Best Dog Rescue 2012 | Straydog Inc. Gun Barrel City | Best of Dallas® 2020 | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Dallas | Dallas Observer
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Best Dog Rescue

Straydog Inc. Gun Barrel City

Sad to say, there's sort of a running chicken-and-egg debate among vets and people who deal with orphaned animals: Does animal rescue activity attract people who are already a little off or does the stress of doing it take normal people and make them that way? The grim reality is that you, the would-be adopter of a rescue animal, can plunge in with the best intentions and find yourself working with rescue people who need to be rescued worse than the animals. Straydog is a family-run rescue farm for dogs that has been in operation for almost 20 years. Somehow the extended Arnold family manages to treat more than 120 dogs in residence at any given time as if each were a family pet. If they don't have the right dog for you, they know somebody else who will — who's not all weird about it.

Best Salvage Yard

Orr-Reed Wrecking

Watch out! Hannah Hargrove, the owner's daughter, is home on leave from college, and she's on a mission to turn this venerable treasure yard of architectural artifacts into a whole new 21st century antique salvage yard. We would say she's going to turn Orr-Reed upside down, but, of course, the charm of the place has always been that it looks like somebody already did that. In the not-too-distant future, Orr-Reed's stacks and stacks (and stacks) of rescued lumber and house parts will be shoppable online at orr-reed.com. For now, while she's doing the necessary inventory, Hargrove is turning part of the yard over to artists as studio space. A cool place to visit, a great place to sell or buy old house innards, Orr-Reed may also be the wave of the antique future.

Best Dirt Additive

Minerals Plus

So you want to plant some posies in the dirt. Well, may we ask something first? What dirt? Because it makes a big difference, especially in the city, especially in this city, where you can get dirt that's way too hard, like concrete, or dirt in which previous occupants have poisoned off all the creepy-crawlies you need to make your dirt hospitable for your posies. It never hurts to improve your dirt, and the best dirt-improver we know about is Minerals Plus, made by Soil Menders and recommended by organic guru Howard Garrett. It contains three kinds of paramagnetic volcanic rock. We have no idea what that is, but it sounds awesome. It also contains lava sand, granite sand, basalt, rock phosphate, humate and montmorillonite. If you don't have any montmorillonite in your soil, we don't even know how you can show yourself in public. Good stuff. Really. Your posies will thank you.

Best Worm Doo-Doo Pee-Pee

Worm Wine Texas Worm Ranch

The art of using worm doo-doo pee-pee to make your garden grow is called vermiculture, and one of the nation's best outlets for both worms and their culture happens to be right here in our midst, at Texas Worm Ranch. Heather Rinaldi is the big ranch boss, ridin' around ropin' worms all day. A farm girl from Oklahoma, Rinaldi has mastered the breeding and shipping of red wrigglers, which are kind of the Black Angus of worms. Rinaldi feeds her worms only the finest horse-barn waste and fruit and vegetable scraps and beds them down at night on mattresses made of leaves, cardboard, newspaper and rotted straw. The resulting worm poop, when mixed with fresh molasses, is an absolutely irresistible elixir for all the kinds of bacteria and other tiny creepy-crawlies that can make a garden strong and brilliant without chemicals. Health note: Be sure not to store your worm wine mixed in with the wines you keep for your own consumption. It might not hurt you, but you'd have to kill yourself anyway.

Best Texas Sun Protection After Sunblock

UV clothing at REI

OK, a few caveats here. First, UV-protective clothing is what you do AFTER you do sunblock. Sunblock protects the skin that isn't protected by clothing, and that's where you have the greater risk for cancer. Second, all clothing helps, and people with darker skin or people who just don't burn very easily probably don't need special clothes. Just don't be naked. Last caveat, REI is not the only place where you can buy good UV clothing. But if you want a really big selection and you want to talk to sales people trained in this stuff, you will never be disappointed at REI. Plus, their stuff looks good. If all we cared about was cancer and we never even thought about how we looked, we'd all be wearing our bedsheets to work.

Best Grocery Store

Sprouts

It was Newflower, and then it was Sunflower, and then at some point recently their bags suddenly read "Sprouts," featuring a bucolic little outdoor scene replete with frolicking cows. The grocery store on North Henderson Avenue has apparently changed opaque corporate owners once again (Sprouts is an Arizona-based natural foods chain), but honestly, we don't much care. It remains one of the only grocery stores in town that actually feels like a place to stock up on food, rather than a wallet-gouging, crowd-dodging, emotionally taxing obstacle course filled with infuriatingly slow-moving yuppies. Sprouts is always manageable and uncrowded, with excellent selections of organic produce and meat. We'll readily admit that they don't have as many varieties of fresh bread as we'd like, but those bulk candy bins a few steps away always help to ease the pain.

Best Bizarre Garden Ornaments

Big Mango Trading Company

Do you need something for your yard or balcony that just stops people dead in their tracks and makes their eyes go googly? The garden ornaments (and indoor ornaments, for that matter) at Big Mango Trading Company are just the right combination of drama and taste, all imported from Bali and Java, all made of natural elements. Bowls, urns and benches made of wood, lava stone and glass, basalt columns and megaliths, garden table-and-chair sets made of petrified wood and wonderful teak-root sculptures that look like petrified rays of the sun: Owner Lori Smith says you can drop five bucks here or 20 grand. It's up to you.

Best Toy Store

Toys Unique

The building that used to house the Toys 'R' Us on Central Expressway is now a liquor store. The old tenant just moved down the street, but it's a symbol of what's happened to the specialty toy store in the age of Walmart and Target: They've disappeared. Not Toys Unique. The family owned retailer has been holding down the corner of Lovers Lane and Inwood Road for more than 30 years, and stepping inside is a bit like walking back a few decades. There's no secret to its longevity. It has a wide selection for an independent toy store and an old-fashioned commitment to customer service. Have a question? Just ask. Want something ordered? Done. Of course, being in the Park Cities doesn't hurt either.

  • 5600 W. Lovers Lane, Dallas, 75209 Map

Best Grocery Store for Creepers

Highland Park Whole Foods Market

Any upscale grocery store is bound to have a higher ratio of beautiful women than the city as a whole. And grocery stores in affluent areas also seem to draw a lot of good-looking ladies as well. So this Whole Foods location, with its pricey produce and absurd health products (we once espied gluten-free plates — plates!), tends to draw ladies (and men, we suppose) who are not only health-conscious and therefore usually in great shape, but also affluent enough to have no need for a job or, with their live-in nannies, the time-waste of parenting to keep them from spending plenty of time with personal trainers, hairdressers, nail salons, tanning booths and the makeup counter. Paying out the nose for a cut of meat is a small price to pay for a visual buffet of snug-fitting yoga pants and top-of-the-line silicone enhancements.

Best Shoe Store

DSW

For some members of the human species — not that we're gender stereotyping here — the selection of footwear is a pretty simple choice: black, brown or sneakers. Others pore over the slightest variations in color, heel height and style like a diamond merchant. In other words, picking the "best" shoe store for all sexes and tastes is impossible, so we'll settle for a happy median and give DSW the nod based on the size of its selection and price. Particularly price. DSW's Dallas outlets offer rank upon rank of footwear in every fashion imaginable for men, women and kids. The styles might not always be fresh off the fashion catwalk, but with their wide selection, you're almost certain to find something that's pretty close, and to the casual observer, a cubic zirconium is just as good as a diamond, without requiring a second mortgage.

Best Of Dallas®

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