Matt Tobin and Josh Yingling were bartenders who didn’t want to become the kind of bartenders who are still pouring drinks at fifty, chain-smoking behind the stick until dawn. So, in 2011 they did what seemed like the logical alternative: they opened a bar. The difference was that this time it was theirs.
The space was a strip mall on Peavy Road in East Dallas, right next to Good 2 Go Taco. It had most recently been a biker bar called Texas Trap. They painted the walls dark, built a coffin-shaped bar, stocked it with craft beer nobody else in the neighborhood was pouring, and called it Goodfriend Beer Garden & Burger House. They didn’t plan to be a serious food destination. They initially had the taquería next door handling the kitchen. That lasted about five minutes before they figured out the burgers needed to be their own.
Thirteen years later, Goodfriend at 1154 Peavy Road has become one of the most important restaurants in East Dallas — not because it reinvented anything, but because it did exactly what it said it would. Good beer. Good burgers. A neighborhood that could feel like it was theirs. The Peavy and Garland intersection that once needed a reason to exist now has a cluster of independent food and drink businesses that grew up partly because Goodfriend proved the neighborhood was worth showing up to. That does not happen by accident.
Starting May 15, Goodfriend is bringing back something it hasn’t done in six years — weekday lunch service, open every day of the week. The beer garden patio with its cedar pergola and East Dallas afternoon light is going to make for a very different experience than the one most regulars have had at night, and if the kitchen holds to what it has always done, the lunch crowd is in for something worth returning to.
The food has always been better than the room suggests on first glance. Culinary director David Peña came up through Braindead Brewing and took over the Goodfriend kitchen after years of eating there as a regular. He cleaned up some of the excess — the portions that used to arrive as genuine challenges to human dignity — and focused on what the menu actually was: a small number of things done correctly, served with beer that is worth thinking about…