon as my face winces — before I even get out a word of complaint — I’m met with a barrage of facetiousness. “Oh, poor food critic guy eats out on someone else’s dime.” I…
No other image better captures the Dallas dining scene: Under a cloudy sky, hungry customers wait their turn for one of the nine tables inside a restaurant that looks like it survived a recent bombing campaign. Six-packs of bottled beer litter the street, and a red and white cooler hints…
The neon is shining at Spork now, as long as you show up after sunset. The casual burger restaurant opened earlier this month at the hands of Eric Justice (former chef at Mexican Sugar) and other Dallas-area power chefs. Tim Byres and Katherine Clapner were among the chefs tasked with…
It’s time for another Dallas Observer Iron Fork event, and while the participating restaurants are sure to provide another gustatory marathon of epic proportions, it’s hard to discuss the food until you’ve gotten past this year’s awesome competition chefs. Matt McCallister has been dominating the competition since he ousted Scott…
