Hello!

Recently, I was driving down Lower Greenville on a Thursday around dinner time. I was peeking into the restaurants, and I noticed many of them were empty. I experienced something similar when I dropped in at one of my favorite watering holes in Oak Cliff on a Friday afternoon, and for the first time in a long while, I didn’t have to search for a table. And again when I made reservations for a few friends in a normally crowded restaurant in another part of town.

Granted, it’s summer, and this is a city that likes to pack bags and escape the triple-digit heat.

Perhaps more impactful, budgets are tighter for many people. We wrote an article in 2010 about 10 places where you could get $5 lunches. Save for Tony’s Pizza and Pasta on Northwest Highway, Keller’s Drive-In and Taquería Pinocho, many of the restaurants don’t have a $5 lunch option anymore, if they still exist.

Dallas has become a very different place since we wrote that article. Google says the rate of inflation between 2010 and now is 52.8% in Dallas. The CPI Inflation Calculator from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says a fiver in 2010 is the equivalent of $7.66 now, but the website also looks like it’s frozen in 2005, so we’re going to take that with a pasta water handful of salt.

Real estate pricing spiked, and produce and labor costs have increased for most of our restaurateurs. Cocktail menus with $20 drinks are commonplace. For a family of four, you’re looking at a $70 ticket — at least at any restaurant priced similarly to Chili’s — if everyone’s getting a burger, water and tipping 20%.

Our restaurant graveyard is a collection of heartbreaking favorites. We’re not only mourning the food. It’s our favorite server, being a regular, the moments we celebrated at the table toward the back, the person we used to be when we frequented the joint around the corner. And maybe what we miss most is what our neighborhood used to feel like.

I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer. (I do lean that way.)

The good news is that we always have a new chef to interview, a new concept to write about and neighbors willing to become new restaurateurs. There have been a few comeback kids in newer spaces with new hope. That’s the real purpose of our reader-forward Best Of contest — let’s celebrate our neighborhood.