It was a rough night over at the Windmill Lounge: not a good night for planter boxes at all. “No we do not have a drive-in patio. Well, not until tonight,” reads a post on their Facebook page alongside a dark, ambiguous picture of some strewn-about lumber. See also: -…
Every September-or-so here at the Dallas Observer, we unveil one of our meatiest issues: the Best Of Dallas. It features, as you know, the best damn things in the world of arts, film, theatre, food, booze and everything culture in Dallas. It’s with that in mind that we announce our…
The new Greenville Avenue specialty grocer, Green Grocer (3614 Greenville Ave.), will host grand opening festivities from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. this coming Saturday with lots of vendor samples and merriment. They also announced via their Facebook page the store is open all week, although not at full capacity…
Yiannis “Yanni” Arestis and Bobby Mullins of Armadillo Ale Works in Denton have been trying to pull this thing together for quite some time. But, building a brewery isn’t necessarily easy. Well, backtrack. Building a brewery might actually be the easy part. Building a sustainable and successful beer brand isn’t…
Observer food critic Scott Reitz is off work being a good son this weekend, so I’ll wrap it up for the week. Stephan Pyles’ new restaurant Stampede 66 was the subject of this week’s review. Scott was disappointed cricket tacos weren’t on the menu, despite the how comical those little…
Good news, those of you whose New Year’s resolutions have expired, this Wednesday is National Pie Day! Not to be confused with Pi Day, which is on March 14, or 3.14 for you nerds out there, Pie Day is the day in which we celebrate the miracle of pie. Pie…
Coca-Cola has a long history of capturing our imaginations through advertising. Polar bears and the northern lights. Olympic athletes. A rosy-cheeked Santa holding a glass of the elixir. However, recently Coca-Cola has stepped up to the scale and released their first anti-obesity ad. Coca-Cola sits us down on the sofa…
Until recently, the chicken nugget biz was a two-player game. McDonald’s ruled the roost with their all-powerful tempura style, while Wendy’s occupied a smaller cult market with a more “breadcrumby” version. Both have their merits and their die-hard loyalists, but now two new competitors have entered the ring: Burger King…
Yelp is adding restaurant health inspection grades to its restaurant pages. The reports, however, aren’t based on customer reviews, but rather city-provided health score information. Yelp has already launched the new feature in San Francisco. New York is next and then it will gobble up the rest of the country…
The Dallas Observer’s 2010 Readers’ Pick for Best New Restaurant, Mextopia, has closed. Leslie Brenner got the details in a voice mail from owner Ricardo Avila. The plan is to reopen somewhere else with a new concept. Avila cited road construction near his restaurant as part of the problem…
Tom Thumb has been touting a new line of cookies lately, displayed in evil temptation just before the produce section. For weeks now, the faddish bags have been on sale for just 250 pennies. The deal with the cookies is they’re wafer thin. Almost chip-like. They’re small enough to pop…
Last week, when they teased this week’s episode of Top Chef: Seattle, Padma promised me that the chefs would battle it out during restaurant wars. I was really excited to see Viking Valentine with an axe, or maybe Merman Valentine busting out a trident on someone’s ass. But it didn’t…
Photo by Katharine ShilcuttLa Gloria in San AntonioIf you’ve read this week’s feature — The 30 Essential Texas Restaurants to Visit Before You Die — by food critic Katharine Shilcutt at our sister paper the Houston Press, then you’ve no doubt already asked why X, Y or Z restaurant didn’t…
Now that they have their checkbooks all sorted out, the boys are back in town and on Saturday night the Stars face off against the Edmonton Oilers. Or someone. I actually have no idea. When they traded Shane Churla, I bowed out gracefully (although he is still with the organization)…
Last week Top Chef contestant and chef John Tesar hired an executive pastry chef for his high-end seafood restaurant in Preston Center, Spoon Bar & Kitchen. For the job, Tesar tapped David Collier, who previously worked with him at The Mansion. Collier is moving back to Texas this month after…
Yesterday we pointed out the mention of Balcones Texas Single Malt Whiskey in The New York Times as part of a larger discussion about malt whiskeys and their recent domestic rise. Today I got a bottle of the stuff. It tastes like this… When it comes to whiskey, I am…
In a small, fenced parcel, presumably somewhere in Texas, two perfectly dressed cowboys wrestle a young calf to the ground. They use their knees to pin the animal to the dirt while a third cowboy holds a thick length of metal in the smoldering coals of a fire in the…
Texas is defined in many ways by many different people. But there are at least three things anyone can agree on when it comes to the Lone Star State: barbecue, Tex-Mex and steaks. This is the holy trinity of Texas cuisine — foods that compose our most firmly entrenched food…
There’s a lot of hubub about the tacos served at Stampede 66, but I’m having a hard time embracing the enthusiasm. First of all, they start at $4 a piece, pricy no matter how good the service is at Stephan Pyles’ latest restaurant, but they also lack the authentic, gritty…
Shame on us for not seeing this sooner. A Waco distillery whooped up on the Scots in the whiskey distillin’ business a month ago. They won Best in Glass, a recent whiskey competition, beating names I’m sure you’ll recognize like Macallan and Glenmorangie, just to name two. See also: -…
Yesterday the meat processing industry’s trade magazine, Meatingplace, posted a new article for their “Activist Watch” column about a much needed communication plan for American farmers after a year of pink slime, gestation crates and slaughterhouse headlines. Certainly the industry has taken a punch. (It could be argued that it’s…
John Mackey, the co-founder and co-chief executive of Austin-based Whole Foods, has just released a new book, Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business. The (trademarked) idea of “conscious capitalism” is the soul of the book and promotes embracing the “higher purpose of a business, its relationships with interconnected…
