Dallas is a delicious destination. That's what Andrew Zimmern was out to prove when his show Bizarre Foods: Delicious Destinations dedicated an episode in 2017 to Big D.
That Travel Channel show has aired plenty of times, and each time, the Dallas restaurants featured on it get new fans all over the world.
"It's been on air several times," says Bill Ziegler, director of operations for Norma's Cafe. He's one of the people featured on the show. "We hear about it a lot. People all over the state, all over the country, all over the world. It's pretty cool."
On July 24, 2019, that same episode from the Travel Channel will hop over to Cooking Channel for a "premiere" of an oldie but a goodie.
It's an action-packed 21 minutes, where Zimmern and his team manage to educate viewers about the origins of Texas barbecue, Tex-Mex and comfort food while also stopping into six restaurants. Six! It even offers drive-by lessons on German settlers in the Hill Country, Mexican vaqueros, Native Americans in the Caddo tribe in East Texas, and more.
The show starts as a narrator proclaims that "here, beef is boss." Cameras go inside Pecan Lodge in Deep Ellum — past long lines of hungry people patiently waiting for barbecue, and into the smokehouse, where the good stuff happens. One of the patrons tells cameras that he came all the way from Sydney, Australia.
"[I] heard this joint is the best barbecue in Texas," he says, "and hot diggity, it is good!"
You should watch the show, if only to hear a man with an Australian accent say "hot diggity."
Next: Knife. Chef-owner John Tesar goes into his meat locker, where the dry-aged steaks are (purposefully) gathering white mold, for flavor. When he grabs a giant slab of beef off of the grill, it's a food moment, y'all: Everything is bigger here.
The beef theme continues at Mia's Tex-Mex, a Dallas institution famous for its brisket tacos. The chef butters a tortilla, slaps it on the grill, then layers Monterey Jack cheese, shredded brisket and griddled poblanos and onions on top. You might just be asking yourself, "When was the last time I went to Mia's for a brisket taco?"
The show goes upscale for a moment as it peeks inside the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek, one of Dallas' ritziest restaurants and the home of that famous bowl of tortilla soup. Then-Executive Chef Tom Parlo tells viewers he still makes the soup from a handwritten recipe. Want to make the soup? Chef Dean Fearing has a good tortilla soup recipe.
The second-to-last stop is Norma's Cafe, where Ziegler cooks up chicken-fried steak with housemade cream gravy and veggies. The show was filmed at their restaurant at Park Lane and Central Expressway in late 2016, then the newest outpost in its 60-year history.
"There's no calorie-counting involved here," Ziegler says as the camera zooms in on a big bite of gravy-covered chicken-fried steak.
The episode ends with dessert: a Drunken Nut pecan pie from Emporium Pies. The "drunken" part comes from a splash of bourbon in the filling.
"There's something in it that makes you happy, it cheers you up," says one customer. "You need it: You need pie!"
The Dallas episode of Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods: Delicious Destinations premieres on Cooking Channel at 9 p.m. July 24, 2019, after first airing on Travel Channel in 2017. The Dallas episode will re-air on Cooking Channel on July 25, Aug. 4, Aug. 14, Aug. 15 and Aug. 25, 2019.
