Perhaps it’s been awhile since you’ve re-read Rick Perry’s book Fed Up, in which he chronicles, presumably choose-your-own-adventure style, the improbable rise of a D-student to the highest office in the only-land-that-matters. If it has, you may not recall Perry’s take on Social Security, which he called a “Ponzi Scheme”…
You can’t swing a mace and chain around Observer HQ without hitting someone who knows what it’s like to fight in a real newspaper war. That Buzz fellow worked in San Antonio back when the Express-News toiled against the Light. Schutze and Wilonsky are both veterans of The Dallas Morning…
Subs, Mexican, burgers, Slurpees — the strip mall at Northwest Highway and Hillcrest has most of the major food groups covered. It will get that elusive fifth major food group, cheap pizza, in a couple of months. Mimi Ahmedi’s family owns the Joe’s Pizza and Pasta chain. He’s branching out,…
A writer for UK’s Guardian takes on a topic today that’s near and dear to my probably-clogged heart: the writing down of orders. You see it all the time, at restaurants of various levels of sophistication: the Penless Server. No matter how many people are in your party, no matter…
That there is the photo CBS News used to illustrate Dallas’s promiscuity, which made me think that it was all our our honky-tonkin’ that makes us America’s sixth-sluttiest city. But in the description alongside that photo, CBS notes our high concentration of Fortune 500 companies, which made me think that…
Adam Richman, the Travel Channel’s Food Coma Correspondent, spent some time in Dallas recently, stuffing his face at Kuby’s Sausage House (which we profiled a while back), Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse and Sprouts SpringRoll & Pho. It’s at that last locale where someone (but not Richman? Isn’t that the whole point…
Amidst all the hype of more In-N-Outs landing in Dallas, Whataburger has (slightly more) quietly opened a new store, its 121st in DFW. To celebrate slyly make you neglect the leftovers you’ve stashed in your sad office fridge, the homegrown chain is offering a week’s worth of free stuff. Here’s…
Official word just came from Bravo: The next season of Top Chef will be set in Texas. You already knew that if you’ve been following any number of blogs, including City of Ate, where we broke the story that the state will shell out an estimated $400,000 to see its…
Celina-based American Craig James wears many hats, every last one of them red white and blue. He’s an SMU legend. He’s a former New England Patriot. He’s a father who will go to any lengths to make sure his son gets the playing time he deserves, even if those lengths…
That’s right, folks: Another In-N-Out lands in Dallas proper this week — another place for you to drive by and think, Even I don’t love burgers that much. That’s just weird. This one lands Thursday at 7909 LBJ Freeway, just near the 635-Coit interchange. So that won’t cause any traffic…
If you find yourself in the Hotel InterContinental up north this week and hear a bizarre, intermittent rattle coming from the second-floor ballroom, worry not. It’s not a rattlesnake handlers’ convention. It’s just the world’s best Scrabble players shaking for Qs and Us. That’s right: There’s a national championship of…
I was at Fireside Pies up north, trying to slow-play a pizza dinner to make it feel like an Actual Saturday Night. I’d perused the very attractive menu and settled on my pizza: the Pork Pie. I chose this because it is called the Pork Pie, and because as a…
The University of North Texas unveiled its shiny new football stadium last week, a $79 million complex designed to bring some juice to Denton come college football season. By big-time college sports’ standards, $80 million for a new stadium isn’t a ton of money. University of Michigan spent three times…
Football coaches, even the high school kind, can be angry men. This is especially true early in the season, when their lives, from their standpoint anyway, are just one big shit salad of false starts and bad reads. Knowing all that, I would have forgiven Patrick Williams, the new coach…
The Colbert Report has some of the funniest writers on TV, but the interviews tend to make me uncomfortable. That may be the point, part of Colbert’s send up of American punditry, but I still feel a little bad for the guests, whose tours of self-promotion always run smack into…
To do our part to conserve energy as Dallas streaks toward 1980-level awfulness, we’re going to cut the lights on the two Observer signs that adorn our Oak Lawn headquarters. So when your alarm clock is still on when you wake up tomorrow morning, you’ll know who to thank. We…
Earlier this summer we told you about how state lawmakers slyly tucked into the school-finance bill a new law requiring illegal immigrants to prove their legal status before receiving a driver’s license. Although civil libertarians and certain pinko newspaper guys decried the legislation as unnecessary, it actually contained some protections…
When Anthony Bourdain cruises through town this fall for his City of Ate-sponsored gig at the Majestic, he’s guaranteed to one or two questions about the meal I watched him eat on last night’s No Reservations: a 50-or-so-course palate-fuck at El Bulli, Ferran Adria’s 72-star restaurant on the remote coast…
I had a milkshake with lunch the other day. I didn’t feel too bad about it, even if I have been bitching about my build lately. I look sort of like a centaur these days, only instead of man’s torso on a horse’s hindquarters I have a famished African child’s…
For folks with a direct line to God, the prayer warriors behind Rick Perry’s rapidly approaching Houston prayer rally are some shitty communicators. Calls and emails to the event’s leadership team go unanswered, messages go unreturned. If you do get someone on the phone, they can’t get you off fast…
For several weeks now, as Top Chef crews have bounced around the state shooting next season’s Texas-centric version of the popular Bravo reality show, journalists and food bloggers have wondered: How much, if anything, did the state pay for the show to spotlight our state’s culinary scene? The answer, according…
As you’ve probably heard, the Texas Board of Education is in the process of picking new supplemental science materials that will be used to complement the state’s outdated science textbooks. The state hopes you understand that it totally would have bought new textbooks, but it blew all the book money…
