Ark-Mex / Iconic Queso / Chile Con
The Faded Rose
A Creole restaurant became part of Arkansas cheese-dip lore, with a bowl so important it reportedly survived a bankruptcy judge.
The Queso Connection
I came to The Faded Rose chasing Arkansas cheese-dip history and found one of those stories so wonderfully ridiculous it could only make me love the subject more. Ed David brought a little New Orleans to Little Rock in 1982, but Little Rock apparently looked at his Creole restaurant and said, That's lovely. Where's the cheese dip? Eventually the bowl became so entangled in the restaurant's story that a bankruptcy judge reportedly ordered it to remain on the menu. When I visited, I got to hear the lore from Ed himself and meet his son, Zac. They were incredibly sweet to me, the kind of people who remind you that the best food stories are rarely just about what's in the bowl. Sometimes they're about the people who kept putting it on the table.
WHAT TO ORDER
The queso briefing
The Judge's Cheese Dip
The only cheese dip on this Trail with what amounts to a legal precedent. The Faded Rose is a New Orleans-style neighborhood restaurant, so cheese dip wasn't even supposed to be part of the plot. Little Rock had other plans. Customers wanted it, the bowl stuck around, and somewhere along the way a bankruptcy judge ordered that it stay on the menu. The owner's retelling of this story deserves an entire episode of my imagined queso documentary. Today it bears the only sensible name: The Judge’s Cheese Dip, served with unsalted tortilla chips. Case closed. 🧀⚖️
“Court-Ordered Cheese Dip”
WHERE TO LAND
Locations to visit
Choose a location below for its address and directions.