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    Cafeteria News

    Dallas restaurant makes treasured Food & Wine list of best cafeterias

    Teresa Gubbins
    Nov 26, 2019 | 10:22 am
    Highland Park Cafeteria
    Turkey dinner deluxe at Dallas' treasured cafeteria.
    Photo courtesy of HPC

    Texas tops a new list from Food & Wine covering the humble realm of cafeterias. Just in time for the holidays, the magazine issued a "10 Best Cafeterias in America" list that highlights three Texas institutions, with a Houston restaurant coming in at No. 1, and a Dallas cafeteria making the list of honorable mentions.

    Houston's famed Cleburne Cafeteria earns the top slot on the list, touted for its fighting spirit, egalitarian milieu, and great turkey. Two other Texas classics are included in a "best of the rest" list of 14 cafeterias that were good, but not good enough to make the top 10:

    • Highland Park Cafeteria in East Dallas
    • the Luby's chain

    Written by David Landsel, the article traces the cafeteria's origin to the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where entrepreneur John Kruger operated a restaurant inspired by the smörgåsbords of Sweden.

    Landsel calls the cafeteria concept "hopelessly dated," while acknowledging that cafeterias are not only surviving but thriving in places like North Carolina, Texas, and "even future-minded Northern California." North Carolina and Texas, apparently stuck in the dismal past.

    Houston's Cleburne Cafeteria, which he notes has overcome incredible odds including a major move and two devastating fires, seems to have provided the inspiration for the listicle. Landsel ate there for Thanksgiving in 2018, and was awestruck by the meal he shared with thousands of people he'd never even met. And yet they ate together!

    "We came as strangers, united in our appreciation of one of the city's great dining institutions, the Cleburne Cafeteria, a family-owned establishment that has been feeding Houstonians from all walks of life for generations," he says. "Some of us were here for the nostalgia, too, because they just don't make cafeterias like this anymore, others because it was easier than cooking our own turkeys. And really, why compete—the turkey here is just that good."

    "Today, the city's oldest cafeteria is better than ever," he says, "serving up quality home cooking at reasonable prices to anybody and everybody wise enough to understand just how lucky we are that this place still exists."

    Other places on the list stretch from Alabama to Sacramento, California, and include restaurants such as Valois in Chicago, Sokolowski's University Inn in Cleveland, Arnold's Country Kitchen in Nashville, and famous Philippe's in Los Angeles (although that place is really better known as home to the original French dip sandwich rather than being a cafeteria).

    His blurb about Highland Park Cafeteria, whose Casa Linda Plaza location is the final survivor in what used to be a chain, applauds its longevity.

    "After nearly a century of serving chicken—chicken fried steak, chicken and dumplings, fried chicken, you name it—to Dallasites with big appetites, what was once referred to as 'America's Cafeteria' has downsized greatly, to just the one location, but the legend (thankfully) lives on," he says.

    As for Luby's, he notes its ubiquity: "Driving around the Lone Star State, you can’t help but feel as if reports of the cafeteria’s death have been greatly exaggerated—Luby’s seems to be everywhere, mostly because it is—dozens of these cavernous mess halls continue to dot the landscape."

    "One of the house specialties—the square fish, translated as neatly-portioned filets of fried, wild-caught cod—is popular enough that it’s now sold (along with the other house classic, macaroni and cheese) at H-E-B, the state’s best-loved grocery store," he says.

    In addition to Luby's, he includes three other chains: Piccadilly, K&W Cafeterias in the Carolinas, and the Midwest treasure MCL Restaurant & Bakery. What, no love for Cracker Barrel?

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    Ice Cream News

    One of Dallas' top gelato shops opens new location in Plano

    Teresa Gubbins
    May 15, 2025 | 3:14 pm
    Botolino Gelato
    Botolino Gelato
    Botolino Gelato

    There's an authentic new gelato shop now open in Plano: Botolino Gelato, the artisan gelateria founded in Dallas in 2017, has opened a location in the Preston Park Shopping Center, at the northwest corner of Preston Road and Park Boulevard, in a former Starbucks where it opened on May 12.

    This is the fourth location for the chain, following the original on 2116 Greenville Ave., Preston & Royal in North Dallas, and Bishop Arts. The company also has Botolino Gelato Lab, a facility near Fair Park where many of their offerings are made.

    In a release, owner Carlo Gattini says that fans have been asking for a location in Collin County; his wife is also from Plano and has ties to the community.

    Gattini, who trained at Carpigiano Gelato University in Bologna, has roots in both Dallas and Italy. He was born in Milan and raised on a farm in Tuscany. His grandmother had her own gelato shop, and she and her sisters famously resurrected the epicurean magazine La Cucina Italiana. Carlo's family moved to Dallas, and his father opened the beloved MoMo Italian Kitchen, where Carlo helped serve the restaurant's classic Italian cuisine for more than 30 years, until the family sold the business in 2016.

    Each Botolino shop offers 16 flavors of gelato and sorbetto, with eight classics and eight seasonal flavors in rotation. They use high-end authentic ingredients such as Valrhona chocolate and Tonde Gentile della Langhe hazelnuts from Nocciola d’Elite farm in Piedmont, Italy.

    Classic flavors include pistachio (made from Bronte pistachios from Marullo Pistachio in Sicily), white coffee with cold-infused coffee from whole-bean Noble Coyote Coffee Roasters coffee, mascarpone & figs, milk chocolate, coconut straciatella with dark Valrhona chocolate slivers, and vanilla with Sava Bourbon vanilla beans from Madagascar.

    Rotating flavors include tiramisu, Alpine almond bar with Sicilian almonds, Turkish coffee, and sorbets such as blueberry and lemon-rose.

    They also do espresso drinks and indulgent desserts including cakes, sundaes, decadent brownies, and sticky toffee pudding topped with ice cream.

    To mark the opening, customers who visit before May 21 can enter drawings for hands-on classes. The 2,000 square-foot shop, located a few doors north of Whole Foods Market, has a covered patio and ample parking.

    “I look forward to welcoming guests to the new Plano Botolino - a great place for family gatherings, a place for first dates, a place to make meaningful memories with friends,” Gattini says.

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