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This past year was a wild, fanatical ride of grand restaurant openings, heartbreaking closures, and big lawsuits for Dallas diners to feast on. For us, that meant a lot of food news to keep us busy. But now, we’re looking ahead at a buzzy 2023. Now that diners are back in restaurants and hungry for more, here’s what online dining editor Nataly Keomoungkhoun and dining critic Brian Reinhart are keeping their eyes peeled for over the next 12 months.

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The amount of excellent food available in Dallas is dizzying, yet mediocre meals somehow keep worming their way into our lives. With your Eater Dallas editor dining out frequently, that means coming across lots of standout dishes and drinks that need to be shared.

Elsie the cat is not allowed to eat people food. Elsie has never been allowed to eat people food. And, before you scroll through a gallery of Elsie’s never-ending brazen attempts to steal takeout from some of Dallas’ most beloved restaurants, you should know that she was not actually allowed to touch any of them. I kept one hand on the camera, one hand ready to gently nudge the cat away from the dining area.

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Dallas is loaded with great restaurants and there are so many great plates out there worth trying. Eater Dallas polled local chefs, journalists, and food influencers about their thoughts on the local food scene in 2022. Here are their best meals of the year — and you can read the full list of picks by your Eater Dallas editor as well.

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Not many dishes are memorable enough to crave months after that first taste. But every now and then, you find something on a menu that truly stands out. With as many new Dallas restaurants as I’ve been fortunate to try in 2022 (and there have been a lot), a few precious bites made a lasting, mouthwatering impression.

Best New Dallas Restaurants — El Carlos Elegante, Pizzana…

Dallas chef Nick Badovinus’ ninth native eating idea is an intimate, upscale steakhouse perched above Nationwide Anthem (one other Badovinus joint) within the East Quarter. Brass Ram focuses on USDA prime rib, in addition to steaks, seafood, soups, and sandwiches. The cocktail menu options greater than 70 bourbons and whiskeys and a martini menu that provides 4 totally different kinds with gin or vodka.

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Walking into El Carlos Elegante in the Design District is a treat for the senses. The eye-grabbing decor is truly like nothing else in the city — certainly not like any of the Mexican or Tex-Mex offerings. The story is, that it’s designed to be like a house passed down through several generations, with layers of old and new sitting next to and on top of each other. And the menu incorporates that family-style spirit also: order a bunch of dishes from across the five sections on it and prepare to share.

El Carlos Elegante, the latest upscale Mexican restaurant to open in Dallas, whispers elegance. The refined cuisine is approachable, unpretentious, and yet positively regal. The newest concept from Duro Hospitality Group opened in late November, just steps from its first venture, The Charles.

It’s been just 43 days since Halloween, and in that short six weeks, Dallas-Fort Worth has experienced one of the biggest clusters of restaurant openings in all of 2022. It’s an important time to open a restaurant in North Texas, to be sure: It’s the holidays, a big time for celebrating and spending, after which restaurants usually see a dip in sales in the new year.

A crowd-sourced stamp of approval. The five-star treatment. Resy’s top-rated restaurants according to you, the guests.

This week’s round-up of the best meals we’ve had recently covers the full spectrum of dining – from a swanky new restaurant experience to a dish you can make with the cans of beans hiding in the back of your pantry. Good food is good food, regardless of price or if it’s eaten in a velvet banquette or by the light of the fridge.

The Dallas Design District has a new Mexican-inspired restaurant, El Carlos Elegante, offering a blend of authentic Mexican and South American flavors. This is the third restaurant opening of the year for Duro Hospitality; the other new spots are Sister and Cafe Duro.

Duro Hospitality, with Sister, The Charles and other restaurants serving Dallas, announced the opening of El Carlos Elegante at 1400 N. Riverfront Blvd. The restaurant, located in the Design District, was created to feel like a Mexican Hacienda. El Carlos is open for dinner at 5 p.m. daily and will showcase Latin cooking traditions like large cuts of high-end, Argentinian-style wood-fired meats and fish, a crudo selection, house-made tortillas and traditional masa-based dishes.

What is it about the Duro Hospitality Group and their designs? Earlier this year we gushed over the maximalist beauty of Cafe Duro on Greenville Ave. Now our gaze turns to El Carlos Elegante, the group’s new restaurant in the Design District next door to the Charles, another of their properties.

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he Dallas dining scene is always evolving. To help you stay in the know, we’ve gathered the buzziest openings, the unfortunate closures, and any other food news we might find fitting. The Dallas Dish is your weekly helping of need-to-know North Texas restaurant news — and will hopefully point you in the direction of your next great reservation.

So many new restaurants have opened within two weeks in Dallas that it’s time for a roll call. We couldn’t wait for another Hot List in early December. For many of these restaurants, the owners raced to open before the holidays, which is historically the most lucrative time of the year for food and beverage businesses. Some, like The Finch in Dallas’ Mockingbird Station, are open on Thanksgiving Day.

The year 2022 has been a weird post-pandemic roller coaster ride for restaurants with boffo openings on the left and dismal closures on the right. Times are uncertain and unpredictable but the human spirit perseveres, filing permits and building restaurants with the hope that by the time opening day comes, everything will be back to normal, and they’ll be rewarded with a packed house.

El Carlos Elegante, a new upscale Mexican restaurant from the company behind The Charles and Sister, opened this Monday in the Design District. We don’t have much information about El Carlos Elegante, except that its name is a Spanish-language riff on The Charles and that reservations are available now.