Best dumplings 2000 | Tabil spiced pork dumplings, The Landmark at the Melrose Hotel | Best of Dallas® 2020 | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Dallas | Dallas Observer
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Best dumplings

Tabil spiced pork dumplings, The Landmark at the Melrose Hotel

This little dish is a magnum opus in a bowl. Three little pork-stuffed pillows soak in a puddle of brisk citrus-sherry soy broth. The dumplings are plump and tender with well-seasoned specks of pork meat. They're covered with a delicious relish of leek, sesame seeds, and orange zest. This is a tight, well-orchestrated little dish. With little pillows so plush, it almost makes you wish you were a sleepy lab rat.

Best Manhattan

The Bar at The Mansion on Turtle Creek

The clubby, old school dcor, the sophisticated tunes from the piano player, and the, um, of-a-certain-age crowd, demand that you order something other than "another cold one" or a Run, Jump, Skip, and Go Nekkid. Generous pours of first-rate bourbon in elegantly muscular glasses with the perfect amount of vermouth and one cherry, mmm...it just doesn't get much more tasteful than that. But don't try tying the cherry stem with your tongue and still expect to get laid.

Best po' boy

Maguire's Regional Cuisine's Catfish Po Boy

It's unremarkable, yet it works. A wide tongue of catfish with a crisp golden coating is slipped between a cleaved roll and crowned with fresh ruddy tomato slices and a smear of Creole rmoulade. The fish is greaseless, crisp, and moist with stratified flakes of flesh and not a hint of river silt.

Best hamburger (tie)

Angry Dog & Jake's Old Fashioned Burgers and Beer

Patrick Williams
We once worked at a restaurant that hosted a weekly half-priced burger night. As a result, for months we could not stomach a burger and came dangerously close to vegetarianism. Luckily, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and soon enough we were eating burgers again, doing our part to help out the national beef industry. Most of the time for lunch, we just go get a deli sandwich. But every so often, our stomach rumbles and angrily demands: "Burger! Burger!" So we motor down the street to Angry Dog, where the burgers are thick and juicy and the service is fast and friendly. A craving is a terrible thing to waste.

Juicy double-beef burgers with cheese and Thousand Island dressing, which they call Thousand Island, not "secret sauce." Beer to go or stay. You can smoke in part of the dining room. The jukebox has plenty of C&W. The ladies behind the counter know how to take an order and chew gum at the same time. And the cell-phone-per-table ratio is lower than any other spot in a 20-mile radius. Everything is jake at Jake's.

Best dressed-to-kill restaurant

Avanti Euro Bistro

Curved leopard-print banquettes, sequestered in gauzy curtains, resemble a sheer neglige over cat-pelt bloomers. Black lacquered chairs are cushioned with leopard-print padded seats, and tables are cloaked in black tablecloths, like a black slit skirt over shiny black stilettos. The focal point of the back bar is a dramatic pair of narrow, triangular shelves bathed in the kind of neon orange favored by those who like folded greenbacks slipped into their underwear. This is the fine-dining version of a minx in homicidal regalia. Be careful how you use it.

Best fried chicken

Babe's Chicken Dinner House

No fast-food assembly line or heat lamp warming here. Manager Don Oates doesn't buy frozen chicken, so everything's fresh. The crunchy crisp breast, wing, drum, and thigh that come with the dinner have been marinated for 24 hours before being battered and cooked. Forget the calorie count and plan to go away full and happy since the side dishes include a choice of five home-style vegetables, a salad, and hot biscuits.

Best crab (and otherwise) cakes

Sweet Temptations Bakery & Café

Sweet Temptations' wonderful crab cakes are served over salad or pasta in an intimate European setting. Their dessert selections are also awesome, including the Lake Highlands rock cake or the Godiva cake.

Best bong

Royal Spice Thai Bistro's, Bong Bong Chicken

It's searingly potent. Sewn with thick sheets of tender, supple rice noodle, Royal Spice Thai Bistro's bong bong chicken contains a simple combination of ground bird and Thai basil in a clean, spicy oyster and Thai bean-sauce blend. Yum, yum. Cluck, cluck. No smelly water to chuck.

Best lemonade

La Madeleine French Bakery & Café

If you're sick of the smog, the ozone alert days, the heat, and the general misery of a Texas summer that lasts into February, head over to La Madeleine for some freshly squeezed lemonade. Not too tart, not too sweet. As the immortal Tammy Faye Bakker once sang, "When life throws you a lemon, make lemonade."

Best pho

Pho Saigon

Pho is a little like Buddha: It invites nourishing contemplation. A Vietnamese beef-broth soup, pho is often described as the national dish of Vietnam. It's a fundamental part of the day, a mind-clearing tonic steeped in ritual, often served for breakfast. It's an arduous, labor-intensive thing created by simmering meat and bones for roughly eight hours to extract that soothing richness. To this are added long rice noodle strands, meat, scallions, and herbs. It's often floated with cuts of beef such as brisket, eye of round, and flank steak, as well as meatballs. But there's more yummy stuff to toss in. You can add gelatinous and chewy soft tendon (not so much a cabled ligament as a piece of knuckle) or bible tripe, a piece of ox stomach. The wide, steaming bowl arrives with a plate piled with knots of bean sprouts, Asian basil, a lime wedge, and tiny slices of green chilies that look like mag wheels, all for tossing into the soup. Pho Kim's pho is delicious: freshly light and perfumy with tender, separate noodles and chewy sheets of beef. There's nothing better to endulge in as the briskness of fall sneaks upon us.

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