Best Import Shop 2007 | La Mariposa | Best of Dallas® 2020 | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Dallas | Dallas Observer
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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.

Best Money Man

James Lehman, CRPC

Are you contributing what you should to your 401K? Are you a good candidate for investing in a mutual fund, or should you have a Roth IRA? What goals do you have in terms of retirement income? All of these questions can be mind-boggling. Hell, on what we make, they may not even make sense, but James Lehman can help put it all into perspective. One meeting with the man (you'll be coached on what info to bring beforehand, fret not) puts your mind at ease when it comes to planning for that small business, college fund for the kids, a home in the country or whatever you have your heart set on years, or even decades, down the road. Lehman is a master at explaining in layman's terms what a few dollars squirreled away now can do for you later. This guy is money, man.

Best New Furniture Store

West Elm

If chintz makes you cringe and fringe makes you break out in a sweat, the clean lines of affordable furniture at West Elm will make you jump with joy. The first West Elm in the Dallas area—and only the second in Texas—the airy Mockingbird Station store makes furniture shops offering the overstuffed and multipillowed sofas that are so popular in Dallas seem fusty and old-fashioned. West Elm's upholstered furniture comes in leather and solid fabrics to provide a backdrop for sculptural tables, bookshelves and storage pieces in wood, steel and laminate. The look is mid-century modern meets second-millennium luxury. Sofas and modular seating range from $749 to $2,000. West Elm also specializes in practical but cool home office furniture—never easy to find. Then there's that behind-the-scene stuff: closet organization, office storage and "spa storage" in solid teak. Spa storage...who knew that was a category of case goods? The translation: "a place to keep your towels and soap in the bathroom." All that simplicity can get a tad boring, so West Elm also has a spattering of what might be called '50s Follies, such as cascading capiz shell lamps, sunburst wall mirrors and clocks, and hanging squares of stainless steel which can be linked as a room divider. Even though she might have looked prim and proper, June Cleaver wasn't boring.

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