Get Your Chili Fix at Tolbert’s

Beans or no beans? Ground beef or cubed? You can argue all night about what goes into chili. Or you can go to Grapevine and have the real thing at Tolbert’s, a chili parlor opened by Kathleen Tolbert Ryan and her husband Paul. Kathleen comes by the recipe first-hand. Her father, Frank X. Tolbert, wrote the book A Bowl of Red and launched the first wave of Tolbert’s in the ’70s. This one sits in a restored 1911 building the Ryans filled with hand-wrought works of art. The menu has chicken-fried steak, fajitas, and a good-and-nasty treat called “donkey tails,” made by wrapping a tortilla around a hot dog and deep-frying it. But only a fool would skip the chili—accommodatingly served with beans or without.