I’m a little biased towards the original Daddy Jack’s on lower Greenville.  My wife and I had our first real date there (you know, the one after the “safe” date where I met her and all her friends at a bar) and had what obviously turned out to be a life changing experience.  Having been in Dallas about 5 minutes and being monumentally comfortable in my all-knowing perspective on life while in my mid-twenties, I couldn’t imagine a seafood restaurant much better than DJ’s.  Fast forward 13 years and a kazillion fine dining experiences later and I’m still not convinced there’s a much better seafood experience to be had in Dallas.

We used to be mainstays on the lower Greenville circuit.  New restaurant, we were there.  Sadly, from our heyday, only Dodie’s, Terrilli’s, Blue Goose and, yes, Daddy Jack’s are still standing.  Such is life in the revolving door at the perennial Dallas hotspot that is lower Greenville. 

At some point shortly after parenthood, we started debating the pluses and minuses and the energy necessary to go to dinner on lower Greenville.  Did we really want to battle the weekend contingency of 20-somethings, tattooed teens and overly eager Dallas PD checkpoints to have dinner?  For any restaurant?  No.  For a trip to DJ’s?  No doubt!

Admittedly, this place is not fancy.  In a traditional no frills New England style, Daddy Jack's Lobster & Chowder House is an unpretentious gem undeterred by the many showy seafood chow palaces in the city in its quest to offer reasonably priced and unbelievably fresh seafood.  Red checked table cloths, kid’s drawings on the wall, and Jack himself manning the tiny open air kitchen emphasize the unspoken mission statement at DJ’s.

Yikes...we’ve consumed conservatively a keg of lobster bisque over the years!  Creamy and dreamy, traditionally thickened with rice, the gyp version that includes shrimp or crawfish, updated version served with a foam head, with chunks of lobster, chunkless, swirls of sherry, confetti of chives, with crusty bread, claw sticking out, bowl, cup, vat, believe me, we were slurping this stuff up way, way before it found its way onto every restaurant menu that wasn’t named Chili’s.  And it is with this lead in that I proclaim emphatically that Daddy Jack’s original location on lower Greenville has the very best lobster bisque in the free world (see it on Dishes to Die For). 

What makes a good lobster bisque?  A dozen years ago, I told Jack Chaplin one night that his bisque was hands down the best I’d tasted and asked how could I make a similar version at home?  He shook his head and said, “You can’t.  To make good bisque you gotta have lobsta pahhts.”  Without detailing the gruesome demise so many of these crustaceans endure for me to enjoy a wicked good spoonful of bisque, his point is well taken.  The home chef doesn’t have access to the ingredients necessary to make the lobster stock that provides the guts for this oh so popular porridge. 

Of course the menu also includes a soulful bowl of New England clam chowder. I much prefer the creamy white version to its 5^th Avenue bastard cousin and DJ’s is absolutely loaded with strips of clam.  Served with the traditional oyster crackers, this is a bowl of soup I’d order again and again if the bisque wasn't winking at me from the corner of the menu.

Once a special and now a menu stalwart is the grilled portabello mushroom salad.  Thick, meaty portabellos are marinated in a concoction of red wine and Worcestershire and grilled like a steak.  Given time, any mushroom will soak up whatever flavors you apply and these are so flavorful they must hang out for quite a while in the tasty sauce.  On the salad, these are served over the top with some fresh sliced tomatoes.  You can also order them by themselves as an appetizer or, if you’ve absolutely lost your mind and order a steak instead of seafood, these babies flatter any beef preparation.

On the entrees, you purists out there can get the simplest of lobster preparations with a single or double order of the one pound cull.  They crack it for you so maintenance is low and flavor high.  Beyond that, three dishes have captured our fancy for years. The fresh catch, which can be anything from snapper to redfish to tilapia comes generously crammed with an often imitated but never duplicated Ritz cracker and lump crabmeat stuffing.  It comes baked simply with a luscious butter sauce and is served with a baked potato and fresh vegetable.  It may not be all that cutting edge in preparation, but find yourself a good California chardonnay on the wine list and you’ll soon find yourself happy, happy, happy.  And for 15 bucks, it is a steal.

As we’ve lamented many times, our landlocked city has had its drawbacks when it comes to seafood.  As a huge fan of Alaskan King Crab legs, I’m aware they are flown in frozen at pretty much every restaurant south of Gnome, Alaska.  I’m fine with that.  What I’m not fine with is some of these so called ‘we fly it in fresh everyday’ seafood restaurants that bring me a spindly plate of legs that smell like a 3 day dead carp caught in Lake Lewisville.  Fortunately, Jack has higher standards.  Each of the half dozen or so orders I’ve had over the years has been of the thick legged variety, with the fresh scent of the sea, seemingly tipping the scales at well over a pound, and pre-cut for my cracking convenience.  You get a baked potato and veggie side but, honestly, who cares when you’ve got a steaming pile of Alaskan legs in front of you?  Give me my ramekin of drawn butter and I’m good.

Finally, Daddy Jack’s touts their Lobster Fra Diablo as their signature dish.  Get your taste buds around a Jethro Bodine sized bowl filled with linguini.  Toss it with a pound of lobster, mussels, clams, shrimp and a spicy marinara sauce and you’ve got what amounts to the quintessential northeast seafood explosion.  Caution, wear the bib they offer if you brave the Diablo.  You were meant to roll up your sleeves and lick your fingers on some dishes and the LFD certainly qualifies.

Desserts rotate with the season and whims of the proprietor but if they happen to have the strawberry rhubarb pie as a selection on your visit, make a point to order it.  The requisite cheesecake and crème brulee are also typically there for the eating.

Like the menu, the wine list is short and reasonably priced.  Save the well marketed and overrated Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio and the $5 darling Yellowtail, the list is exclusively California and that works quite well.  I mean, if you can’t get comfortable with a Cali chard dripping with oak and butter with these menu offerings, shame on you.  DJ’s also sports a chalkboard wine special(s) nightly on which we’ve seen big names such as Silver Oak, Far Niente, Jordan, Opus, etc.  But don’t over think it.  Straightforward food at sensible prices begs for a wine that follows the same mantra.

As I said, it’s a tight 15 or so table space at Jack’s so there are only a few servers on most nights.  Don’t mistake our laid back description of Jack’s to mean there isn’t a fine dining element to the place.  The servers have that old hand, professional air about them and serve you with a relaxed ease that is way too rare in these parts. 

As a reasonably accomplished untrained home chef that could stand to lose a few pounds, I wholeheartedly subscribe to the belief that you should never trust a skinny chef.  Equally robust Jack Chaplin opened his chowda house in 1993 and although he left town then returned, a few unaffiliated spin-offs bearing the name popped up, and many discerning diners have strayed from Greenville Avenue for their fine dining fix, Daddy Jack’s is just a very good, honest, straight forward, down to earth place that serves awfully fresh seafood and deserves every foodie’s attention and adulation. 

Foodie Note:  Did you know until the latter part of the late 19^th century, lobster was in such great supply in the US that it was considered poor man’s food fit only for day laborers and slaves, often washing up on the beaches in 2 foot high piles?