the Austin restaurant I always visit
grilled chicken hearts, wild boar confit, and whipped lard
First—a word on the No Kings protest here in Detroit, which took place on Saturday in Mexicantown.
Southwest Detroit has a strong Mexican and Latino community, so it was awesome to see the event being held there. One of the highlights of the day was seeing a real Ken Bone-looking motherfucker carrying a sign that said “Self Deport Now” get chased out of the crowd. The Benny Hill theme might as well of been playing. It was very funny. Hell yeah, Detroit. Participating in a guttural “fuck nazis” chant was also cathartic.
I was also thrilled to see Mexicantown Bakery absolutely slammed, and overall it looked like every business in Southwest was jammin’. My feed is inundated daily with videos of fruteros and taqueros getting kidnapped in Los Angeles, and taco stands I love like Angel’s Tijuana Tacos have scaled back operations considerably. An entire community is scared right now, and it pisses me off that on top of that their livelihoods are being threatened. The Move this week: Go to your Hispanic or Latino neighborhood—wherever you are—and buy food and drink. Support these communities in every way you can; they need it.
OK TIME TO TALK ABOUT DAI DUE IN AUSTIN, TEXAS
From late 2011 to 2016, I lived in Austin, and in those five years these are the three things that I did:
Stand-up comedy.
Drank at bars.
Ate at restaurants.
When people ask me what to do in Austin, I have nothing to point to. No fun ideas, no cool things to see. Perform, drink, and eat—that’s what I did there. I lived in Texas during my obsessive years (26-30). I slept very little, I shucked oysters until my hands hurt, I wrote jokes, I went on stage, I drank tallboys of Lone Star and did shots of well whiskey, and I ate pretty fucking good.
Dai Due opened on Manor road in 2014 and immediately started getting a bunch of buzz. I kept hearing that the food was wild—lard and game meat and only ingredients from Texas. What a concept, even now: To exclusively using things available in your region, and one as unforgiving as Texas.
I have taken many different comedians to Dai Due over the years: Liza Treyger, Adam Conover, Dan Soder, and most recently Amy Silverberg. Whenever I get a text from a friend in town for Moontower or one of the many comedy clubs there, I always point them to Dai Due. Despite how much the city has changed, Dai Due remains a constant. Why do I recommend this place so much? Simply put, it’s Texas on a plate.
Dai Due is a restaurant that’s radically local. The menu shifts often with the seasons, though there’s plenty of pickling and preserving and canning happening. Still, expect lots of potatoes in June, fresh limes and lemons which end in the Spring, flounder in the Fall, etc. etc. To quote the website, “We do not use vegetables and fruit grown far away, meats from factory farms, fish that are not from our waters, or foreign cheeses.” This place is also my exhibit A when I say that we need to embrace homemade ketchup.
Dai Due is a kitchen where ingredients are sacred, where fries are fried in beef fat, tallow is whipped with honey and served with bread, and the olive oil produced comes right from olive trees in Texas. Read: Dai Due is proudly seed oil free. You might have…..thoughts about that, so let’s talk about it.
Tallow isn’t a dirty word, friends.
Dai Due uses Texas olive oil, animal fats from hogs, beef, chicken, duck, and butter. They deep fry in beef tallow (just like McDonald’s of days past), and their mayonnaise is made with Zero Acre’s fermented sugarcane oil. Brother, that’s a whole lot of commitment to avoid seed oils.
To my knowledge, Dai Due has been seed oil free since they opened. This isn’t some recent fad. They’ve been doing this for well over a decade. This is a restaurant that believes in using every part of the animal and to commit to less waste. I mean, they just won a Michelin Green Star for a god damn reason. Yes, the tallow champions of present have a not-so-great spokesperson in the form of a brain worm riddled RFK Jr., but, like all things, the conversation is much more nuanced than the people shouting online would have you believe.
Personally, I don’t give a shit about the seed oil vs. tallow debate. Everything is killing us. There’s not some magic diet in the modern age that’s going to grant us everlasting life. We’re all going to die horrible, horrible deaths. But, when a restaurant like Dai Due commits itself to using sustainable, regional products, to using every last bit of a wild animal, to putting in the fucking work—how can you not have undying love and admiration for that restaurant?
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What to order at Dai Due:
There’s almost always grilled chicken hearts ($8) on the menu, and you’ll want to get those. The last iteration I enjoyed came blessed with hot honey, chive, and sesame seeds. Usually served on a skewer, think of it like eating some Texas-style shish kebab or kefta.
The Dai Due breakfast ($15) is a modern classic breakfast plate—it includes Gulf coast brown rice, sautéed vegetables, kimchi, and a fried egg. Nourishing, tangy, natural, and healthy. I ask you, what’s better than local rice, vegetables, and an egg? This plate will happily sustain you for a lifetime. I recommend it for both locals and visitors looking for a light yet hearty meal. One of the best breakfast plates in the country.
Other dishes you’ll want to chase down:
Back in 2021, I had a wild boar confit with a ginger bone broth and nam phrik (jacked up fish sauce) that blew me away. All the thinly sliced carrots, herbs, and radishes ensured every bite had something lovely, and the lime juice pierced through the luxurious boar like a dagger. I’ve been chasing this dragon ever since. Jesse Griffiths (chef and proprietor) tells me that the dish just want back on the menu a couple months ago, but it’s dinner-only.
Sandwiches are always a great move here, too
In particular, the breakfast sandwich ($16) made with Nilgai antelope breakfast sausage, scrambled eggs, cheddar cheese, onion, and hot sauce honey hits the spot. It comes on squishy, freshly baked onion seed parker house bun. Nilgai antelope have an interesting history in South Texas, apparently brought over from India as zoo animals.
Good friend and lifelong Texan Matt Bearden always recommends the pastrami sandwich ($17) with pepper jack cheese, sauerkraut, and beet 1000 island dressing on grilled rye. The innards of the grilled rye are stained purple with that sweet & tangy beet dressing. Beets are used wonderfully at Dai Due—the vegetable grows in the cooler months, and is optimal for pickling, preserving, canning and the like, making it a powerful weapon for a restaurant commitment to locality.
This above cemita ahogada with pork carnitas, refried beans, asadero cheese, red cabbage, onion, radish, and mayo—sliced in half and dunked in a spicy bone broth for sopping—is another stunner. Sopping up this pork sandwich in a rich bone broth conjures up images of a delightful French dip, and you might think this is “wild game butcher shop meets Mexico,” but Mexico already has a lot of game in its diet. After all, they eat ostrich in Jalisco. I’ve seen the cemita ahogada bob and weave through the menu over the years, but when it’s on, it’s a must-cop.
As always, the Dai Due burger is great, too. This burger ($26) gets switched up on occasion, but in early May I enjoyed dry-aged Longhorn patties cooked over a wood fire, stacked on a bun with cheddar, a very balanced house-made ketchup, yellow mustard, and onion & dil pickled cabbage. Make note that while the considered ingredients play an important role, it’s all about the excellent beef here, which sings with natural, meaty flavors you sadly aren’t going to find at the supermarket.
Dessert at Dai Due predictably zig zags with the seasons, and always offers a unique expression.
We caught the early part of mango season (typically May through September in South Texas), and thus enjoyed a dense pound cake with lime curd and South Texas mangoes. It was silky and smooth, with each slice of mango providing a juicy, sweet pop. There’s also a short list of desert wines to enjoy, too, a few of which come from Marfa, a strange, somehow chic art town in the high desert that I’ve always wanted to visit.
It’s an oft imitated concept—a seasonal restaurant—but you’ll be hard pressed to find another place in America that does it better than Dai Due. You might have an aversion to game meat, or you might see the “no seed oils” explanation at the bottom of the menu and get turned off, but, you’d be missing out. Everything here tastes amazing.
Dai Due is full of lard and beef tallow and offal and game meats, but there’s so much thoughtfulness and loveliness to be had here. The meal doesn’t feel heavy. A tallow fried donut with mango glaze, candied lime, and Tajín is decadent, but not a slog. Good food doesn’t weigh you down. It rejuvenates. Yes, even a donut.
In my 11 years going to this restaurant, I’ve only been there for dinner once or twice. Typically, I’m here during the day with some comedians for a nice brunch before shows in the evening. Dai Due shines extra bright during the day. The patio is just wonderful, leafy, breezy, and full of sunshine. My recc? Go for breakfast and lunch, savor the afternoon, and more importantly, get out of your comfort zone and try some chicken hearts.
That’s it! Thanks for reading The Move! NOW GO TELL YOUR FRIENDS. I’d love more subscribers, and paying ones, too, but you don’t have to do that. Spend that money at a taqueria this week, ya heard????