Rants and Raves: The Dallas Food News We’re Most (and Least) Excited About in May 2025

After a few months of slow news in the Dallas food scene, the stove is finally turning back on this May. An abundance of interesting restaurant openings and behind-the-scenes moves are shaking things up and generating gossip. Let’s jump in.

News of the month: Burger Schmurger, Flamont, Kappo Tatsu, Eledi, and more

New restaurants seem to come in waves. The last one was right around the holiday season; then, for a few months, we had a lull in which most announcements were chains or steakhouses. In May, though, we’re cookin’.

For one thing, beloved smashburger pop-up Burger Schmurger is ready to sling schmurgs in its new permanent home in Lake Highlands. Soft opening began on April 30, and a grand opening is expected in a few weeks. (Also, please do not screw up the city’s best pool table.) Another casual April debut came from the folks behind taco spot Mami Coco. Their new venture on Lowest Greenville is Las Brasas, a haven for grilled meats, the Dallas Observer reports.

Up in Plano, the crew behind Rye and Apothecary will debut an all-day bistro called Flamant in late May. It will be a more casual venue for the team to cook an eclectic menu of European foods, with a wood-fired grill and their usual strong cocktail program. Another casual summer fling: Via Triozzi’s new rooftop, Terrazza da Triozzi, featuring a completely new menu (pizza!) from the restaurant below.

More upscale will be Mamani, opening near the end of the month at the Quadrangle development in Uptown. Chef Christophe de Lellis came to Dallas from the Las Vegas location of Joël Robuchon’s French fine dining empire, and is expected to maintain a similarly exacting standard here. The menu won’t be typical of French food in the United States: I’m told that all four of de Lellis’ grandparents were Italian, so his personal cooking style is more Mediterranean in outlook. We don’t know much about menu specifics, so this is one news story to monitor closely.

In the last week of April, word also arrived of two restaurant openings out on the edge of the horizon. Chef Anastacia Quiñones-Pittman leaves José on May 5, along with general manager Victor Rojas and beverage director Carlos Márquez, to begin work on a new Mexican restaurant, Eledi. Location and opening timeframe are to be determined, but Quiñones-Pittman spoke to Eater with a few more details. And Tatsu, the omakase sushi counter that is one of Texas’ best restaurants, will open a casual sibling in the room next door, Kappo Tatsu, equally small but featuring all the foods Tatsu can’t use on a sushi menu. That’s coming around the end of the year.

“In just a few months,” according to Eater, Richardson will get a Palestinian restaurant called Ayat, a small chain from New York. Eater’s Courtney Smith says it’s the first specifically Palestinian restaurant in the Dallas area. I can’t confirm that, but the only other Palestinian food business I know about here is Ramallah Bakery. Ayat will be only a few hundred feet away from the bakery on Sherman Street, which Dallasites already visit to get groceries at Sara’s.

Where to eat in May

Rye’s new tasting menu, debuting on May 9, has a theme: “summer vacation.” Get ready for all the flavors you remember from summer break, but transformed into irreverent fine dining. Remember, its sibling bar Apothecary is a time machine this season, too, and May will see it roll out a 1950s-inspired cocktail menu.

You should probably hit some of Dallas’ best barbecue joints (as decided by us, of course) before Texas Monthly releases its new 50 Best list this summer. Once the TM list drops, expect big spikes in lines and wait times at its top picks. Beat the crowd and go now.

Restaurant Beatrice is celebrating its third birthday with $11.11 drink specials May 2-8. The email adds, “Our crawfish farmer just lowered their prices.” (Not to $11.11, but pretty close.) Nikki Greek Bistro & Lounge has a new “Six Under $20” lunch special menu Tuesdays through Fridays, featuring seasonal selections, and a new happy hour menu on the same days, 2-6 p.m.

Best meal of the month: patio weather at Written by the Seasons

I spent April dining as a vegetarian at Dallas restaurants. Several places make it easy to go without meat, notably Resident Taquería in Lake Highlands and Goodwins on Lower Greenville. I also dropped in on a few Southern Indian restaurants, such as Simply South, that don’t offer a single meat option. But the biggest surprise is how much flavor Written by the Seasons can pack into its veggies, including the herbal and vegetal components used in garden-based cocktails.

Here is an axiom of vegetarian dining. Salads can be great dishes. Some of my favorite foods on earth are salads. But salads aren’t great or satisfying when you’re being forced to eat them. You have to choose them. Written by the Seasons still has room to improve, especially on the textures of items like the kimchi pancakes and gummy dessert meringue, but it far surpasses the expectation set by its cheesy name. And it passes the salad choice test. Its salads are so darned appealing, so loaded with cool stuff, that I felt pity for the menu’s poor helpless burger, which I will never order, because how could it be better than salad?

Three fun May food events

On May 4, writer Ted Genoways will give a talk at Las Almas Rotas about his book, Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico. It’s the first biography of Cuervo, written with access to his family’s secret archives (plus those of the Sauza family), and promises to tell wild tales about how the tequila business was born of the violent Mexican Revolution. This event is at 5 p.m. and requires no RSVP. I won’t endorse anything else that’s even slightly Cinco-related.

On May 25, it’s Burger Fight! You know the drill: Meat Fight is a great big meaty party for charity, and Burger Fight is that, but with burgers. VIPs enter at 12 p.m., while peasants—sorry, I mean general admission—follow a half-hour later. Go get tickets.

One weekend later, on May 31, the Texas Monthly Taco Fest hits Grand Prairie. You’ll get to sample some of the Dallas area’s best tacos (El Come Taco, Molino Olōyō, Resident Taquería, and two of our favorite barbecue joints, Zavala’s and Vaqueros), plus visitors like the amazing El Paso spot Taconeta, Fort Worth fine dining staple Don Artemio, San Antonio legend El Pastor Es Mi Señor (guess what they make), and Austin’s acclaimed Ramen del Barrio. VIPs enter at 5 p.m., while people who only kinda mostly love tacos start a half-hour later.

Five one-sentence restaurant reviews

The vegan tacos al pastor at Donde Los Tacos, which recently opened on Davis Street in Oak Cliff, don’t have trompo-style texture, but otherwise had me completely (and happily) fooled. The spring menu at Via Triozzi is all hits, particularly the lanterne pasta with spring peas, asparagus, and prosciutto. (They put my prosciutto on the side.) I have ordered just two of the roughly five thousand things on the menu at Simply South, but they were both great: chana palak (a hearty, spiced blend of spinach and chickpeas over rice), and a specialty dosa with a spice-coated inside and six different chutneys. Flavors Indian Kitchen introduced new “Super Six” rice pulavs, which are similar to biryanis, and scream with bold seasoning. Black Thai in Carrollton has some of the best pad thai I’ve eaten in, gosh, maybe five or six years?

Bonus leftover tip

Our full review of Little Blue Bistro is in the May issue, on newsstands now, and publishing online in about three weeks, but here’s some advice: order the scrumptious radish salad. Its one drawback is that it comes with a truly absurd amount of herb butter. Ask for a little to-go cup, scoop your extra butter in, and then put it on toast for an afternoon snack. Delicious.

Required reading

• The best read of the month—aside from our barbecue interviews, if we may say so—was Chris Wolfgang’s profile in the Dallas Observer of six different young chefs who are prepared to make their mark on the local food scene. If you want to know what the next few years of Dallas dining will look like, start here.
• Also at the Observer, Aaren Prody profiled a seventh chef who could easily fit onto that same list of rising future culinary stars: Olivia López of pop-up Molino Olōyō.
• Dallas Morning News reporter Sarah Blaskovich found an interesting way to chart the history of Knox Street’s real estate deals and redevelopments: through the history of its bygone restaurants.
• Former Observer editor Gavin Cleaver came back to Texas from his native United Kingdom for what the Brits call a flying visit. His goal? Eat a freaking ton of barbecue. It’s a funny, outrageously opinionated travelogue.
• There’s a darn good Reddit thread this week of the “Most Expensive Overrated Restaurants.” Some common mentions: Nick & Sam’s, Monarch, Drake’s Hollywood, The Mexican, Carbone, Komodo, Restoration Hardware, and Nobu.
• In Texas Monthly, taco editor José Ralat has a scouting report on a pop-up business called Knight Out that brings Monterrey-style trompo and carne asada to Dallas-area events.
• Two more scouting trips to newish businesses: Hank Vaughn of the Observer visited the new brick-and-mortar Richardson restaurant Moriya Shokudo, which I loved when it was a food court stall in Dallas’ Koreatown in 2023, and then he also tried out a Northwestern Chinese noodle shop called DH Noodle, which comes to Plano from Flushing, New York and specializes in Lanzhou beef noodle soup and spicy lamb ribs.

Three hot takes

Dallas restaurants are too darn big

I just wrote a thousand words of rant on this subject, but it’s very important and worth repeating here. In cities like New York, Chicago, and Seattle, you can go to a tiny restaurant that would fit in your own home kitchen, sit at a counter, watch chefs cook, and have a spectacular meal. Here in Dallas, many restaurants are twice to five times the size of a basketball court, and it makes the meals worse. Soul is hard to scale. Make restaurants smaller!

Things are only going to get stupider

I don’t usually print rumors, but they don’t usually make me this irritated. Last night, an industry source told me that the replacement for much-beloved Meddlesome Moth will be yet another all-hat-no-cattle chain steakhouse. This one, specifically, has $95 steak tartare, a $22 order of bacon, a $1,000 steak that must be cooked medium, and a $1,000 dessert finished with a shot of Louis XIII cognac.

At some point, we’re going to need a resistance movement against predatory restaurants like this. Maybe we can all form a picket line outside, but instead of chanting slogans, we stage our own cheap dinner? Hire a taco truck and an elote cart to pull up and serve people protest meals for $5? I’ll bring a few cases of Natty Light.

I won’t tell you anything else about this place for two reasons. One, it’s an unconfirmed rumor. Two, your brain cells are valuable.

The key to a veggie burger is texture

I’ve been trying quite a few of them around town this month. There are four schools of vegetarian burger. One: fake meat, like an Impossible patty. Two: a store-bought veggie patty like Gardein. Three: a made-from-scratch patty mix of veggies, grains, lentils, and/or nuts. Four: black bean burger.

They can all make for a tasty meal in their different ways. But they all have the same liability: texture. You just can’t get fake meat to sear like the real thing, and many scratch-made veggie or black bean patties fall apart the moment they encounter teeth. I’ve eaten several with a fork and knife, like a weird bun salad.

Texture is the most important element in my research now, and it will be the most important research focus when I become a wealthy philanthropist and fund a university Department of Foodology with an endowed professor chair in veggieburgistics. We will present our findings in a 36,000 square foot restaurant where every table is required to order a paint can full of caviar. It’ll be right on Steakhouse Row.

The restaurant where we saw the most Cybertrucks this month

Sanjh. Two Cybertrucks.

What’s coming on SideDish in May

I’ll be updating craft beer’s outdated reputation, shining a spotlight on the new marriage between Trinity Cider and Picadera Dominican Street Food, querying upscale restaurants that charge credit card fees, and reviewing three new restaurants in the Bishop Arts District. Plus, Nick Rallo is back with more episodes of Sandwich Club.