Changing scenery, greenery at M&O Station Grill

When the M&O Station Grill opened, it was all about nostalgia.

Now, with the Carroll Street area changing around it, M&O looks to a new future.

The Leonards Department Store museum, next door, still remembers an iconic 20th-century downtown Fort Worth retail supercenter.

But development is bringing a new generation to Danny and Rose Badillo’s freshly remodeled cafe and burger grill.

“People come now who never heard of Leonards,” Danny Badillo said this week: “Or they say, ‘I think my grandmother shopped there.’ ”

They still order a burger. But they also order salads, and craft beers, or the turkey-rosemary provolone burger on a house-baked wheat bun.

“People are so much more health-conscious,” Badillo said. He’s added a Caesar and wedge with housemade dressings and grilled chicken, a salmon fillet or house salmon cakes.

There’s also an avocado-feta salad that Rose Badillo named the “sister salad”: “It’s like when you plan lunch with your sister and you put together a salad. You say, ‘I’ve got an avocado,’ and she says, ‘OK, I’ll bring some feta,’ and it goes together.”

The new dining room still dishes out nostalgia with a jukebox and piped-in classic rock mixed with an occasional 1960s commercial from the old KXOL music radio station. But there are new faces, particularly at dinner.

“People are moving in all around where it used to be an industrial zone,” Danny Badillo said: “We’ve been about burgers forever. They want light stuff.”

M&O Station Grill is open for lunch and dinner weekdays and Saturdays; 200 Carroll St., 817-882-8020, bestburgerfortworth.com.

Sunday tastings

West 7th’s busy dinner restaurants are not so busy at lunch.

So the West 7th restaurants will host another “Bites & Flights” nosharound Sunday, offering unlimited bites for $25 and wines for $12 during the three-hour event.

With a wristband, diners can sample Brewster’s “Duke” burger sliders or quinoa burger sliders, Mash’D’s corn star tamales, pizzas from both Cork & Pig Tavern and Thirteen Pies.

Social House will serve its popular chicken-and-waffles, Terra Mediterranean Grill will serve mini-falafel sandwiches, and Rafain Brazilian Steakhouse will serve sirloin, chicken and sausage skewers. It’s on Crockett Street, east of University Drive, 2 p.m.-5 p.m., west-7th.com.

More Mambo

We can’t get enough Rio Mambo.

The Tex-Mex restaurant company opened 15 years ago — sadly, on Sept. 11, 2001 — and has spread to six locations with a seventh and eighth on the way.

By spring, a Rio Mambo will open in Burleson in the coming Old Town Station shops on Interstate 35W at Renfro Street.

Yet another location will Mambo its way into DFW Airport Terminal D this winter.

Mambo is a local “Tex-Mex y mas” restaurant comparable to Mi Cocina or Cantina Laredo. The other Mambo locations for owner Brent Johnson are in southwest Fort Worth, north and south Arlington, Addison, Colleyville and Weatherford; riomambo.com.

Literary note

Half-price dinners at Lonesome Dove Western Bistro?

That’s what chef Tim Love’s Stockyards flagship restaurant is offering tables of women (only women) at a new “Tuesday night book club” promotion.

The Dove offers a dinner special for half price each Tuesday, and a half-price wine; 2406 N. Main St., 817-740-8810, lonesomedovebistro.com.

This story was originally published September 28, 2016 at 3:45 PM with the headline "Changing scenery, greenery at M&O Station Grill."