On Sunday, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins ordered all the bars to close indefinitely at 11:59 p.m. the following day. Since the industry is also a rumor mill, the move was not totally unexpected, but the speed, lack of notice and sense of finality still shocked operators and workers. Leaders…
Alex Gates, chef-owner of Cochineal in Marfa, doesn’t know who nominated her for a James Beard Award, which is not surprising for an award that holds an open nomination process on the internet (my Papa John Schnatter nomination went nowhere). What is surprising is that a semifinalist spot would go…
What’s in a cup of tea? The rebellious seeds of our democracy, sure. But tea, at least in America, is a contemplative drink, maybe a comfort during illness or a holiday tradition. It’s a peaceful, social drink. In much of the rest of the world, tea fills the role that…
I’m not the biggest brunch guy. I feel like maybe later in life I’ll get there because I certainly love traditional brunch items, and day drinking seems like it might be fun in an alternate timeline where I don’t have so damn much to do. But Medrano is a brunch…
Because I’m the age I am, the word “biscuit” makes me think of “The Humpty Dance” every single time I hear it or even think it. If I eat a good enough biscuit, I might even quietly rap it. Samoans! I guess that a place with biscuit in the name…
The nip in the air and the incessant drone of Christmas music means it’s that time of year when we take Melissa’s mom to tea. High tea in the American interpretation almost universally means standard black teas served in the lobby of a reasonably nice hotel to guests ensconced in…
Let’s get a couple of things out of the way: 1. I paid $45 to attend a cocktail class that turned out to be a marketing presentation for a single brand of whiskey, and 2. I don’t care. Commercialization is annoying and we all have too many ads shoved down…
Our Budget Bites feature normally has a limit of around $10, but I applied for and received an exemption to write about slightly more expensive sushi. My grandmother is fond of saying “never buy the cheapest weenies.” If you don’t want to pay $16 for a complete lunch, sushi isn’t…
On Saturday, City Council member Adam Medrano and I joined my Observer boss Taylor Adams to judge the taco entries at the best taco festival in North Texas, and several thousand of you were kind enough to be there, too. We gave five awards, and y’all picked a People’s Choice…
Apologies for the hiatus, loyal readers, but I had a bit of a travel mishap, and my offer to provide an in-depth review of viral gastroenteritis was politely declined. We return to my culinary tour of southern Dallas, except this week I went so far south I actually ate in…
Former Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston knows food, likes the Observer and has been known to voice strong opinions on rare occasions. So when he offered to write about food for us, we said hell yeah. In his seminal interview with me known as “Hot Dish,” my colleague Brian…
Science presents us with many paradoxes. Its ability to improve our lives almost exactly matches its ability to show us the ways we’re ruining our lives. The world is overheating, and a huge cause of that destruction is global agriculture, in particular the raising of livestock for meat. Meat production…
