Start Spreading the News

For a foodie there has never been a more exciting time to live and eat in Dallas.  In the last few years, chef-driven, innovative, provocative and adventurous restaurants have sprung up all over like goosebumps on the back of my neck when I hear someone mention Twerking or Groupon or Honey Boo Boo. Well, not really like that's because that's more of an eerie, sickening feeling like the world has just violently veered off its roller coaster tracks.  Maybe I should just say it seems like there are really a lot of terrific places to dine in Dallas and all the new ones mostly work and the good ones keep getting better.

Some married friends we knew a decade ago when they lived in Dallas have returned here to live. When P and P's kids were little they lived in the far north suburbs and there weren't that many remarkable restaurants to lure them downtown/uptown.  Oh we had Kent Rathbun's Abacus, which is still around, although it doesn't seem as aspirational as it used to.  We had The French Room at the Hotel Adolphus which is where you need to go just once in your life so you can experience what it must have been like to formally share a fine repast with Marie Antoinette while the peasants were eating cake and thinking about how to get a head in life. (Sorry).  I think Avner Samuel must have had a decent place at that time since he opened and closed about 6,000 restaurants before hitting the jackpot with his awesome NOSH on Oak Lawn a couple of years ago.

P an P relocated due to brilliant career moves to the Northeast, first in New Jersey and later, sublimely ensconced in a palatial apartment atop the Omni Berkshire Place Hotel.  With 24-hour room service in The City That Never Sleeps I think in the same situation I might have ended up weighing as much as Paula Deen's facial spackle. Careers brought them back to Dallas, and with kids all grown, they bought a futuristic, steel-framed house in a remote part of Kessler Park, which ten years ago was a carjacking just waiting to happen but is now teeming with nearby bistros and charming cafes in the Bishop Arts District.  Think about the trendiest, friendliest, least pretentious, pedestrian-friendly place you know and that is absolutely nowhere near Dallas.  Kidding aside, that description actually defines Bishop Arts, with standout restaurants like Driftwood, Hattie's, Bolsa, Boulevardier, Lucia, Eno's...the list goes on and on.  And the crazy thing is, when the P's lived here ten years ago every one of those joints was called Wigs by Consuela or Pepe's Body Shop or This Site for Lease.

Pretty Sure No One Ordered the Breast of Chicken

And another hotbed of deliciousness has popped up out of seemingly nowhere--the Dallas Design District, which used to be an evening and weekend ghost town of high-end household wares with European names and triple digit price tags, is now hopping with some of the brightest and best new places in the culinary universe.  We met our friends at the Meddlesome Moth  (its website address makes me laugh out loud, www.mothinthe.net) and it was so dang busy they had people stacked vertically as they waited for their tables. We got a round of drinks and kind of moshed sideways until we ended up crowding into a corner of a semi-private dining area with a table full of snockered bridesmaids and an embarrassed MRS degree candidate wearing a veil over her Trojan Magnum earrings. Looming over the table was a gigantic, vintage photo of a twenty-something Sophia Loren seated in a swanky nightclub looking askance at table mate Jayne Mansfield's upper body wardrobe malfunction. Apparently, it was very chilly in that club.

Being a balmy, 115 degree evening, we decided to stroll across the street to FT33, my favorite restaurant in the world for at least the next fifteen minutes.  I've raved and blogged about it before and as always, it did not disappoint.  Chef Matt McCallister was behind the line looking all tatted and focused but I didn't see his ravishing wife Iris, who I was hoping to run into so my street cred could be personally validated.  It wasn't necessary though; the food forward, seasonally-inspired modern cuisine spoke for itself and the P's were dutifully impressed by FT33's industrial chic ambience, fun, professional service and ridiculously savory cuisine.  We shared the generous charcuterie platter but all selfishly hunched over our entrees like convicts in the state pen.  I had the duck breast and never once thought of Jayne Mansfield.  Until now, that is.

I still haven't mentioned DISH, which is sophisticated, sublime and sexy, or Victor Tango's, a silly name for a seriously good place, or Sissy's Southern Kitchen, which makes me squirm to say out loud but always delivers swoon-inducing Southern-fried comfort on a plate.

Coming back to Dallas from New York, our friends the P's are astonished to find the restaurant scene so vibrant and eclectic and I feel proud to say I play a small part in that, even if it is only in cyberspace. So consider this:  Maybe instead of Big D we should start referring to our town as the Little Apple.

Destination Dining: ACME Food and Beverage

Dynamite, anyone?

According to www.dictionary.com the word acme is defined as: the highest point or stage; also: one that represents perfection of the thing expressed.  So when you name a restaurant ACME Food and Beverage, you better make sure it is the finest example of its craft, at least in its own category, like Starbuck's is to coffee or George Clooney is to suave.  So as we bounded into ACME for the first time Saturday night, I was expecting something a hundred times better.  I probably would not have been so disappointed if they had named the place LACKLUSTER Food and Beverage.  Or if that is too harsh, perhaps MEH Food and Beverage would suffice.  But ACME made me think of FT33 or Cane Rosso or the mail order house where Wile E. Coyote bought TNT and anvils in his fruitless quest to exterminate the Roadrunner.  Sadly, none of these notions proved prophetic.

The two chirpy hostesses smiled and greeted us in unison and seated us at a nice corner booth, or what I thought was a nice corner booth until my teeth started chattering and my lips fell off in the non-stop assault of Arctic blasts from their evil seven-ton A/C unit positioned directly over our heads.  It was a balmy 72 degrees outside so I had worn a sporty, short-sleeved Polo which proved completely incapable of keeping frostbite at bay.  I tried using our cloth napkins as emergency sleeves but they were so stiffly starched they kept falling off and clattering to the floor.  Despite the frigid conditions, I lived.

Pull-eeze

Starters were troublesome.  D had the Warm Mozzarella with Grilled Toast, which was a big disc of bland fondue swimming in olive oil.  If I were to compliment it I would say it was stretchy.  I had the Tuna Tartare, which looked like a bright pink, mealy meatloaf garnished with micro greens and pears.  It was enough for a family of four if they liked their tuna raw and sweetened with fruit.  I didn't.

Entrees were equivalent to a meal grilled at home when you've had one too many glasses of wine and it's getting dark and you can't see or tell or care what you are doing.  My Berkshire Pork Chop with Sweet Potato Puree was good the first bite, okay the second bite, and dry as Mitt Romney during Happy Hour at Hooters on the third.  The puree was sickeningly sweet and glowed with a weird, alien orange color the exact shade of Ronald McDonald's hair.

D had the burger and he said it was good except we couldn't figure out why they said it came with

You can tune a piano but you can't tuna fish

"redneck" cheddar. There was nothing redneck about that cheese; it knew several foreign languages and loved opera and had been to Paris twice.  The fries were delicious.  (I ate more of them than the desiccated pork chop.)  D had also ordered the Mac N' Cheese (also slapped with that loathsome redneck label) and they were okay except for the unctuous topping of sticky sweet chutney.  I then realized the kitchen had this thing for complicating savory dishes with inexplicable cloying and distracting sugary flourishes.

The braying of the bottle blonde next to us, the frigid, Icelandic conditions and the unremarkable, childishly sweetened food had us outta there faster than Kim Kardashian's greed-induced but perfectly legal wedding which upheld the long-standing, accepted belief that true marriage is between one man and one gold-digging, 15-minutes-of-fame sex tape entrepreneur.  

At ACME, I wish I could have at least scored some of Wily's TNT since the food itself was definitely not dynamite.

Destination Dining: FT33

After every food critic, blogger and tarot card reader in Dallas proclaimed FT33 the best new restaurant of the century late last year, I have been anxious to try it.  It took four weeks to snag a reservation for 2 on a Saturday night but we finally got in.  I was afraid all the hyperbole-and-a-half was going leave me underwhelmed and empty-pocketed so I put my game face on, hoping for the best but sort of expecting to be disappointed.

Industrial Chic

I wish the word WOW had more than three letters in it.

Chef Matt McCallister has redefined the term chef driven kitchen. Every plate, every ingredient, every nuance is his artistic self-expression.  The dishes hitting the table that night were like highly stylized, personal gifts from his kitchen.  His "season inspired modern cuisine" soars with freshness, balance and originality.   Okay, I am going to stop now because I am gushing so sweetly I am in danger of early onset diabetes.

Six apps, six mains, six desserts.  I guess the devil is in the details because two of those 666s were absolutely flawless. The menu is presented on a rectangular piece of press board, cleverly held in place by bindings on either side snugly fitting into top and bottom notches.  Down alongside the left margin of the page are the numbers 1 through 31, with a hole punched through that night's date.  A little later we discovered previous nights' menus had been cut into thirds and were used as coasters.  Clever and Green have never enjoyed a more symbiotic relationship.

Our crisply professional yet amusing waiter ran us through the short menu, highlighting certain items and explaining unusual ingredients we may not recognize.  (As restaurant savvy as I think I am, that comprised about half the menu, but I nodded along knowingly as he intoned exotic words and phrases like tassione greens and speculoos.)  He gave us a few minutes to ponder and then returned to the table with an inquisitive smile.  "Gentlemen, are you ready to order?" he asked politely.  I said what do you think I should have and without hesitating he suggested pork sugo, confit matsutake & hand-cut tagliardi as a first course and general tso's duck breast, lemongrass sausage, kimchi & fried wheatberries as my main course.  (I said fine after quickly checking the menu to see if he had just quoted the highest priced item in each category to boost his tip from the newby rube.  He hadn't.)

I never order duck.  I don't even think about duck.  And if I do, I don't like to think of them with breasts.  I couldn't quite picture pork sugo, had forgotten what he said matsutake was, and wheatberries sounded like something you'd find in the grocery store between Fruity Pebbles and Raisin Bran.

Matsutake is the Madonna of Mushrooms

Everybody Jump to the Left

OMGosh if those plates could sing they'd be belting out the national anthem (live not lip sync) at the Super Bowl this coming Sunday.  That sugo thing was actually a pasta dish with what tasted like North Carolina pulled pork sporting a sexy, savory mushroom sauce.  Sounds weird but it was gone in sixty seconds, no sharing.

Fine me $1,000 for all the duck dissing I've done in my life.  Those tender, medium rare slices of heaven kissed my tongue good night and then slid down my throat to cuddle lovingly in my stomach.  The dry sausage and pungent kimchi were welcome, tangy counterpoints to the rich duck breast, and the fried wheatberries provided a crunchy, fun alternative to a more plebeian rice offering.  My dessert (I know, I know, I don't eat dessert but the food was so good here I  had to try it) was the only dish to disappoint.  It was an okay chocolate torchon--a dense, fudgy disc with bergamot (isn't that a perfume?) earl gray (tea?) and cocoa nibs (the word nibs makes me giggle?)  The menu had informed me the pastry chef was Josh Valentine, the twirly mustachioed villain poseur on Top Chef Seattle this season, so maybe I was predisposed to dislike it since it came from him.  I don't know, maybe I've skipped so many desserts I've forgotten how to enjoy them.

At any rate, FT33 was and will remain a highlight in my dining repertoire.  Chef McCallister, I pudgily salute you.