The Knox-Henderson neighborhood is an idyllic slice of American pie. This area, a few miles north of downtown, was first developed in the 1920s and is named for the two streets, Knox and Henderson, that run through it east to west and meet over Central Expressway. The mile-and-a-half strip has a mix of restaurants, bars, and shops spanning both sides of the highway; some are the old soul of the neighborhood, some new and sparkly. It’s a lovely neighborhood with many mid-century homes. It’s got charm and character. There are large oak trees, and the grass is definitely green.
But at the far west end of Knox Street, towering glass buildings are disrupting that neighborhood feel. A construction project took out an entire city block on the adjacent Travis Street. Now the skeleton of a modern high-rise stands tall with cranes jabbing the skyline.
And literally beneath those cranes is one white, squat two-story structure built in the 1940s. A Google Maps view shows an almost comical glimpse of an entire city block cleared to the dirt with one small building hugging the corner for dear life.
Cafe Madrid is a tapas bar that serves pitchers of sangria and offers a lovely menu of Spanish and Mediterranean dishes. Flamenco dancers and musicians often entertain. The small sidewalk patio is lovely, and it’s been around for decades, providing a bit of Spanish charm hard to find here in Dallas.
And guess what. Cafe Madrid ain’t moving.
Cafe Madrid brings sidewalk cafe culture to Dallas.
35 Years of Comunidad
Donica Jimenez fell in love with Spanish culture and language while attending Hockaday. She still remembers her Spanish teacher’s name: Flake Daniel.
Also in those early impressionable years, her parents imparted to her a penchant for entertaining and dinner parties. These two things led Jimenez to study Iberian culture and history at SMU. After graduation, she had a few translation jobs, but Jimenez’s heart just wasn’t in it. She wanted to own a business that somehow involved Spain and hospitality.
She’d often travel to Spain and come back to Dallas with a sense of longing. Something about the Spanish culture was missing from Dallas.
“It’s a sense of community. Everyone meets at their local tapas bar, the mom and dad with the babies in the stroller and grandma and the neighbors. I wanted to recreate that here in Dallas,” she says.
In 1989, Jimenez spotted a lease sign in the window at 4501 Travis Street. She measured the distance to the restaurant from her house — she wanted to be close to home: 1.8 miles.
“When I decided to open a restaurant, I got in my car and I just started driving,” Jimenez says. “This was the first spot I saw with a for lease sign in it.”
Soon after she opened the restaurant, she started a family.
“I put a sign on my front door: ‘I’m going to Baylor to have my baby.’ I came back two days later with my daughter in a car seat. She was on the bar,” Jimenez says with a big, gracious laugh that will melt anyone within earshot.
The restaurant became her life. On her first trip to Spain after she signed the lease, she loaded 11 suitcases with wares for the restaurant. “They’d just started a nonstop flight to Iberia and I was telling them I’m opening a restaurant and they were so excited they didn’t charge me extra for the luggage.”
After 35 years in business, she sees many regulars, but recently, the script has flipped, and there are more new customers. “I guess with all the people moving to Dallas,” she says.
She gets a lot of students who have traveled to Spain looking for that flavor closer to home. Young parents and walkers along the Katy Trail pop in for an early drink and bite to eat. There’s a pre-opera and symphony crowd, then late at night, she says, a more artsy, eclectic crowd shows up for wine and conversation. You’ll likely hear a couple of languages drifting from tables.
She raised three kids as a single mom within its walls and has had many of the same employees for decades.
One thing everyone should understand about Donica: it’s really not about the money.
Cafe Madrid offers a variety of tapas.
‘A Lot … A Lot of Money’
Decades ago, a Houston-based real estate company, Sarofim Realty Advisors, started buying property on Travis Street, where Cafe Madrid sits.
“Over 25 years, they bought one piece at a time under different names, so no one knew that it was one company buying the whole block,” Jimenez explains. “So this was the last piece they didn’t have.”
In 2017, her landlord came in one day to let her know they were selling the building; a developer, MSD Capital, an affiliate of Michael Dell’s investment firm, was buying the whole block. They told her she’d need to be out by the end of the year.
“And I said, ‘Well, I have a right of first refusal in my lease.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is a lot of money”
How much? She asked.
“A lot … A lot of money,” she remembers them promising her.
They balked and wouldn’t tell her exactly how much. A month goes by, and she gets an official notice from the developer with an offer to buy the space, which was way over market value.
“I never had investors. My grandfather loaned me the money to open up my restaurant. It’s literally just been me for 35 years,” she says
She did the math, knowing she was in it for the long term.
“I’d been here about 25 years at that point. I’m not going anywhere. I don’t want to start over,” she says.
She decided to exercise her first right of refusal, accept their offer and bought the building despite the inflated price.
Then, things got messy. Five days before she was supposed to close on her loan, the bank called, telling her she needed to “walk away from this deal.” They told her they wouldn’t be able to complete her paperwork in time to close the loan.
Four months of paperwork and her entire life’s work started to circle the drain. Seemingly, anyway. Perhaps for some mild-mannered tapas bar owner, but not Donica Jimenez.
“I’m very strong in my faith. And this whole time I’ve just been praying to God to show me what to do. Guide me,” she says.
Her aunt knew a loan officer, and on the Monday before the Friday deadline to close, they got in touch. The president of Texas Security Bank told her to meet him at her restaurant with two years of financials. It was a jumbo loan, which can take weeks and more commonly, months, to finance.
“This loan has to be funded by Friday. Money in the bank,” she remembers. “I met with him for two hours, he said my financials look great and said, ‘I’ll fund your loan.’”
She told him that it was sweet, but it had to be in the bank by 5 p.m. Friday. He told her he was the bank president, and he’d get it done. He did.
Jimenez still had her patch of Spain in Dallas, her life’s work, the place where employees had worked for decades and her three kids had been raised.
The threat of condo development looms over the dwarfed Cafe Madrid.
Michael Dell Is Not from the Block
In 2018, Michael Dell’s company bought the block; well, most of it. Dell is the world’s 10th richest person with a net worth of $151 billion. The Dallas Morning News reported at the time that the deal was estimated to be worth $250 million and included a massive development in the Knox-Henderson area. Construction started in 2023 and is expected to be completed in 2026.
New glass skybound buildings will eventually include three towers on a four-acre (ish) site. The luxury Auberge Resorts will operate the Knox Hotel and Residences. There will also be a 27-story multifamily building with over 100,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space.
In the shadow of this new building, with cranes swinging above, Cafe Madrid sits like a stubborn bull being taunted by a matador. But it’s not even flinching.
However, eschewing these suitors wasn’t easy.
When MSD Capital first bought the property, they showed up at Cafe Madrid often.
“When the Dell people came in, I was, once again, very open and honest with them. I told them I make a really good living. There is nothing that I want to do right now that I can’t already do,” she says transparently.
Short of one thing: Jimenez is very strong in her faith and sees her restaurant as a ministry, as a welcoming space for everyone, and more directly with the nonprofits she works with. She provides a space for single women to learn to cook through Buckner Family Pathways and also works with Brother Bill’s Helping Hands and Exodus Ministries.
Jimenez tells a story of a vision she had about 10 years ago while visiting her family ranch near Pilot Point.
“I literally had this vision of building the ranch into a women’s ministry, part-time, like a retreat,” she says. “I want to take these women and their children to the ranch, have a weekend, let them have fun, let them ride horses, swim, and take some life skills classes.”
So the next time the Dell group showed up at her doorstep, wondering what it would take to get this modest two-story white building, she told them, “‘God has sent y’all here to give me the money I need to do this ministry because I can’t. It’s so much money.’ There’s no way I could do it on my own,” she says.
They were interested and told her to get a bid.
She hired an architect and a developer. Months later, she presented them with the final number.
At this point in the story, Jimenez gets almost giddy. She shows them the plans and the cost.
“They said, ‘We’ll never pay that,’” she says with that big laugh again. “I said, ‘Ok, then I have no incentive to leave.’ Because I’m not going to. We all need a purpose in life. And right now, this is my purpose in life.”
Cafe Madrid is humming on a lovely Saturday evening. A flock of parakeets circles the trees near the restaurant as diners order plates of lamb and cheese and sip from pitchers of sangria. Thankfully, the massive construction project next door doesn’t affect the experience at the restaurant, save for cars bouncing through the disheveled street in front.
Michael Dell might have bought a lot of the property in the Knox-Henderson neighborhood. But Donica Jimenez saved its soul.
The dining tables at Cafe Madrid spill from the restaurant onto the patio.