The address was 4515 Greenville Avenue, but that didn’t help much. The building sat back off the street, down an alley near Yale Boulevard, behind nothing that looked like a restaurant. No sign. No parking lot to speak of. No indication from the street that anything worth finding was back there. Judge Buchmeyer — a federal judge, a man accustomed to having things run efficiently — drove up and down Greenville trying to locate it before finally giving up, parking, and walking until he found the door. When he walked inside, Mickey Mantle was sitting at a table eating a burger.
That was Rose’s Bluebonnet Sandwich Shop. For sixty-three years it was the best-known hamburger joint in Dallas that almost nobody could find on the first try.
Rose Elizabeth Slovacek was born in 1914 in Alma, Texas, the daughter of Czech immigrants. She came to Dallas after high school, worked as a nanny, lived briefly in New York, came back, and took a job at a small sandwich shop on Greenville Avenue. At some point she bought it. She renamed it after herself and the bluebonnet, and she ran it until the day she died — two days short of her 89th birthday, in 2003. The restaurant closed with her. There was no one else who could have kept it going the same way, and she wouldn’t have wanted anyone to try…