Tastemaker Awards

10 best ghost kitchens in Dallas take takeout to another level

Chicken is a major trend in the ghost kitchen world.

Courtesy of Guy Fieri

A key part of our annual CultureMap Tastemaker Awards, celebrating the best in Dallas food and drink, is a category we call the wild card, which changes from year to year, depending on what culinary trends have emerged.

Prior wild cards have included cuisines such as fried chicken, but for 2021, it's all about the ghost kitchen. Sometimes called a virtual kitchen, it's a new model of restaurant where there's an entire menu but no actual brick-and-mortar location. Instead, the food is all delivery or to-go.

Ghost kitchens arose directly from the pandemic, when dining-in became a challenge, but they show signs of lingering, well past that day in the future when we achieve herd immunity.

It's one chapter in our editorial series, where we spotlight nominees in categories such as best bars, best neighborhood restaurants, best rising star chefs, and best restaurants — voted on by a panel of judges consisting of former CultureMap Tastemaker Award winners and local F&B experts, who helped narrow down the final list to 10 finalists.

Who will win? Find out at the Tastemaker Awards party on August 19 at Fashion Industry Gallery, where we’ll dine on bites from nominated restaurants while emcee CJ Starr reveals the winners. Buy tickets here.

Here are the 10 nominees for Best Ghost Kitchen:

Fuku - David Chang
Celeb chef opened the first Fuku, starring his famous fried chicken sandwich, in New York in 2015. Now he has ghost kitchens in cities such as Baltimore, Miami, and Philadelphia. In Dallas, he has two locations: 501 N. Houston St. in downtown Dallas and 3100 Dallas Pkwy. in Plano. Four chicken fingers with sauce are $9.50; so is a sandwich with chicken fingers, pickles, fuku mayo, and butter on a Martins potato roll. Add waffle fries, pickles, two sauces, and a drink, and it's $14.50.

George Lopez Tacos
Well known comedian is doing street tacos with choice of chicken tinga or pork carnitas, in two varieties: one with diced onion & cilantro, salsa verde, pickled onions, and roasted jalapenos; and another with fire-roasted peppers & onions, fresh diced onion & cilantro, salsa verde, and avocado crema. An order of three tacos is $13-$14. They also have chips, guacamole, and churro bites.

Guy Fieri's Flavortown
Operating out of the Brio Italian Grille / Buca di Beppo family, Fieri's delivery-only restaurant features prototypical Guy food: bourbon brown sugar BBQ wings, a burger topped with mac & cheese, Buffalo wings, bacon-wrapped jalapeño poppers, cheesesteak egg rolls, Cuban sandwich, queso dip, and a chicken "Parm-eroni" with chicken, mozzarella, provolone, pepperoni red sauce, crispy pepperoni hay, parmesan, and spaghetti.

MeMee's Wings
Family venture between three sisters specializes in a unique twist on Memphis-style chicken wings, tossed in honey and blended with tangy spices. They also offer chicken tenders, plus sides that include fried okra, crinkle-cut French fries with their own seasoning, and a "twice stuffed" potato, which is their spin on the "twice baked" potato.

Okaeri Cafe
Adored pop-up specializes in authentic Japanese dishes such as okonomiyaki pancakes, made with shredded cabbage; omurice, a fusion dish with a soft omelet draped over a dome of fried rice; and bento boxes, with Japanese curry and mounds of rice molded into adorable little bear-shapes. They don't have any pop-ups currently scheduled, but they are making plans to open a brick-and-mortar location in Richardson.

Provecho Pollos - Jose
Concept tucked inside José restaurant from chef Anastasia "AQ" Quinones specializes in chicken: a half or whole chicken that has been brined, marinated, and roasted, along with Mexican soup with potatoes, cabbage, carrots, corn and Mexican squash; charro beans, salsas, and Mexican rice. They also do two desserts, also very homey: churros or Mexican rice pudding.

Secret Sauce BBQ - City Works
Takeout-only concept operates out of City Works Eatery & Pour House in Frisco and Fort Worth, featuring queso dip, wings, tacos, mac & cheese, and country-fried chicken, plus BBQ options such as baby back ribs, hot links, and pulled pork, served with white bread, pickles, and sides such as grits, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, chipotle slaw, and maple bacon baked beans.

TLC Vegan Kitchen
Vegan chef Troy Gardner was one of the first to introduce a ghost kitchen concept when he debuted TLC in May 2020. He offers a lengthy selection of vegan items which you can get in family-style meals or boxed lunches. The menu features chili, chicken-fried steak, lasagna with house made ricotta, mozzarella, & parmesan, and desserts including chocolate lava cake and banana foster pudding.

Wow Bao - Revolving Kitchen
Chicago-based outfit specializes in fast Asian street food including bao, pan-seared potstickers, steamed dumplings, rice & noodle bowls, soups, salads, and specialty drinks such as fresh ginger ale. They've partnered with Reef Kitchens, a big player in the ghost-kitchen world, to launch locations across the U.S., including Austin and Dallas, where they're camped at Revolving Kitchen, the Garland home base for many Dallas-area ghost kitchen concepts.

World Pizza Party - Revolving Kitchen
This second virtual concept for vegan chef and ghost kitchen master Troy Gardner is Dallas' first all vegan pizzeria, operating out of Revolving Kitchen, with a menu that includes nine varieties, from sausage & mushroom to BBQ chicken to spicy Sicilian to "pig-less" pepperoni, all made with plant-based products, including Impossible beef and creamy mozzarella made from cashews.

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Closure News

The original Dick's Last Resort in Dallas closes after 40 years

Dick's Last Resort

A venerable destination in the downtown Dallas area has closed: Dick's Last Resort, the notoriously saucy restaurant and bar at 2211 Lamar St., has closed permanently, after 40 years.

According to a representative from the Nashville-based chain, the final day for the Dallas location was November 30.

"Business at that location had been declining, and they were facing an increase in rent, so they made a decision to close," the representative said.

Dick's Last Resort was founded right here in Dallas in 1985 as a winking, impudent good-time spot with good bar food and cold beer, at a time when leg warmers and mullets were the rage.

The concept was hatched by bon vivant "Buffalo George" Toomer and Richard "Dick" Chase, centered on a saga about a bad boy named Dick whose big-league plans had failed and who pivoted to open a laid-back bar full of attitude and dick jokes. The restaurant featured gruff staffers and a Southern-style menu in a rowdy roadhouse environment.

It became a huge success, with customers coming eagerly to be insulted, get pelted with napkins and straws, and wear paper hats with crude comments and insults written in a sharpie such as "I've nailed more wood than HGTV." That atmosphere made it a popular destination for bachelorette parties and other group events, and it was a big tourist draw at its then-location in the West End. (It relocated to its current location close to American Airlines Center in 2005.)

Although the food took a backseat to the atmosphere, the menu — written on the wall — featured ribs, chicken, wings, and burgers, served casually in paper and buckets. In its heyday and for many years, it remained lodged on the TABC Top 10 list for beer sales in Dallas.

Chase was ousted for embezzling by the financial backers, who went on to grow the concept into a national chain, with locations in Boston, Chicago, and London. Those are now closed, but there are currently a dozen Dick's across the southeast in Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, as well as Las Vegas and a longtime location in San Antonio on the Riverwalk.

Dallas restaurateur Mike McRae, who currently owns restaurants such as Dodie's Cajun Diner in Rockwall, Stan's Blue Note, and McRae's Bistro in East Dallas, worked for Dick's for 23 years and owned the Dallas location for 12 years.

"I was hired as their general manager 18 months after it opened," McRae says. "Richard Chase was kind of a hothead. He would fire people on the drop of a pin. We had a pink plastic flamingo with a light inside behind the bar, and he was adamant that the light be on all the time. He once fired a GM because the light was off."

Dick's was owned by Steven Schiff, a Dallas entrepreneur who was in real estate and oil, but had no experience in the restaurant industry.

"Steve talked to Norman Brinker and said, 'I've got this place but I don't want to be in the restaurant business — how do I sell this?'" McRae says. "Norman said, 'You need to open two more locations in different cities.' So we opened the location in San Antonio and a third in downtown Chicago. Both were wildly successful — way more than Dallas. These places were netting over $1 million in yearly profits, which was a lot of money back then. We opened one in London, Boston, San Diego, Myrtle Beach, they were in major cities all over the U.S."

McRae eventually became director of operations and they kept it running until 2009 when they sold the company to its current ownership group based in Nashville. McRae bought the Dallas location in 2010, later joined by his partner Gabe Nicolella; they owned it for 12 years before selling it back to the corporate owners in 2021.

"We did some crazy things in those days, like creating a fake restroom with a pair of tennis shoes visible and a tape recording of farting sounds," McRae says. "We only hired people who had been class clowns, who couldn't get jobs anywhere else. We served food in buckets and the placemats were torn-off butcher paper — things you couldn't get away with now."

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