Springtime is an all-new season for Buttons Food and Music.
With the city's most extensive Sunday buffet, Buttons is already set to draw crowds for Easter and Mother's Day.
Now, chef Keith Hicks' contemporary comfort-food restaurant has reduced menu prices to draw more lunch and weekday diners.
Hicks also shook up the menu, adding dishes such as his "jerked-up" chicken with Jamaican jerk spices and a peppery salsa verde ($16).
Back are the double-cut pork chop with sides including black-eyed peas ($20), baby-back ribs with potato salad and collards ($14), and chicken-fried steak or chicken-fried chicken with sides ($13-$14).
The familiar fried catfish from the Sunday brunch also comes as a lunch or dinner platter with yams, collards and hush puppies ($15).
A separate "bar bites" menu offers smaller $5 and $6 dishes for bar customers, including sliders, fried oysters or fish tacos.
By email, part-owner Herbert Hughes wrote that Buttons wants to be more than a Sunday buffet ($19, and one of the top 100 in the U.S., according to diners using OpenTable.com).
"We want to move it to another level," Hughes wrote, with a secondary Sunday menu of $15 dishes and monthly gospel music along with the regular jazz buffet.
He also sent along Hicks' question: "When there's talk about chicken and waffles, why doesn't Fort Worth get any respect?"
For the record, Buttons has been serving chicken-and-waffles ($18, or $15 at Sunday brunch) for four years, long before it became a Dallas fashion.
It's open for lunch and dinner daily with dinner served until midnight Wednesdays and Thursdays, 2 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 4701 West Freeway, 817-735-4900, buttonsrestaurants.com.
Also making a spring comeback: Cafe Brazil.
The popular Dallas all-night cafe has staggered through two years in Fort Worth, mostly due to inconsistent performance and perpetual road construction on West Berry Street.
Cafe Brazil celebrated its anniversary this week with new menu items: chorizo "rolls" that are more like flavorful chimichangas, pumpkin-spice pancakes and a chipotle chili con carne topped with apple slaw. (Yes, that's high-concept.)
The Fort Worth Brazil is now open all day Sundays through Wednesdays, 24 hours Thursdays through Saturdays; 2880 W. Berry St., 817-923-7777, cafebrazil.com.
Bud Kennedy's Eats Beat appears Wednesdays in Your Life & Arts and Fridays in DFW.com Weekend. 817-390-7538
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