Last week, Dallas Morning News food critic Leslie Brenner published an article on the state of Mexican dining in Dallas. It’s a worthwhile read and, in part, I agree with it. After all, the basic thesis is: “Wouldn’t it be cool if Dallas were a leader in modern Mexican fine…
The pirates who run the State Fair of Texas and the army of flying monkey lackeys otherwise known as the Dallas Park and Recreation Department are trying to bury all the State Fair’s loot for good before the Dallas City Council can send anybody in to police up Fair Park…
After five Dallas city appointees to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board defeated a suburban-backed, billion-dollar borrowing scheme by DART on Tuesday, the usual grumbling and ominous threats of withdrawals of membership in and support for the agency burbled up from the ‘burbs. The city, they said, had better do…
It all started innocently enough. One taco restaurateur took to Facebook to accuse another of attempting to poach his employee, and the other denied the charge. Then – mostly with light hearts – they issued an escalating series of taco challenges. But of course, Dallas foodies couldn’t leave well enough…
Great week for me. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to complain about Dallas Morning News editorials twice in one week. And as complaints go, this one is a little bit conditional. They actually said a good thing, but, lucky for me, they said it the wrong…
Dallas dining is becoming notorious, but not necessarily for good things. There’s the “fickle 500,” diners who patronize the new and the now only to disappear from dining rooms once a restaurant’s six months of fame are up. We’re famous for jumping on the bandwagon later than other cities; what’s…
Bucks Burnett has met most of his music idols. In this monthly column he shares tales from the front lines and backstage. When I saw Led Zeppelin in Dallas in early March 1975, during the Physical Graffiti tour, it started a chain of events that ended with the extremely unlikely photograph…
If you’re into poke, the Hawaiian marinated raw fish and vegetable dish that is more properly eaten under a beach cabana than in a suburban Texas strip mall, then you’ve been having a pretty good few months. In DFW, the number of new fast-casual poke places is staggering: FreshFin on…
When you approach Nikkei, it feels almost like a secret — nothing but a blue door and a small neon sign to alert you to the entrance tucked next to Coal Vines in Uptown. As you walk up the stairs into the restaurant, your eyes follow colorful walls adorned with floor-to-ceiling Japanese-inspired…
The whole question about Fair Park, our 277-acre albatross that everybody thinks should be turned over to a private entity, is whose entity. Seriously down-at-the-heels but still shabbily beautiful in its own way, this vast “exposition park” in South Dallas is going to become somebody’s baby. Please note quotation marks…
Hard to know at present if The Dallas Morning News is really going to carry through on its announced plan to move to the George-Dahl-designed building that I remember lovingly from its years as the Dallas Public Library, and less lovingly as a major beacon of rat urine on hot…
A letter to Enrique Peña Nieto, president of the United Mexican States, from a newspaper columnist in Dallas, Texas. Dear President Peña Nieto: Please don’t pull the rug out from under us. We need your help, and the world needs your help. If you temporize too much with the regime…
Bucks Burnett has met most of his music idols and isn’t shy about talking about it in his monthly column, Namedropper. I bought Vanilla Ice’s Mind Blowin’ from Blockbuster Music the day it came out on March 22, 1994. I gazed in awe at the cover, which showed Ice wearing dreadlocks and blowing smoke…
We’ve already celebrated some of the best tacos, best burgers and best food in general that we ate in 2016. But not every meal was so happy. As cosmic payback for having the coolest job on the planet, food writers occasionally have to eat things that are truly terrible. From overcooked…
A longer video depicting the prequel to a controversial arrest in Fort Worth shows how everything is racial
Bucks Burnett has met most of his music idols. In this monthly column he shares tales from the front lines and backstage. Last Wednesday, my plan was to go down to Austin, watch Alejandro Escovedo tape his fifth Austin City Limits performance, get interviews with him and his band and…
According to court documents filed yesterday (copy below), the State Fair of Texas wants to make a legal issue out of the fact that I called them “moneyed gray-hairs and blue-beards from the Park Cities.” In a motion asking that State District Judge Staci Williams remove herself from an open-records…
One brave woman gives chase to a dog thief, and a very sad story gets a very happy ending.
Bucks Burnett has met most of his music idols. In this monthly column he shares tales from the front lines and backstage. I’m known for having numerous what-the-truck stories about unlikely encounters with the greatest heroes of the day. I used to have an ego about it. Who could blame…
DART, our regional transit agency, is doing us all a big favor by being so useless. If we stare into the mess that is DART long enough, like a shaman stirring a pile of charred dog bones, we can see the pattern that will tell us what we need to…
If you’ve found yourself in a Chili’s dining room, hopefully you took the opportunity, first, to reevaluate the string of life choices that led you to your seat at the wobbly high top or in the sinking seat in a booth. Then notice that the restaurant chain is involved in…
Editor: Jim Schutze is away from Unfair Park briefly to work on a cover story for us, but we snared this from his Facebook page because we liked the writing and because we didn’t know four-legged coyotes make it down to Swiss Avenue. Beautiful encounter with a coyote on Swiss…
