Best Indian restaurant 2000 | Swarna Palace Indian Cuisine | Best of Dallas® 2020 | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Dallas | Dallas Observer
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Best Indian restaurant

Swarna Palace Indian Cuisine

The cuisine at this bowling alley-sized Indian dining room is lush, colorful, and laced with clean flavors. Virtually everything, from the spinach pakora (batter-fried spinach leaves) to the shrimp birani (shrimp with basmati rice) to the chutneys is brisk and tasty. Plus a huge TV screen surrounded by assorted monitors beams in programming from India: a cornucopia of televised entertainment such as action chase scenes featuring steam locomotives and grizzled criminals who sing and dance. Must be the lentils.

Best interior restaurant garden

Bread Winners Bakery and Café

Even if you just order a cup of coffee, you can enjoy the lovely indoor flora and open ceiling at this place. The room is just the right size, with seating for about 25. A table for two in the corner can be quite a romantic affair.

Best salad bar

Texas de Brazil

It's a hideously decadent thing, and so delicious you can skip the prolific and endless skewers of red meat plus some paler varieties served here. A sprawling black marble bar in front of this restaurant's Brazilian grills contains some of the freshest, most sumptuous spreads of leafy, seedy, and rooty food in Dallas. Big bowls of fresh salads. Tabbouleh. Hearts of palm. Bright, juicy tomato slices. Supple artichoke hearts stuffed with tuna salad. Asparagus. Mushrooms. Even those vegetables that as children we would scrape from our plates and hide in the potted African violets take on new luster here. Brussels sprouts, for instance. Meat even creeps in. On an island in front of the salad bar is a hunk of prosciutto that sits behind cutting boards blanketed with thin slices of the stuff, along with a little salami. It's not entirely healthy, but at least the cholesterol won't leak from your tear ducts as it does after filling up on the glistening meat impaled on those skewers.

Best mussels

Daddy Jack's Wood Grill

Are you looking for a briny sweetness from your mussels, as our food critic always does? Or is that a sweet brininess? Your sacred seafood quest has ended. Daddy Jack's in Deep Ellum serves these mollusks up right. Besides being tender and, yes, chewy, each little fella is coated in a tangy garlic-tomato sauce. When this appetizer is placed on a generous slice of sourdough bread, you can make a meal of it, unless you are forced to share with others, which makes eating alone an attractive alternative.

Best fancy restaurant

Abacus

If chef Kent Rathbun's brilliantly orchestrated Abacus is anything, it's fancy. Its rich elaborateness is accomplished in thoroughly fresh ways, both on the plate and in the dining room. The food is complex with lots of influences meticulously merged in a loud, well-creased ascot sort of way. The dcor is...well, it's a futuristic rendering of poshness. The interior is filled with dramatic angles, jarring plunges, and hard surfaces softened by sloping ceiling soffits and rounded points. It's rich with deep, bright reds and dark wood and lighting that add delicate sparkle. If the Starship Enterprise were retrofitted in red velvet and paneling, Bones wore a corset, and Kirk was called madame instead of captain, the bridge would look like Abacus. Warp speed.

Best spaghetti & meatballs

Raneri's

The pasta is firm and tender. The sauce is tangy and rich. The meatball, shaped like a downed sparrow, is bulging with flavor. When you eat it your face gets messy, as messy as it does when you spill too much Chianti down your throat.

Best chocolate chip cookie (tie)

J.D.'s Chippery & Great Harvest Bread Co.

Alex Scott
JD's cookies are big, crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside, and warm from the oven. One of these suckers can keep you going on a sugar rush for an impressive stretch. Then, in the throes of a nasty jones, you'll come back and buy another one. The snickerdoodles aren't bad, either.

The Great Harvest Bread Co. gets our nod for "best" because of their huge cookie size that's bursting with chocolate. It makes other cookies paltry by comparison. This is a chocolate chip cookie specially designed for chocolate lovers.

Best romantic restaurant

Lola

This ivy-covered frame cottage with mustard-colored walls, handsome wall sconces, and hardwood floors has the feel of an aging domicile embracing all of its coziness and lyric sparkle. Not only does Lola dish out inspired New American cuisine and well-priced wines, it does it in a collection of snug, intimate dining areas woven throughout. If this isn't the perfect place to seduce or propose, it's at least the perfect place to hammer out a prenup.

Best apple turnover

The Mixing Bowl Bakery

Finely fluted layers of delicate pastry encase a juicy apple stuffing far removed from the leaden, tough-skinned clumps on most bakery shelves. Do not attempt to eat while driving, or you will emerge a pastry-flecked frump. Better to have a seat in the small caf and check out the collection of vintage baking tins and eggbeaters while indulging.

Best wine list

Jeroboam

Though it's written in French, the list at Jeroboam is one of the most intelligently organized and readable we've seen. The first eight pages serve as a table of contents, with wines categorized under regional headings along with bottle and by-the-glass prices. There is also a bin number that cross-references to pages in the list with regional descriptions, tasting notes, and wine specifications. Fifty-six pages of maps showing districts and villages help describe the wines' origins. The prices aren't bad either.

Best Of Dallas®

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