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Forget the latest culinary craze — loyal diners dish about the spots that keep them coming back, and back, and back

It’s a challenge to keep up with the trendy and innovative restaurant landscape in Dallas. Every day, it seems, brings the announcement of a new upscale taco joint or slow-food gastropub or microbrewery. Amid the blur of media clamoring to cover the city’s latest and greatest foodie hotspots, it’s easy to forget the neighborhood restaurants that have stuck with us over the long haul.

But the regulars don’t forget.

They patronize their favorites week in and week out, sometimes daily. Their allegiance isn’t just about the food. They tend to be loyalists and creatures of habit, in contrast to those of us who have restaurant attention deficit disorder.

The neighborhood eateries with established regulars aren’t typically the ones enjoying Twitter and blogger buzz. If we lost them, however, they would leave gaping holes in the fabric of our community.

While most of us play the restaurant field, we salute the regulars who make sure our neighborhood’s dining staples will be around when we crave them.

The incogniTo diner

Corazon de Tejas 110

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El Corazon de Tejas is where Bill Warwick escapes from it all.

He discovered the place years ago when it was still Tejano restaurant, before the recent transformation. Warwick is an accountant for Hunt Oil in downtown Dallas, so the restaurant is both convenient to his office and unknown to his co-workers.

That’s important to him. Warwick dines at El Corazon just about every day for lunch as a respite from his stressful job “so I can go back to work and not hurt anybody,” he quips.

He sits in the bar area, always in the same booth, and his waitress immediately makes him a margarita when he arrives. The servers also know to bring out chips, salsa and queso. The chips dipped in a queso-salsa mix are usually the extent of his lunch.