Nick Rallo

The Pantry burger with cheese with a z.

I'm sitting at the bar at Proof + Pantry, which faces away from the hustle of the One Arts District, and the place is humming with its new lunch service. A man next to me is polishing off a lobster roll. He lets me know the salad I ordered with my burger (no idea why I did this) has sheerly-cut radishes. He says he doesn't live nearby, but he's already a Proof + Pantry regular. The bartender smiles, introduces himself to me. Behind the cozy bar, a ladder is propped up, which I'm assuming leads upward to some amazingly old, dusty-bottled elixir.

I order the newly added Pantry Burger, a house blend with American cheese and caramelized onions. It's 15 bucks.

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courtesy photo

Danyele McPherson has been waiting for her turn in Dallas' culinary spotlight for some time. After a stint on Bravo's Top Chef and working in the kitchens of Stephan Pyles and The Grape, McPherson has finally landed her own soon-to-open restaurant on Lower Greenville. The highly anticipated Remedy is McPherson's first restaurant as an executive chef, but make no mistake: If anyone's up for this kind of challenge, it's her.

Over the last several months, McPherson has been working tirelessly to open her new spot while helping sister restaurant HG Sply Co polish the menu. To say the least, she's a really, really busy chef. I caught a few minutes with McPherson to talk about what diners can expect from Remedy, the lessons she's learned in her first restaurant opening, and her thoughts on the dishes that define American cuisine.

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Kathy Tran

As sandwiches go, the meatloaf burger served at Urban Acres is a very good one. Filled with well-pedigreed ingredients, it tastes like a meat lover's dreamwich. The puck of meatloaf in the center is made with 100 percent grass-fed beef, and it's cradled in a sumptuous bun baked at Empire Baking Co. just a few miles away.

To call the condiment lapped across the bread aioli would be accurate, but the description would leave savory details untold. The chipotle peppers for the spread were made from some seriously coddled jalapeños: grown on-site, smoked, sun-dried, softened with hot water and blended with mayonnaise made from eggs produced by the pasture-raised chickens of Vital Farms, the egg of choice for chefs and home cooks all over Dallas who want to make the best omelets, cakes and fried-egg sandwiches.

Recent restaurant reviews:
- Cold Beer Company Found Out "Local" Is Harder Than It Looks, Especially in Dallas
- Casa Rubia Is the Best Restaurant in West Dallas' Hit-or-Miss Trinity Groves

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Alice Laussade

Don't like sauce on your brisket? Fine. Just dip your face in it.

We get it: You're too good to put sauce on your barbecue or ranch on your pizza. Us? We like our food better when it's wet, especially when these condiments are involved.

Have a condiment you like better? Dip your laptop in it or something. These are better.

The BBQ Sauce at Slow Bone (above)
Cool, thanks a bunch Slow Bone! We can't buy barbecue sauce anymore. Your BBQ sauce is king-like. It's got richness, smoke and a roundhouse of acid, which combined with the melt-in-your-mouth brisket makes for some of the best, exciting sauce applications in Dallas. Few things are more fun than filling a spot on the cafeteria tray, which is normally reserved for sides, with ladels of your insanely good barbecue sauce. This will forever ruin anything you buy at the store. -- Nick Rallo

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Catherine Downes

How many animals will be needed to adorn the walls of the new downtown Mudsmith?

News reaches us that Lower Greenville's fanciest coffee shop/bar/place to look at people using Apple products is to branch out to the previously uncool downtown Dallas in a redevelopment on the 1500 block of Elm.

When it gets there, it'll take one look at its new building and notice it has been joined by the Londoner, a local chain that stretches from Addison to Frisco, and Southpaw's Organic Grill, which has outlets in Uptown and the Park Cities, which is code for "fancy."

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via Henry's Majestic

This burger, dude. Good enough to be served with a stupid salad.

After well-received stints at two Dallas institutions and her currently-airing appearance on Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen, Rosanne "Roe" DiLeo is seemingly up for anything. This time, Chef Roe won't be dodging pans slung by a cursing Englishman or setting a new standard for bar food at The Libertine. Instead, she'll be working on creating a "new oasis for Dallas' diners and drinkers" in Uptown.

Tonight, Chef Roe will debut her fancy-but-approachable new dinner menu at Henry's Majestic on McKinney Ave. The restaurant is the brainchild of the owners of another highly successful Uptown institution, Bread Winners. Henry's Majestic won't focus on making baked goods and brunch like its sister restaurant, but there will be brunch, and while mostly traditional, it does not look disappointing. Even a simple avocado toast, pictured below, is enough to make you want to sleep until Saturday.

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Vivian Chen/Flickr

Your vessel of choice.

Not all Coca-Colas ("Cokes") are created equal. On one end of the spectrum is an especially frothy Coke that comes fizzing from a fountain into a much-too-big red plastic cup loaded to the brim with ice, in a dark pizza parlor in the sweaty aftermath of an especially tense slow-pitch softball game that you pretended not to care about but really, man, what a big win. On the other, or near it anyway, is a Caffeine-Free Coke, so pointless that its presence in the fridge has been known to cause unsuspecting soda-seekers to briefly consider drinking La Croix before slamming the fridge shut, huffing loudly and driving to 7-11 for a Big Gulp.

Here, the definitive ranking of Cokes. When bottles and cans are involved, they are presumed to be acceptably cold.

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file

Fifty bucks says they ditch the table cloths.

Lemongrass, the Deep Ellum Vietnamese restaurant that survived for years at 2711 Elm despite no one you know ever eating there, is closing. It will be replaced by a bar with the last remaining clever bar name, On Premise. All future bars will simply be numbered ("Bar 1," "Bar 2," etc.), like New York public schools and firehouses. Wait, no: Firehouse 37 is actually a cool name for a firehouse-themed bar with flaming cocktails and fire hoses for bar taps and a pole behind the bar for the bar backs. Someone do that, then we'll start numbering them.

Anyway, On Premise. It's brought to you by the guys behind The Mitchell, which is a cleverly named bar taking over the former home of The Chesterfield, which was a cleverly named bar downtown. One of the On Premisers, Chris Beardon, also owns Truth & Alibi, a cleverly named nightclub that looks like a cleverly named candy shop.

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via Instagram

There is, it seems, yet another burger chain ready to bloom in Dallas: Dugg Burger, a "deliciously simple yet innovative eating experience" coming soon to Casa Linda.

The menu is straightforward and enticing because I'm physically addicted to animal fat. The restaurant says it "will serve burgers, fries & drinks -- that's it. We're keeping it simple so we can focus on delivering a truly exceptional burger." It will be fighting for, and will no doubt win, a spot in your burger-chain rotation alongside Hopdoddy, Liberty Burger, Mooyah and Smashburger, none of which you should eat before eating at Maple & Motor or Off-Site Kitchen, both of which would probably be better replaced by a splurge at Knife or Boulevardier, although you'd probably be better off just staying home and grilling tilapia.

See you at Dugg Burger.

It's meatloaf, and it's a burger. It's a meatloaf burger.

Back in September, Urban Acres announced that it had hired David Rodriguez, the chef who'd jest left Oddfellows. In that short time, he's turned out a new menu of impressive sandwiches and breakfast items to show off some of the delicious ingredients for sale in the co-op. Till then, the space was primarily a spot to pick up your CSA share, and if you were inclined, grab a couple of pork chops cut from some properly raised pigs. But it's quickly becoming one of the best places in Oak Cliff to grab a quick lunch.

If you haven't delved into the sandwich board yet, start at the top with the meatloaf burger. Meatloaf sandwiches have never been on my priority list of things to consume because the pervious versions I've encountered were served cold, with mayonnaise. They've been satisfying in their own way, but have never been something I would seek out. The meatloaf burger, however, isn't your everyday meatloaf sandwich.

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