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Best Beet Salad

Bolla

Bolla

It's a dead ringer for a sculpture garden, this cluster of roasted gold and blackened blood-red beets, carved into silos and cubes and slithery rectangles, resting near dunes of sea salt. Bullet dabs of oil, suspending pulverized basil, chive, parsley and garlic hug the plate edges, while tufts of amaretto crème frâiche fill in spaces between the silos and delicate pelts of warm Camembert. These little points of intensity counterpoint and compete with the earthy beet—a contemporary cultural expression of this historic foodstuff as much cogent commentary as it is tasty thrill. Or so an art critic might say before he's pummeled with an artichoke.

Best Bird's-Eye View

Yumi To Go

Yumi to Go

It's kinda Big Brother, but it's really cool too. Ever want to see exactly how your food is made? Lemmon Avenue's Yumi To Go satisfies not only a yen for tasty Asian cuisine, but your inner voyeur as well. Place an order for R and G beef or sweet-and-sour pork and, OK, maybe some ahi tuna spring rolls. Then cruise (figuratively speaking—no gas necessary) on over to yumitogo.com. Click on the Yumi Cam button and watch a swift, clean and efficient kitchen get to wokin'. It's a little like watching your own personal chef...except completely affordable and you never have to get that fry smell out of your curtains.

Best Breakfast

Cindi's New York Delicatessen

Cindi's NY Delicatessen Restaurant & Bakery

This is one of those hotly contested categories that people are willing to go to the mat over, so it's never easy coming up with a winner. You've got your biscuits-and-gravy crowd of the Mecca and Metro variety, who swear on the beehive of their favorite waitress that their local diner holds the true secret to the egg well-fried. You've got your breakfast-as-brunch set of Lucky's, Cliff Café and Breadwinners fame where pancakes and French toast rule, and the infusion of Mexican accents into the early morning meal is a gastronomic necessity as well as a delight. But for our money, which is not much these days, we choose Cindi's NY Deli (Central Expressway location), where a bagel and lox are still among the pleasures of the flesh, and eggs any which way you like 'em—fried, scrambled, omelet—are reliably good. Coffee pots remain on the table, hot and ready to pour. Hash browns are just the right shade of brown. Waitresses are sweating from orders short and long, patrons old and young. And the Vietnamese owner has the good sense to employ the former owner of the now defunct Gilbert's Deli to get a bit of Jewish cooking into their menu so that the name delicatessen never becomes a misnomer.

Best Brunch/Pancakes

The Dream Cafe

Dream Café

A self-described "urban retreat serving wholesome global cuisine," this eclectic and artfully decorated restaurant offers healthful and delicious lunches and dinners, but we'll focus on the breakfast and weekend brunch. The "cloud cakes," made with ricotta cheese, are the perfect consistency—light and fluffy with just the right amount of sweetness. Those and the granola-encrusted French toast are topped with fresh strawberries and crème fraîche. If you're choosing the egg and meat route, there's the "dream Benedict" with wilted spinach and cherry tomatoes that almost cancel out the calorie-rich hollandaise. The huevos rancheros are also excellent, with fresh ancho and tomatillo sauce, red corn tortillas and brown rice. Who says you can't combine healthy with delicious? Besides everyone, we mean.

Best Bubble Tea (TIE)

Tempest Tea|Fat Straws Bubble Tea

Fat Straws
Kathy Tran

We still don't understand the purpose of the tapioca balls in the bottom of the bubble tea: They just get stuck in the freakishly wide straw. And yet we're still attracted to this weird concoction, a kind of milk slushie. At Tempest Tea, they improve on the regular bubble tea by offering a variety of quality teas as the base. If you are new to bubble tea, they are glad to make suggestions too; for us they prepared a delicious, cool mix of apricot white tea, vanilla flavoring and soymilk. If bubble tea is not to your taste, you can relax on their plush benches with a hot or iced tea chosen from their selection of more than 75 varieties.

It's hard to frequent any culinary establishment with the word "fat" in the name, but this fabulous slurp-fest is made possible and palatable only by the fat straws used to suck up the big, chewy tapioca balls at the bottom of the delicious and nutritious teas, slushees and smoothies the place has to offer. The tapioca balls—bubbles in Fat Straw parlance—are pearls of chewy carbs and aren't so much flavorful as they are textural, providing the slurper with a unique sip, chew, swallow, eat experience. The Dallas location we visited near the Galleria is a slight, sleek ultra-modern venue, and the menu boasts a vast array of post-modern beverages such as a green tea milkshake, passion fruit jasmine tea and mango slushees. This is definitely not your father's Starbucks. Nor does it pretend to be.

Best Burger

Twisted Root Burger Co.

Twisted Root Burger Co.

This Deep Ellum gem is known for one of the best hamburgers in town, along with its famous homemade root beer and milkshakes that can be ordered with Bailey's or amaretto. But for those hoping to avoid a future of getting drunk on milkshakes and packing on calories from hamburgers, the turkey burger is a way to satisfy your craving for meat without all the guilt. Unlike most places that use ground turkey, Twisted Root serves up a slice of moist turkey meat and places it on a wheat bun. And, like everything else on the menu, they are happy to customize it any way you like it. We like a slice of Swiss cheese and bacon, but then we're just extra health-conscious.

Best Burrito

Chuy's

Chuy's

Sadly, the word "burrito" conjures up the idea of a bland, paper-wrapped item purchased in a drive-through during the "fourthmeal" time of night. Chuy's has shown us it shouldn't be that way. Their "Big as Yo' Face" burritos live up to the claim; we can usually make two meals out of one. This is what a burrito should be: stuffed, not limp; hearty, cheesy and spicy, not mushy and pasty. And, oh yeah, you're definitely going to need that knife and fork that Chuy's provides in a prayer-printed glassine envelope. This monster comes topped with lots of sauce of your choice: We suggest the deluxe tomatillo. Yum.

Best Cajun Restaurant

Alligator Café

Alligator Cafe

Alligator-skin wallpaper, green. Lots of napkins. And helpful hints: pinch the tail, suck the head. Who'd a-thunk Cajun could be so Freudian? Such is the power of the crawdad. And of the Alligator Café with its long ropes of thick and greaseless fried alligator tail, soothing and swarthy gumbo with rings of fresh scallion embedded in this Cajun lava, plates of fried green tomatoes covered with shredded Parmesan on a bed of lettuce, and the heartiest damn red beans and rice your stomach ever rumbled to. Yes, Alligator, blow my Freudian crater.

Best Calzone

We used to be satisfied with the greasy calzones at your standard mall food court pizza joints (Famous Famiglia, Sbarro, etc.), but now that we've sampled the Italian staple at Picasso's, we just can't go back. There are those of us who'd argue Picasso's serves up the best pizza pie in town, but fold the crust over and it's just as good, if not better. You can choose from the normal toppings—pepperoni, sausage, olives, etc.—but Picasso's also gives you the added advantage of "deluxe toppings" (artichoke hearts, feta cheese, pine nuts, etc.) and "gourmet toppings" (steak fajita meat, portabella mushroom, smoked Gouda, etc.), allowing you to take your calzone experience to the limit. We highly recommend the large—not only will it feed you for a couple days, but if some freak snowstorm blew up, you could probably crawl in the thing and survive. It's that big, people.

Best Ceviche

Dallas Fish Market

Dallas Fish Market

Dallas Fish Market chef Randy Morgan says his goal is to align food with décor, in this case a modern white glass and metal room with repeating geometrical shapes cleansed into near sterility. Thus Morgan, who resuscitated the shuttered Russian Tea Room in New York, works his food into these cues, sometimes by shaping, sometimes by deconstructing and reformulating. His ceviche reflects this mindset, if only subtly. It's an invigorating mound of precisely minced Hawaiian red snapper interlaced with bits of mango and jalapeño that issues bursts of cumin. Morgan has teased out a workable juice formula—roughly 60 percent lime with 40 percent orange—to flash-cook the fish into opacity while moderating the lime intensity as it annuls the orange sweetness and preserves natural fish flavors and textures—flavors balanced with the precision of the mincing. Geometry never tasted so good.

Best Of Dallas®

Best Of

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