You may or may not remember that a few weeks ago I went off on a tangent about the State of the Cocktail. I received a little mail from that tirade, and I’ll be reporting on the results over the next few weeks–that is, at the slow pace of my…

On my restaurant critics’ top 10 list of most-often-asked questions–along with “What’s your favorite place to eat?” (home) and “Why aren’t you really fat?” (stress)–is, “What’s a good place to go for seafood?” Until now, I haven’t had a really good answer. Cafe Pacific is good, Newport’s is fine, there…

Fried chicken was the favorite food of my childhood, probably because we hardly ever had it. We came home from church on Sunday not to chicken but to leg of lamb, a legacy of Anglophile grandparents. My mother didn’t like to fry chicken because it was “too messy,” which it…

The restaurant with the romantic reputation has become even more so. St. Martins is one of the few late-night places that lets you meet the morning in sophisticated style. In addition to the selections from their regular menu available from 10 p.m. till 1:30 a.m., the kitchen is now offering…

Five handwritten pages from a devoted diner–how could I ignore this request to check out her favorite pizza place? A transplanted New Yorker yearning for the pizza joint of her childhood, she discovered a menu attached to her doorknob one day which led to the pizza of dreams at a…

The Metroplex is a myth. D-FW is actually and appropriately more like a big mall than a single metropolitan area, a messy conglomerate of distinct communities with two main “anchor stores,” linked only by geography and a highway. Everyone knows how different Fort Worth and Dallas are: Fort Worth is…

How sweet it is. Lakewood is one of the prettiest parts of Dallas, but it lacks certain urban quality-of-life requirements. You can’t get good groceries there, or go to a first-run movie. Good restaurants are scarce and–until recently–to get a good cup of espresso you had to drive across, or…

Everyone loves to be the one “in the know,” the one in touch, the one who knows what’s hot and what’s not. Everyone loves a secret–if they’re in on it–and from the first day it opened, Gloria’s was everyone’s favorite secret. “Hey, I know this great little Salvadoran place.” (Salvadoran–what’s…

This is Capriccio’s third move–it opened in the old house on Maple, then moved to the reconstructed San Simeon space on McKinney. In December, it moved again, into the old house once occupied by the ever-lamented Routh Street Cafe. Capriccio’s most recent space on McKinney had been completely redone, transformed…

Speaking of breakfast, there’s something about a particular shade of orange that I’ve seen only in vinyl, and it’s so evocative of a certain kind of breakfast that the menu could have been sold with the stuff by the yard. Was there even a choice of colors at this price?…

We live in scary times. And what’s the first thing to do when you get scared? Tell the truth: you turn around and run. Hide under the bed. Find your mommy. Eat something. That’s why, I theorize, comfort food has become the sure bet of the food business. It began…

A January issue of New York magazine featured two long articles: “Why America Hates New York,” and “The Ultimate Mexican Restaurant Guide.” The former article was actually a Newt vs. New York piece, and quoted a lot of statistics about how liberal New York is as opposed to how reactionary…

To remind you where I’m coming from: I married into a clan whose family reunions are highlighted by a belly dancer’s performance. Malouf family ties are strong; hundreds of them gather every two years from all over the world to compare their Siti’s–that’s grandma to you, gringo–tabouleh recipes. The food’s…

It’s never a deal, but expense really isn’t the problem with caviar. It’s availability. Unless you’re all dolled up for a night on the town, you’re not going to find caviar on the menu. Why should caviar require a coat and tie to eat? Yet nobody serves it except fancy…

It was a quiet night at the Champps Americana sports bar the Monday night after the NFC Championship game. After all, Dallas had just proved to the world that we weren’t champs. And that’s almost a quote from Troy Almighty’s mouth. Mudville had nothing on us. But the big screens…

I am always surprised when I tell people I work for the Dallas Observer and they immediately mention those classified personal ads. I never look at them myself; I turn straight to Molly Ivins’ column to get the dope (or hear about the dopes) in D.C., or I read the…

Cafe Society has been Dallas’ favorite coffee-talk cafe since it opened. It beat the rest of the coffee hustlers here, but the real root of its charm is its attitude. It assumes Dallas reads, talks, converses, and debates. It bases its whole business on that. Its mission statement says that…

Patrick Esquerre’s new cookbook, written in collaboration with his mother, Monique, is a collection of the recipes behind La Madeleine’s bakery and cafe. When Patrick Esquerre started serving food at La Madeleine, he used his mother’s expertise (she had written a successful French cookbook) as the basis for a lot…

Talk about timing: Pablo and Olga Esparza opened Amaya’s Grill in Lancaster just five weeks before the tornado hit. Undaunted by the disaster, the family rebuilt their south-of-the-Trinity location and then expanded north to a second restaurant across from Love Field. The night we ate there, our party included two…

News organs from New York magazine to Food & Wine have noted the resurgent popularity of strong, old-fashioned spirits (oddly coinciding with the new puritanism, MADD’s crusade, and the ascendancy of the 12-step program). There’s even a lush gift book glorifying the American cocktail. But the truth is that the…

We started the evening at a pitch-black bar in Deep Ellum–where we parked down an alley, where the bartender sighed “red or white” when we asked about wine, where the waitress answered our queries over her shoulder as she walked away from the table, where the chef shouted from the…

I thought Newt Gingrich was out of his mind when I read in a December New Yorker article that he favored using space stations to employ disabled people. But hey, I’m–excuse the expression–liberal. I try to keep an open mind. And recently I started toying with an equally wacky solution…