Chipotle rightly refers to its burritos as full gourmet meals wrapped in handy carrying cases. Dissect one before chowing down or study the spillage on the plate after a few bites, and you'll notice that ain't no cheap, boxed, Spanish rice hidden inside with the meats, vegetables and beans. Flavored with lime juice and tiny shreds of cilantro, the not-too-dry, not-too-sticky rice would be good as a side dish as well, though Chipotle wants to stick to serving only burritos, tacos and chips with salsa.

BLTs and grilled-cheese sandwiches are about neck and neck in the "hard to screw up" category, so it probably comes as no surprise that Jena's All Good Cafe does both well. But, as they say, God is in the details. While we'd never equate black peppered bacon, red leaf lettuce and Roma tomatoes with holiness, those ingredients make Jena's BLT as memorable as most other, more complicated sandwiches. And they're served with a pickle and cole slaw, to boot.

In the right hands, a chickpea can be a beautiful thing. In the wrong ones (say, most companies that mash 'em up, toss in some garlic and oil and sell them in tubs at grocery stores), they can be a sticky, bland mess akin to a slightly flavored wallpaper paste. Ali Baba adds just the right amount of garlic, tahini and olive oil, mixes until smooth and almost creamy and serves it in the middle of a plate full of hot, chewy triangles of nan. It's tasty enough for an entire meal without overwhelming the palate, but don't stop there. The other Syrian and Middle Eastern dishes are just as good.

Burgers, the "mundane hot dog" for tykes too finicky for ketchup squirts, grilled American cheese sandwiches, a variety of fried foods that make swell props for carb-counting lessons, ice cream desserts and purple vanilla milk shakes. The Purple Cow has everything a kid could ever want outside of Gummy Bear cell phones. There's an electric train up above that chugs along the perimeter. There's a jukebox that can play the same song over and over and over to test the limits of parental sanity, lots of cow gimcracks for the whelps to whine after and a kiddy menu to maul with crayons. It's good, clean hair-pulling fun. For mayhem temperance, the Purple Cow even serves milk shakes spiked with hooch. Plus there's plenty of black coffee for the adults.

Readers' Pick

The Purple Cow

The folks at Mis Cazuelas know all the hot and spicy stuff (in the right proportions) to make their salsa easily the best in the city. The key ingredient is the cilantro, which other restaurants around town skimp on (or omit entirely) in their salsas. At Mis Cazuelas, there's just the right blend of herbs, tomatoes, and peppers.

Salve's Tartufo is a double-chocolate gelato truffle with lively brandied cherries that spark its creamy heft out of cloy range. This tight little dessert will arouse any set of sweet teeth.

Unlike the sandwiches at the chain store down the street, EuroTex's Little Italy isn't a handful of room-temperature vegetables precariously nestled within bread and drowned in salad dressing. In fact, it doesn't include a wide range of veggies--just tomato, onion and bell pepper--served with warm feta and sliced cheeses between two pieces of grilled, crispy-edged panini bread. How the downtown cafe manages to keep the crumbly feta tucked inside there is a mystery to us. Talk about real sandwich artists.

It's topped with diced tomato, cheese, and cream. It's smooth. It's creamy. It's got a little tang in there. Plus a little smoke. And the horns won't start for at least an hour.

Eighteen-O-One is the small, lunch-only restaurant inside the West End's Dallas World Aquarium, but it could easily stand on its own merits. They please parents as well as kids with interesting seafood dishes and quality renditions of old standbys such as hamburgers and sandwiches. But someone put a lot of thought into the kids menu. Best of all is the fish-shaped pizza, one of the best pizzas we've had in Dallas (we know because we kept stealing pieces from our kid's plate). Amply supplied with mozzarella and thin-sliced pepperoni, the pizza is made perfect with a doughy crust and chunky marinara sauce. Makes us wish we were a kid again, because the pizza isn't available on the adult side of the menu. Same with the fish and chips--perfectly golden brown fillets served with fries--and the mini-hamburgers. The familiar kids-menu default item, chicken tenders, is also available.

There are two items noticeably missing from Tex-Mex joint Buster's Burritos: tacky souvenirs from across the border and lumpy, pastelike refried beans. Instead, the setting is minimal, but not sterile or institutional, and the giant burritos, tacos and chimichangas are served with whole black beans sprinkled with a fetalike cheese (they call it a Mexican version of Parmesan) and accompanied by a dollop of pico de gallo. Just like everything at Buster's, the beans are a nice diversion from standard fare.