A quick look at Lola's 25-selection by-the-glass wine list is reason enough for this award. Rather than pound your eyes and tongue with endless chardonnays and merlots from California and elsewhere, Lola throws out a couple of ticklers from Veneto, Italy; Germany; and Vouvray, France. The sweetener is this: Prices range from $6 to $18, with most of them hovering under the $10 mark. The list bulges with a diversity of wine regions, including Germany, Austria and Alsace, areas that don't usually merit list mentions. Heck, there are three chenin blancs from Savennieres--most lists don't even have whites from the Loire Valley, let alone from this tiny appellation. But fat phone-book wine lists, no matter how comprehensive, can't spell quality in and of themselves. Who wants to wade through lakes of wine with names that are hard to pronounce? So the weighty list comes with svelte prices, with markups well below those typical in Dallas. And if the phone-book list is too mind-numbing before the appetizer arrives, there's also "Van's Picks," a one-page wine brief of favorites composed by Lola owner and tireless wine slurper Van Roberts with prices mostly in the $40 to $80 range. Never has cork yanking been so pleasurable.
Readers' Pick
Cool River Café
1045 Hidden Ridge Road, Irving
972-871-8881
Addiction is an ugly thing. The first step is to admit you're powerless over it: You need your coffee, you will have your quintuple espresso low foam the runway mocha frappadoodle, and the rest of the world be damned. Having accepted the situation, the next step is to quit slopping the corporate hog. The Nodding Dog in Oak Cliff is a funky independent coffee house in the Bishop Arts district. It can comfortably sit 10 at its smattering of mismatched tables, not including the incongruous floral sofa. Think of it as anti-décor: The place doesn't look like a hotel lobby, it doesn't invite you to spend the night, it doesn't try to sell you a compilation CD or a ceramic mug. You can get a cup of coffee--a really good, ulcer-squirting cuppa joe. Coffee selections are for people who really enjoy the taste of coffee, so frou-frou is kept to a minimum. That said, they do make the best soy latte, hands down. The Dog also mixes Italian sodas and offers a small selection of muffins, cookies and grilled sandwiches. Owner Gus Trevino believes in giving back to the community, which is why he buys his coffees from area roasters such as the San Angelo-based La Crème Coffee and Tea. You can also catch local musicians jamming on the weekend.
Kids love to cook, and you love to rationalize any opportunity to dump them somewhere for a couple of hours on Saturday as a great educational adventure. Sur La Table meets all your needs. This classy kitchen/cookware store not only takes grown-up cooking seriously, with adult cooking classes and the most amazing gadgetry, high-end pots and pans, and chi-chi tableware, but it has homed in on your children as an untapped market of future foodies. Kids cooking classes are a little pricey--around $50 for two to three hours--but your kids really learn how to cook. Each class has a theme--cake decorating, cookie baking--and your 8- to 12-year-old comes home with a fresh-baked accomplishment, plus free accoutrements such as spatulas, spoon-ulas or offset icing spatulas.