Beloved East Dallas eatery reopens with dinner and drinks after a long hiatus

There were two major changes to the Garden Cafe over the course of the year and the seven months it was offline. Dinner is one.

Mark Wootton isn’t a morning person, but his cozy, vine-clad eatery has always been an early bird. Since 1991, Café East Dallas has been the perfect place to open a newspaper over an extra long breakfast of triumphant pancakes or simply endless black coffee to your grave made from homemade bacon.

Now that the doors are open again, dinner is served. Wootton has spent the past few months building, training and refining recipes with his new Head Chef and former dishwasher-to-prep cook, Ricardo Perez. From 5 p.m. (Thursday to Sunday) the Garden Cafe is also a place for braised beef cheeks with Parmesan risotto and mustard, chicken and dumplings or roasted red snapper. A couple of comment cards in the early days of service have generated rave reviews.

The other update for Garden Cafe that guests will notice is the booze. Finally, you can open a bottle of wine in the backyard garden (it’s no longer BYOW). Beer, kombucha, and wine-based cocktails are also available – there’s a real little bar inside – which is a landmark for Wootton that has been making for a decade. It was a long way.

Over the past decade, denied reallocation requests, fears of illegal bring-your-own-beer rulings by the city, and growing concerns from neighbors in the historic Junius Heights neighborhood are just some of the challenges the Wootton family faces. (At some point some Rene Pumpkin guests allegedly loaded up vegetables from the backyard garden.)

When the pandemic stalled everything in their path in March 2020, he knew he still had a chance.

“We have decided that now is the time to try again. If we didn’t get it, we wouldn’t reopen it, ”he says.

Mark Wootton, general manager and head chef, poses for a photo at the Garden Cafe in Old East Dallas, which is currently under renovation, Saturday, June 19, 2021. (Brandon Wade / Special Contributor)Mark Wootton, general manager and head chef, poses for a photo at the Garden Cafe in Old East Dallas, which is currently under renovation, Saturday, June 19, 2021. (Brandon Wade / Special Contributor)(Brandon Wade / special article)

This time the support showed. As Wootton recalls, Wayne Garcia, a member of the City Planning Commission, asked the group to “raise your hand if you go here tonight” at a gathering of about 50 Garden Cafe Should Wine Soldiers. Almost everyone’s hand shot up.

“It was very clear that we had the support of our immediate neighbors,” says Wootton.

A neighbor who was “very” against the results of the reallocation returned to the café to see what was what. Since the café reopened a few days ago, Wootton has been asking guests to fill out comment cards to look for holes in his brand new full-service restaurant. Opponents’ comment provided immediate relief, a glowing criticism that included sentences like “perfect execution” and “we’ll be back”.

Another good feeling was getting Perez to run the kitchen. Perez has worked for Wootton in the back of the house in the past. Perez immediately started with the evening menu: seared red snapper with a puttanesca sauce and a blade made of crispy snapper skin was a pure Perez creation.

But they don’t just play the new things. There are buttermilk pancakes for brunch, piled with blueberry compote, cookies absolutely draped in peppery sauce, and, yes, oh my god, good meatloaf. The latter is one of Dallas’s long-standing comforts. It’s on the menu as always – all caramelized edges and flavored juices made from a mixture of ground beef, onion and peppers, grated Parmesan and fresh black pepper, Tabasco and Worcestershire in quick puffs and lots of fresh herbs. The meatloaf is baked until it revels in its own juices, covered with a tomato glaze that’s red for Christmas.

An egg sandwich was always an eye catcher. The eggs prepared directly from the farm in the Garden Cafe have always tasted like someone had taken a melon baller to a sunset. It turned out that during the cafe restart, the breakfast sandwich briefly left the menu.

“That was actually an accident. We looked at the menu and it wasn’t there and we thought, oh damn no! ”Says Wootton. So don’t panic. The Garden Cafe is ready and listens to what the community needs: the breakfast rolls are also coming back.

The Garden Cafe is located at 5310 Junius Street, Dallas. Gartencafe.net. Open Thursday-Sunday, brunch from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and dinner from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

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