Best Hook-Ups 2007 | TailWaters Fly Fishing | Best of Dallas® 2020 | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Dallas | Dallas Observer
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Best Hook-Ups

TailWaters Fly Fishing

Good fly fishing shops seem to have a hard time in Dallas. Could it have anything to do with a climate that's Trout Hell? Against the odds, TailWaters Fly Fishing has us hooked. This cool new store on the McKinney Avenue trolley line looks and feels like somebody plucked it out of Montana and dropped it here. A knowledgeable and friendly staff, good supply of flies, lots of angler tchotchkes, good range of rods, including ones by Dallas-based Temple Fork—this place has everything to help you forget where you really are. They'll also help you plan fly fishing trips and advise you where the big ones are biting. As a full-service fisherman's helper, they're very fly indeed.

Best Hotel

The W Dallas

We are including this for one very good reason: You're more or less paying for this anyway, what with the tax breaks and publicly subsidized dough Dallas poured into Ross Perot's piece of property years ago, so ya might as well give yourselves a pat on the big ol' back. For whatever reason—film fests, traveling friends, spa trips, dinner plans—we've found ourselves visiting the W often since its opening last year. And, yeah, hipsters love their Belmont in the Cliff and old-timers love their classy-charming Adolphus and the visionaries can't wait for their Mandarin Oriental, but the W offers just what we were expecting: sleek, cool, comfortable, the coolest swimming pool in town (even if it overlooks the minimum-security jail, ugh), the blissful Bliss spa and one of the best restaurants in town (Tom Colicchio's Craft). And we've heard about issues with hotel security being a tad over-eager on occasion, but that's how we like our fancy-schmancy hotels—well-protected to keep out the riff-raff that really oughta be staying at the Ritz-Carlton or ZaZa. Move along now. But next year, this goes to the Stoneleigh, assuming they don't screw up that multimillion-dollar renovation. They won't. Fingers crossed.

Best Import Shop

La Mariposa

That drive down to Brownsville can be a real hassle, and they're shooting people in Nuevo Laredo a little too often to make shopping there worthwhile. Best to let La Mariposa handle the Mexican importing for you. No, they don't carry cheap prescription drugs, but they do have a lovely selection of Mexican folk art, jewelry, embroidered clothing and home décor items imported from and inspired by our neighbors to the south. Dig their Day of the Dead trinkets and sculptures, which make great gifts for those who deserve little skeletons.

Best Juiceteria

Fruteria Cano

Visit this fruteria for a taste of one of the best parts of Mexico. Down there colorful fruit stands dot every busy corner selling fresh-squeezed juice and smoothies. This little store in Oak Cliff is packed with boxes overflowing with fruit from Mexico, and depending on the season, from all over Latin America too. There's papaya, coconut and pineapple, mangos and even a fridge full of edible cacti. The glass counter is abloom with freshly cut fruit, including chocolate-dipped strawberries. And you can order fresh-squeezed juice and any fruit (we recommend mango) served with lime and red chili. That'll put a skip in your sip.

Best Kids' Clothing

Old Navy

We counted 'em—11 different styles of boys' blue jeans, plus numerous khakis, cargo pants and camouflage jeans. Faded, un-faded; dark blue, light blue or charcoal; with or without reinforced knee patches—they come in all kinds, and the best thing is sizes. Unlike a lot of discount purveyors, Old Navy always has the slim and husky sizes you need in stock. And these clothes will have your kid looking sharp at great prices, including frequent buy-two-or-more-for-a-special-price deals. We probably don't need to sell you on Old Navy's girls' selection, because chances are your daughter is already shopping there.

Best Late-Night Gardening Fix

Clean Air Gardening online

Sure, you can spend all weekend prowling the local gardening stores, picking out the perfect annuals and organic herbs and filling up the back of your SUV with bags of mulch and fertilizer. But when Sunday night rolls around and all the stores have closed, how do you sate your gardening jones? Click on over to Clean Air Gardening online. Their selection of products for environmentally friendly gardening is vast: rain barrels, compost bins, organic fertilizers and additives. The big item is the garden tool that jump-started site founder Lars Hundley's passion for online retailing: the push reel mower. Our order (an upside-down tomato planter, if you're curious) arrived quickly and was well-packaged. While Clean Air Gardening is online only, now that the seeds of retail success have been planted, they plan to plant a showroom in the Dallas Design District soon.

Best Light Source

Current Energy

It's time to lighten up. We mean environmentally, as in lightening your energy consumption. An easy place to start is by changing all the old light bulbs in your bat cave to the new long-lasting, Energy Star-certified, low-wattage variety. They have a bounty of bulbs at Current Energy, the Knox Street boutique for all things energy-wise. Besides lights, they also can enlighten you on everything from switching to cost-cutting electric suppliers (takes 10 minutes at one of their computers) to the best way to insulate your attic with recycled materials. They'll even do a "house audit" (for a fee) to let you know everything you could do to save as much as 50 percent on air-conditioning, electricity and appliances in your new (or old) place. And they'll give you a fresh-baked cookie while you browse. Best to keep up your own energy, right?

Best Liquor Store

Sigel's Fine Wines and Great Spirits

Quick quiz: Would you rather have to choose a good, reasonably priced bottle of wine, or overhaul the engine in your car? Yeah, we'd go with the engine overhaul too, and we know precisely dick about motors. Why, oh why, does buying a bottle of fermented grape juice have to be such a royal pain? We just want to bring a nice gift to a dinner party without breaking the bank or facing those awkward, wooden smiles when we hand our more knowledgeable hosts something they wouldn't wash their feet with. We don't have an effin' enology degree. We don't want to know the DNA sequence of the variety of grape we're drinking. We just want to get out of the store without spending a fortune or having the clerk laughing behind our backs. That's why we shop Sigel's—not the huge variety of wines and spirits in every price range, and not the huge cases of cold beer. We go there because they have very nice people who will guide wine idiots to a reasonable bottle, without leaving you feeling like you've just been pantsed.

Best Men's Clothing Store

REI

Suits? What do we know about suits? A week's worth of work clothes around this joint consists of two pairs of jeans, five T-shirts and a pair of flip-flops. Sometimes, though, the missus insists we look less like the reprobate we are. For funereal and wedding gear (same diff), you got your mall. For casual (read: everything else), we shop REI's racks of Columbia Sportswear, North Face and their own comfortable, cottony house brand. Natural and high-tech fibers, plenty of cargo pants and shirts with big, big pockets, fit for casual Friday at the office or hitting the trail—because we're men, dammit, and you just never know when you might have to tear off and answer the call of the wild, all while hauling your BlackBerry, encased in sweat-wicking synthetic linen. Our fave? The REI Adventure Pants, because there's always an adventure in our pants.

Best Mid-Century Comeback

Pop Logic

About two years ago, those of us who dug the mid-century décor of Eames, Stow Davis, Miller and Dunbar had a place to go for a much-needed chair, side table or console record player. The place was Metro Retro in Lakewood, with Andrea Jennings on hand and on the lookout for anything Eisenhower-era. Then she closed up shop, and we somehow found ourselves stranded styleless with a futon and a cinderblock bookshelf. Well, Jennings is back, this time in a smaller storefront on Lower Greenville. She's got a fresh stock of vintage pieces (selling quickly) and goofy gift items that are technically modern but with a wink at the past: Forbidden Planet journals, B-movie DVDs, pet-related funnies and cocktail accessories pepper the 1950s to 1970s furniture and wearables. Jennings is still settling into the new locale, unloading more and more every time we've visited, but the old Metro Retro popcorn machine has made an appearance—a sign that all is well in this '50s haven.

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