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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.

Best cake by the slice

Dallas Affairs Cake Co.

How many times have you ogled the layer cake at your favorite coffee shop, ordered a slice of the vertical wonder, and then sunk in disappointment at its day-old taste and fridge-ridden frosting? Cake by the slice is a risky choice, but not at Dallas Affairs, the Lakewood-area bakery known for its stunning special occasion cakes. At the counter, Dallas Affairs keeps two cakes on hand for by-the-slice orders. One is an Italian cream with cream and pecan frosting; the other, a chocolate fudge with chocolate cream filling. For $3 a pop, it's a little slice of heaven--thick, heavy with flavor, and most important, fresh, fresh, fresh.

Best cup of coffee

Einstein's Bagels

We hate to do this, if only because it seems so unfair giving this award to a chain (though that doesn't stop readers, who, until recently, were convinced that the best burger in town came from the Burger King "grill") when plenty of local coffeehouses serve their own brand of bean brew. But having lived here our entire lives and having sampled a good amount of coffee around this town, we keep returning to the cup of joe served at this bagel chain. (Speaking of which, the Bagel Chain on Inwood Lane serves a tasty brew, though they recently took away our favorite, Double Chocolate Chip, which is why it doesn't make the top of the list.) Einstein's is big on the seasonal flavor: Last week or so, it resurrected the autumn brew, which has a chestnut scent and very little acidity; it went down smooth. We're equally fond of the vanilla hazelnut: Unlike most other flavored coffees around town, the Einstein's variations aren't overwhelming--neither too sweet nor too strong. They are, in a word, perfect. When's the last time you saw someone get this worked up over coffee? (Maybe we had too much this morning: We stopped at Einstein's and had two large cups. We're still buzzing.)

Best arena food

Turkey leg at the Ballpark in Arlington

Stadium food is a blessing and a curse. The best things about turkey legs at a ballgame are: 1. They are self-contained and easy to transport down steep steps; 2. They disgust large segments of the population, who are too squeamish to watch someone tear the meat on the bone like a cur, not to mention try it themselves; 3. There is no way to spill it on the people sitting in front of you; 4. They somehow make the overpriced canned beer taste better.

Best bagel (tie)

Einstein Bros. Bagels & Gilbert's New York Delicatessen

Yes, it's a chain. But when the quality control, selection, and freshness are this good, screw mom and pop. The blueberry and cinnamon-raisin varieties are some of our favorites--sweet and chewy, great smeared with copious amounts of butter. The coffee is on par with the garden varieties offered by those Seattle guys too. The one in our neighborhood is always packed on the weekends, but these kids are so well trained, the line is never as daunting as it looks.

Bagel chains come and go, but Gilbert's Delicatessen has weathered the onslaught, holding firm to its New York traditions and its conviction that Jason's will never be a deli. The Gilbert family runs this North Dallas institution with a sweet-and-sour sauciness, but their bagels cannot be denied. They're big, hot, doughy, plain, egg, wheat, sesame-seed, poppy-seed, onion-garlic, everything bagels. Try them with the scrambled eggs, lox, and onions. Or for the less Jewish, the link sausage is the best in town. What more could you ask for? Nothing, so eat.

Best mojito

Samba Room

A mojito is an exhilarating blend of lime wedges and mint leaves bathed in rum, with a splash of soda and a stalk of sugar cane for garnish. It's the kind of drink that will turn even the most uptight WASP into a samba-dancing Latin lover.

Best Of Dallas®

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