Where To Eat Now

Where to eat in Dallas right now: 10 new restaurants for on-top-of-it foodies

For this rendition of Where to Eat, the theme is all about new. In a propitious set of circumstances, June 2015 has plenty of contenders.

Most of these places are as new as it gets: hot-off-the-press, just-opened within the past few weeks. If you live to dine at the newest restaurants around Dallas-Fort Worth, you've come to the right list.

Blaze Pizza
Blaze is yet another chain that tries to duplicate Neapolitan-style pizza, in the same school as Project Pie, which debuted in Dallas in 2014. Blaze was created by the team who founded Wetzel's Pretzels and boasts celebrity investors such as LeBron James, Maria Shriver, Boston Red Sox co-owner Tom Werner and movie producer John Davis. The first DFW branch is in Frisco, which is a long way to drive for pizza. But if you're a fanatic who needs to try every pie, then drive you will. A second branch will open "soon" on 3388 Bryant Irvin Rd. in Fort Worth.

Buzzbrews
The Buzzbrews empire expands with a new branch at Skillman and Live Oak in the former Tipperary Inn (and Mecca) space. Many a restaurateur has tried to tame this spot, but Buzzbrews has a history of persevering beyond all odds. They've brightened what was previously a rather gloomy space and even attached a sweet little bar to the outside, to create a kind of impromptu patio. In addition to affordable grub and breakfast fare, a full bar features cocktails, beer, wine and, the best part, prosecco on tap.

Fixture
Chef Ben Merritt (Woodshed Smokehouse, Stephan Pyles) branches out in Fort Worth into a space that was the former 24 Plates (which closed despite positive reviews). Fixture serves comfort food with a twist. Signature items include chicken and waffles, Brie and cranberry nachos, duck tacos, and goat hash. There's some real creativity to be found in dishes such as "beet" fries and a fried bologna club served on a kolache bun from Fort Worth's Pearl Snap Kolache.

Kitchen LTO
The restaurant incubator concept at Trinity Groves has a promising new identity starring chef Anastacia "AQ" Quinones, the fifth LTO chef, whose reign extends through the end of 2015. Her modern Mexican menu ranges from classic items like guacamole to fine-dining options such as broiled red snapper with peaches, purslane, chile de arbol and pepitas. Even prototypical items such as quesadillas get a cheffly spin, filled with huitlachoche, rajas and truffled avocado puree.

K.T. Burger
The tormented spot in Highland Park Village that was once Marquee Grill, featuring Top Chef contestant Tre Wilcox, then Village Marquee, then Village Kitchen and Toko V, will now serve burgers and shakes. The "K.T." refers to the Katy Trail Ice House chain of which K.T. Burger is a little cousin. It's a fast-casual format with a funkier atmosphere — recycle dwood, exposed brick — where you order at the counter. The menu includes burgers, tacos, cheese fries and jalapeño bottle caps.

Mi Lindo Oaxaca
Taco Trail blogger José R. Ralat calls Mi Lindo "the one restaurant all seekers of authentic Mexican food should put at the top of their must-visit list." He knows! The menu has tacos but also unique dishes such as memelitas, corn discs topped with refried black beans, and the "Mexican pizza" called tlayuda, with house-made corn tortillas packed with refried black beans, lettuce, tomato, avocado, queso Oaxaca and choice of meat. There is also a labor-intensive exotic drink made from corn and chocolate, tejate, that Mi Lindo makes from scratch.

On Premise
Club guys from The Mitchell partnered with chefs Brian Zenner (Oak, Belly & Trumpet) and Ann Marie Romero (Pakpao, Oak) to open this global-cuisine restaurant in Deep Ellum, in the prized space that previously housed Lemongrass. The sky's the limit as far as inspiration goes, be it Mexican, Moroccan or Thai; menu items include chicken wings and beef satay. The format is mostly snacks, with prices from $5 to $12.

Super Chix
When the first SuperChix opened in Arlington in 2014, it was cast as a prototype for an eventual international concept. But owner Yum Brands relented and opened a second branch of this Chick Fil-A challenger in North Dallas. Fried chicken tenders are the thing, which you can get in strips (in a cardboard box, yay) or on a bun in a sandwich. Other items on the small menu include above-average French fries, skin-on and not too thin, in three flavor options: salt, sweet, or rosemary and black pepper. There's also frozen custard in flavors that change, available as a dessert or in a shake.

Tallywackers
You wanted new, you got it. This Chippendale's-type restaurant just opened at 4218 Lemmon Ave., in what was most recently Lolita's but has been many a sketchy concept over the past few years. A tallywacker is a stick used to keep score or count objects. A release calls the place a "bar, restaurant and entertainment smorgasbord featuring outstanding food and a handsome all-male waitstaff." You get to choose the waiter you want, by the way. The comfort-food menu has chicken-fried steak, pizza and hot dogs. Are you really going here for the food?

Uchi
In case you hadn't heard, a third location of Austin-born sushi-eria Uchi from famed chef Tyson Cole has opened on Maple Avenue in Dallas. Oh, who are we kidding? If you're reading this, you've probably already eaten there. I mean, it's been open a full day already. Not to mention the soft opening last week, when on-top-of-it foodies like The Brad pored their way through the menu. It melds the best items from Uchi and sister concept Uchiko, with fish both hot and cold, and other exotic items like sake and desserts. Hurry, hurry!

Blaze does pizza vaguely in the Neapolitan mode.

Blaze pizza

Courtesy photo

Blaze does pizza vaguely in the Neapolitan mode.

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Bagel News

Dallas' Starship Bagel used ingenious method to win Best Bagel award

Starship Bagel Oren Salomon

Courtesy

Starship Bagel founder Oren Salomon

Dallas' award-winning Starship Bagel racked up another award on November 16, when the bagel shop won top prize in the 2025 New York BagelFest, an annual bagel competition drawing two dozen bagel purveyors from around the globe.

Starship won "Best Bagel" — the top award that the festival bestows — as well as awards for Best New York-style bagel, Best Showmanship, Best Schmear, and Most Creative.

This marked the third year Starship competed, following 2023 when they first won Best Bagel, and again in 2024 when they won Best Schmear.

Competing in another city in the food & beverage realm is challenging, as it takes the operator out of their usual zone, away from the processes and equipment they rely on every day — and especially in a category as temperamental as baking, which involves unpredictable factors such as yeast, a living thing, and water, whose makeup famously differs from city to city.

But this year, Starship Bagel founder Oren Salomon devised a formula that, on paper, might seem risky, but ended up being a wild success.

"We took a huge gamble and it paid off," Salomon says. "We made the winning bagels in Lewisville a week before the event."

Wait, what?

"We par-baked them, froze them, and brought them to New York on dry ice — then finished them off in an oven I purchased in New York and brought to the Citifield venue," he says. "We turned an 'away game' into home field advantage."

The word "par-baked" means partially baked, a process where bread or pizza dough is baked for part of the total cooking time, then frozen to be popped back into the oven for a final finishing bake.

"Par-baked" can be a dirty word in the baking world since it's a technique most often employed by supermarket chains and big companies, not the little guy. Your typical "artisan" baker baking a loaf of crusty artisan bread is not par-baking.

But Salomon says that the technique proved to be ideal for bagels.

"Bagels lend themselves to it and it’s a very bagel-specific technique," he says. "Par-baking actually makes a superior product and that’s exactly why we wanted to enter it into the competition."

For bakery nerds: They first baked their bagels in a rotating deck oven, to give the bagels a crisp bottom. After freezing, they did their second bake in a convection oven, which gave the bagels a nice crispy top.

Starship Bagel Starship Bagel

"It's a hybrid approach with results only made possible by using two ovens," Salomon says.

They'll continue to experiment with this technique at their three locations in Lewisville, downtown Dallas, and North Dallas.

"Now we’re going to roll out parbaked bagels to all of our stores so we can serve hot bagels all day long," he says. "It’s a transformation that will allow us to increase quality, freshness, availability while reducing costs and our carbon footprint by reducing our need to deliver to our satellites multiple times per day."

It may not be enough to keep up with what they anticipate will be a huge burst in business in the upcoming week. Their win got major coverage not only in the hometown press but also nationally. (The New York Post: "Schmear campaign! The best bagel shop in America isn't in New York, it's in Texas — worse, the judges were mostly New Yorkers.")

Since they've returned from the competition, they've been slammed, and Salomon anticipates possible shortages this weekend and going into the holiday.

"We look forward to feeding all these new faces, we just hope they come with proper expectations for the moment," Salomon says.

Starship Bagel has enoyed a meteoric rise since Salomon opened the first location in Lewisville in 2021. A second location opened in downtown Dallas in 2023, and a third opened in North Dallas in 2024.

For this year's Bagelfest, they brought a big menu of items including:

French onion pre-soup: onion bagel with French onion schmear topped with melted Gruyere and chives
Beer Schmear: poppy bagel with hops-infused schmear topped with candied orange and barley malt drizzle
Mushroom Shawarma: Sesame bagel topped with seasoned mushrooms, tahini, and Israeli salad
Schmeara Masala: garlic bagel with Makhani sauce schmear, topped with cherry tomatoes and cilantro
Ube For You, Bae: plain bagel with ube schmear topped with toasted coconut flakes
Black Garlic Chili Crisp: Italian bagel with black galic schmear topped with kimchi cucumber and chili crisp

Winning the Best Bagel award in New York was a coup since New York is generally considered to be the bagel capital of the world, with many aficionados insisting that the secret ingredient is New York water.

"We won with Lewisville water!" Salomon says.

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