Certain words, when placed side by side, just sound wrong. It’s rather jarring, for example, to encounter phrases such as “French soldier” or “irrefutable evidence” or even “Bush administration”–phrases that, while grammatically correct, confound logic. In the same manner, we accept Tennessee sour mash or single-malt highland scotch. Should Yoichi,…
In a February article in the online magazine Slate, Columbia University Professor Duncan Watts exhumed the work of the late Princeton social psychologist Solomon Asch to explain what Watts called the Kerry cascade. The phenomenon, Watts says, is the strange dynamic by which Massachusetts Senator John Kerry rapidly swept to…
Once upon a time, daring engineers threatened the very heavens with dazzling feats of construction. Of course, we are referring to that marvelous epoch a few years ago, when upscale restaurants pushed dishes to new heights–literally. Chefs stacked cuts of meat on a foundation of mashed potatoes framed by crisp…
Forty-nine hundred McKinney Avenue has always had an identity problem. Does it really want to be Italian? Or more accurately, will we let it be Italian if it really is? Or is this spot next to a dry cleaner really never meant to be more than a hoagie deli with…
Early one evening, about a year ago, the Burning Question crew encountered a suburban couple venturing into the wilds of Lower Greenville for the first time in years. It was fascinating to observe them as they watched, with a kind of “people still do that?” amazement on their faces, the…
Spike is a dwelling of odd contrasts, ones so striking that it’s a good bet they were unintentional, which makes them all the more delicious. On the surface, Spike is another in the long line of Dallas’ shallow nightclubs with pulsing music, lighting that requires bat sonar and shopworn chic…
The main concern was bones. Carp bones. Scrolling down the prolific menu at Shanghai Restaurant (brief menus and fortune cookies never appear at the same restaurant), I became curious about the red-cooked buffalo carp tail. A few menus here feature things like flounder cheeks. Monkfish liver is a popular entrant…
Last October The New York Times called Texas “a patchwork of dizzying gradations of wetness.” In Plano, those gradations are apparently so disorienting that residents there can’t seem to ease the regulatory tangle that stands between them and a wet whistle. Consider this: Last month, a petition drive in Plano…
It’s hard to dine in a blur. Eating in a buzz is easy, and it’s not impossible to feed in a fluster. Chewing in a din can be annoying. But dining in a blur is a trudge. Dining in a blur is different from eating in the dark, where you…
We’ve always thought “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it” was a proverb reeking of genius. And its steely profundity came to mind late last week when Sipango founder Ron Corcoran announced that big changes are in store for his restaurant/nightclub, now that one of his…
Every kid growing up in the 1960s wanted to be a cowboy. What a life: blasting away at white guys dressed as Indians, slaughtering buffalo just for fun, git’n the doggies along. Of course, Kevin Costner spoiled it all for later generations. Images of sensitive frontier ranch hands munching on…
Ten years ago Mediterraneo slipped into the ground level of a bank building in the farthest northern reaches of Dallas. My first visit was in 1996. It was for the birds. I gnawed on a dry-cured duck breast and avocado salad with mixed greens, shaved parmesan and Provençal vinaigrette. That…
Erraticism is underrated. Pathological restlessness isn’t a character flaw; it’s a gift, maybe even a mark of genius. Take the late Seymour Cray, the legendary supercomputer architect. Cray devoted his life to spinning miracles. Though his canvas was silicon and his medium sheer number-crunching fury, his supercomputers were nonetheless sculpted…
On the surface, this week’s Burning Question is all too simple. Of course people congregate at sports bars for the big game; that’s why they’re called sports bars. Right? Much like the distance between residents of Oklahoma and proper dental hygiene, however, a lag exists between nominal sports bars and…
Two things occurred to us while working on this week’s topic. First, the Burning Question crew should never be allowed to roam unsupervised through O’Hare airport in Chicago. Second, the English language needs more words. How else can you explain it? There’s simply no way to describe the intonation of…
On the second visit we ended up next to the same car we slipped alongside on the first trip: a red Plymouth Sundance with Tweety Bird slip covers over the front buckets. This was weird: two Warner Bros. canaries leering out at me from a cheap MOPAR on two separate…
Nothing will dampen the spread of the Dallas steak house: not mad cows, not prime beef at triple-bypass prices, not heinous visions of “downer cow” kielbasa (who has the spine for that?). And nothing will throw a bucket of A-1 on Dallas’ lust for blue-blood beef. In fact, the steak…
No municipality on earth is a better locale for a restaurant pushing backyard cuisine than Plano, bedroom community to the world. But what exactly is gourmet backyard cuisine? If my memory still serves correctly after years of alleged cabernet abuse, backyard cuisine once consisted mostly of Oscar Mayer tubes, Durkee…
It was the year of smoke. So many Dallas restaurant landmarks went up in the stuff in 2003, and so many Pall Malls and Partagas Churchills didn’t, at least not within restaurant walls. And walls will be the most crucial culinary consideration in Dallas from now on, thanks to the…
It was a year when even the ups left us feeling down. In 2003 Americans heard phrases like “jobless recovery,” splurged on duct tape and plastic sheeting and dutifully scorned French foods. It took a bloody occupation of Iraq to finally dislodge Ben and Jen from headline news. We toppled…
What is hip? Like a cube of lime Jell-O, hipness is hard to grasp without making a mess. Yet everybody craves this elusiveness, so much so they want to eat it, thinking it will impart some sort of penetrating insights. We all know where to get it, too: New York,…
There’s no greater threat to democracy (other than Congress) than drinking and voting. But what about voting and drinking? In North Texas, it’s becoming as all-American as German car leases. Witness McKinney, Allen and the mother of all American suburbs, Plano. Groups from each city are racing (or have raced)…
