After an extensive remodel to the historic Melios Bros Char Bar restaurant on Greenville Avenue in Dallas, a new restaurant named Son of a Butcher has opened in its place.
Son of a Butcher serves sliders, milkshakes, waffle fries and cheese curds in a dressed-down dining room with an inviting, green-turfed patio out front.
In its former life, the family-owned diner Char Bar was an icon in the neighborhood for nearly 50 years. Char Bar was known for its low-priced diner food and for the delightfully dated aesthetic. The building’s new operators maintained Char Bar’s iconic three-peaked exterior but gutted the interior. It needed it.
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Son of a Butcher started as a food stall inside Legacy Hall in Plano. It essentially operated as a test kitchen that allowed CEO Jack Gibbons and his team to test “narrow and deep” concepts on the food hall’s customers. Son of a Butcher — call it SoB if you like — emerged as a restaurant that could stand on its own.
It comes from FB Society, formerly Front Burner Restaurants, LLC. Diners will recognize this team’s other restaurants in Dallas-Fort Worth: Whiskey Cake, Sixty Vines, Ida Claire, Mexican Sugar, The Ranch and Haywire. Gibbons and his team formerly operated Velvet Taco and Twin Peaks.
The Son of a Butcher menu is compact, the prices reasonable. One slider is $3.95, two are $7.75.
Of the 13 sliders, options include Nashville hot chicken with pimento cheese, meatball with marinara and provolone, burnt ends with smoked brisket and gouda, and a PB&J with bacon. All sliders are served on potato buns. The Wagyu beef comes from A Bar N in Celina, which has become popular among local chefs — and one that just signed on to sell meat at Texas’ first Eataly, in Dallas’ NorthPark Center.
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For sides, SoB sells waffle fries loaded with house-made sauces like nacho cheese, Buffalo sauce and ranch. But the cheese curds should be your cheat-meal choice: Theirs come smothered in Nashville hot sauce and ranch with the optional squeeze of lemon.
The restaurant will sell wine, beer and hard seltzers, but the drinks they expect to be more popular are the milkshakes. Pistachio mint tastes a little like Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies, and blueberry cobbler has a decadent cinnamon crisp crumb on top.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the fast-casual restaurant was intended to be easy in, easy out. It also has a drive-through, available only for food and drink pick-ups that have been ordered online or via a third-party delivery service like UberEats or DoorDash, in advance. The team first used this style of drive-through at Velvet Taco, when third-party delivery got popular a few years ago.
It’s worth re-stating: You can’t pull into the drive-through and order. Advance orders only.
For those who choose to go inside the restaurant, peek inside the restrooms. The walls are covered in steak-patterned wallpaper.
“I think this will make most vegetarians blush,” Gibbons says.
Son of a Butcher’s opening on Lowest Greenville in Dallas marks the early stages of what will likely be an expansion in Texas.
“The strategy is to open in Dallas’ coolest spots,” Gibbons says.
Son of a Butcher is at 2026 Greenville Ave., Dallas. The original, at Legacy Food Hall in Plano, is still there. Son of a Butcher opened in Dallas on Dec. 14, 2020. Dinner only, from 4-9 p.m., at first. All food can be ordered for delivery or takeout.