Bread Winners Bakery & Cafe (Dallas, TX)

Today my wife and I were at NorthPark Mall doing a little dress shopping. Well, she was doing a little dress shopping; I was traipsing along behind her playing solitaire on my phone. It was getting fairly late, and we made a last-ditch effort to find dinner before hunger turned me from Jekyll to Hyde. Bread Winners is one of the more recent restaurant additions to the mall, so we thought we'd give it a shot.

Bread Winners has a fairly nice dining room inside, but there is a ton of outdoor seating on the patio. If it hadn't been 100 degrees out there, we might have done the patio. Today, however, was an air conditioning kind of day. A few of the other patrons were exceptionally loud, possibly fueled by the half-price martinis they have on Thursdays. The setup looked much fancier than the other Bread Winners locations I've been to. That being said, perhaps if they're going to have a nice seated dinner service they should opt for cloth napkins instead of paper. Just saying.

We were both thoroughly famished, so I insisted on an appetizer of hummus and pita to start things off. It didn't really fit with either of the entrees my wife and I were contemplating, but sometimes hunger overrides the voice of logic.

The hummus was really fresh and creamy. I didn't care for all the pine nuts, but they weren't enough to ruin this dish. The pita triangles were warm, fluffy, and delicious. I was also glad that we didn't have to rip apart big pieces of pita bread. This was a nice start to the meal.

I'm pretty familiar with Bread Winners' salad-and-sandwich lunch menu, but I was really excited to see ribs as part of their dinner selections. Done and done. I ordered the St. Louis Ribs, which come with green chile mac & cheese on the side.

The mac and cheese was spectacular! It had a nice crust of toasted breadcrumbs, which went perfectly with the gooey, delicious cheese. The chiles added a good kick to the mac. My wife found it a little too spicy, but I really enjoyed it.

My ribs weren't quite as pleasing as the mac and cheese had been. For starters, the meat was sadly fall-off-the-bone tender (i.e. overcooked). I was able to separate meat from bone with almost no effort at all. The rib meat itself was tender, but stringy like pulled pork. It also had zero smoke and barely any crust. The flavor from their sauce was pretty good and wasn't overly sweet. I think the cooks need to work on their butchering skills a bit, because 2 out of my 6 supposed St. Louis ribs still had part of the rib tip (knuckle) attached. I'm also not sure why they felt the need to shove a large sprig of rosemary into the middle of my ribs.

The ribs were rather disappointing, but I could have eaten a whole trough of their mac and cheese. Bread Winners is definitely not a place to go for good barbecue, although my meal as a whole was pretty enjoyable and much tastier than the usual mall food court options.

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Bread Winners Bakery & Cafe
8687 N. Central Expy
Suite 1608
Dallas, TX 75225
(469) 232-9798
http://www.breadwinnerscafe.com/