Best Coffee House 2007 | White Rock Coffee | Best of Dallas® 2020 | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Dallas | Dallas Observer
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Best Coffee House

White Rock Coffee

Here's how you can make a billion bucks in just a few easy steps. First, secure a good supply of cow pies (horse apples will do in a pinch). Next, char those pies or apples (apple pie?) over an open fire until they're black and crisp. When they're done, grind 'em up, force hot water through the grinds, mix the slurry with low-fat soy steam or milk froth and cinnamon, put it in a paper cup, and sell it for a few bucks 'n' change. Then compile music and sell CDs. Bingo, you got a billion. There's a company that actually did this. You may have heard of them. But if you're more into beans than burnt crap in trendy froth, stop by White Rock Coffee. They have a space-age building with rustic rafters. They have a drive-up window and free wi-fi. Instead of CDs, they host live music and open mike Tuesdays, which are more biodegradable. White Rock roasts their own coffee (on the lighter side, keeping the blowtorches at bay) in small batches. White Rock pours certified Fair Trade Coffees whereby farmers are guaranteed minimum floor prices and fair labor conditions. Behold: the ultimate self-congratulatory caffeine rush every morning. The resultant brews are heady, smooth, refreshing and righteous. White Rock also sells cool frills like scones and exquisite, richly colored Chantal teakettles. Praise the bean.

Best Cold Cuts

Nove Italiano's Salumi

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Most people are born with salty meat urges, the kind of meat with generous sequins of fat. Nove assembles them on a wooden board with timepiece precision, tiny slices of red and pink and blood black overlapping their way toward your cravings. The board hosts salamis and ruffles of prosciutto di Parma, sweet and salt tangy; mortadella folds, reeking of delicate pepper and coriander; and wedges of aged cheese with a little blot of seasoned ricotta. There's a mole, an intensely extracted explosion of cured salami musk from Seattle's Salumi Artisan Cured Meats. These slivery wafers are laced with chocolate, cinnamon and ancho and chipotle pepper gently hoisted on wisps of smoke. It comes with pizza bread. But why muck it thusly? Man can live on salted meat alone.

Best Crab Cakes

Central 214

Crab cakes are ubiquitous. Crab cakes are dull, persecuted into monotony by the terror of filler tyranny. Chef Tom Fleming conquers this heinousness. Fleming's Maryland jumbo lump crab cakes have filler, but there is a precise method to his madness: quarter-cup of bread crumbs to 5 pounds of cleaned crab flesh. To this he adds a dressing composed of brandy, mayonnaise and roasted peppers with plenty of cayenne. The cakes are seared until they form a thick mahogany coat. They're loose and topped with fried potato strings. They rest on a bed of wilted arugula and tomato relish in a lively vinaigrette. Lemon is there too, creating a stiff acidic tension that gradually dissipates in the depths of the sweet cake. Relish that.

Best Dessert

Cuatro Leches cake at La Duni Latin Cafe

"Greed is good," says Gordon Gekko in 1987's Wall Street, and damn if the selfish bastard wasn't right. Greed isn't just good, it's down right saintly when it comes to La Duni's cuatro leches cake. Oh, you could share it with a friend, but the noble thing to do is eat it all by yourself, throwing your expanding body on this live hand grenade of caloric excess. According to the menu, this sumptuous confection begins with layered mantecado vanilla sponge cake, which is soaked in tres leches sauce, then topped with caramelized Swiss meringue and dotted with arequipe reduction and served with extra tres leches sauce and arequipe caramel. Yeah, yeah, dunno what all that stuff is; all we know is that if you reach toward our plate, you'll find yourself with tiny little fork holes in the back of your hand. Don't be angry. We're doing it for your own good.

Best Destination Dining

Four Winds Steak House

Four Winds Steakhouse
It rests in the thick of the back country, at the end of a twisty driveway, wood fencing lining its flanks. There's a gazebo, a long porch and a few oaks sulking in the breeze plus a 15-acre pond where bass can be reeled in. This is Dallas steak dining as envisioned by Zeus and executed by former Del Frisco's chef Frank Rumoré. Once a ranch house built by former Dallas Cowboys middle linebacker Lee Roy Jordan, Four Winds is a rustic cedar tabernacle with obese shrimp in the cocktail, house-made mozzarella in the caprese and charred steaks that look like hunks of cooled Hawaiian lava flow that get the hot flow going in the mouth. Dab that drool. Perched on an 1,100-acre stretch an hour or so out of Dallas, dining here is like a four-hour vacation. Pitch a tent near the gazebo if the wine gets get the best of you.

Best Diet Destruction

Chicken Club and Chocolate Shake

What was it that your sorority sisters told you when you were packing on that freshman 10? A grilled chicken sandwich is lower in fat and calories than a burger? Right. If they said that at Snuffer's, they were lying to you. Don't feel bad. They'll get theirs eventually. For now, revel in the fact that you saved enough Weight Watchers points to blow on the chicken club sandwich. A savory grilled chicken breast gets raunchy with some deli-cut ham (yay, pork!), smoked turkey, American and Swiss cheeses (that's right, the best in fake and true) and some mayo, plus lettuce and tomato for good measure. Put it in a burger bun and sink right in. It's oozy, it's wrong and it's so right. Pair it with one damn fine chocolate shake (waitstaff tells us shakes depend on the bartender, but we've never had a bad one, no matter what hour or flavor) and you've got a bit of guilt and a lot of pleasure. Fries too? Hell yes. But not the cheddar fries. That'd just be way too sinful. Right?

Best Dining Diamond in the Rough

Local

Local is a slowly evolving organism, one that seems to thrive creatively on the cusp of its own extinction. Chef/owner Tracy Miller brought forth her restaurant in 2003, an offshoot of the catering operation she's nurtured in Deep Ellum's classic Boyd Hotel since 1997. Miller opened with the commitment to shepherd and develop Local in deliberately managed increments so as not to outrun her culinary (and financial) headlights. Since that time she has added a sleek yet comfortable wine lounge and is unfolding plans to subsume the Boyd's courtyard with garden dining in the spring. Yet through all of this inching, Miller has never relaxed her snug embrace of American flavors, distinctly teased with her own earthy flair. Try her urbane steak and eggs twist, two fried quail eggs on a drift of steak tartare. Or wallow in her meticulously harmonized hazelnut- and mustard-crusted halibut in Chardonnay thyme broth accompanied by grilled country bread and a young spinach salad—pure haute meets homey. Or surrender to the rib eye in a mushroom sauté with onion risotto. Miller is a virtuoso who whirs the salivary glands with clean flavors that mingle and marry and juxtapose in well-composed essays. That it sits in the Deep Ellum urban frontier means your adventure never has to suffer the irritants (noise, parking, neglect) of the stunning and the trendy.

Best Dinner and a Movie

Mockingbird Station

Spike Global Grill and the Angelika have a movie-and-dinner deal that for $22.95 per person gives you fresh mint basil salad, skewered tapas and strawberries-and-cream parfait, plus a movie ticket to any film at the Angelika. Since movie tickets now cost $9.25, the three-course dinner is fresh and tasty and a real bargain. Spike also offers two other movie packages: a wine-and-cheese tasting with three 3-ounce flights of red or white wine for $24.95, or a four-course meal (dishes selected by the chef) for $39.95. See the movie first or see it after you dine. (The ticket is good for up to one year.) It's a perfect first date—the movie gives you something to talk about when conversation lulls, and Spike stays open until 2 a.m., great for long getting-to-know-you conversation if you hit it off—or plenty of time to get really wasted if your date won't shut the hell up.

Best Dinner and Then...?

Central 214

We knew the service at Central 214 was attentive when our waiter surreptitiously noted our preference for Splenda and brought a single packet with each tea refill. And the food sparked oohs and aahs too, especially the hanger steak and the "mac and cheese our way" (their way is rigatoni with a garlic cream sauce and Parmesan). But if you're really on your game, you'll parlay the delicious dinner into a suggestion of dessert...brought by room service. The chic Hotel Palomar offers sumptuous rooms to sleep off your gluttonous meal or, you know, whatever. Our tip: Request a room with a soaking tub.

Best East Texas Outpost

Cotton Gin

Unless you really, really love Dairy Queen, the Crandall Cotton Gin is one of the last outposts for a hearty meal between Dallas and Tyler. Next time you're truckin' out to the Piney Woods, stop here for an $8.95 daily dinner special, which gets you more food than any person should eat in a single sitting. About as "fusion" as it gets is the grilled ham with pineapple on Sundays, but expect solid down-home entrees such as liver and onions, roast beef and chicken-fried steak. Just pray you've no occasion to travel east on a Monday when the Cotton Gin is closed.

Best Of Dallas®

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