In a short post-holiday week (as you no doubt remember, last Saturday was National Bacon Day), it takes us a little while to get back in the groove. Not so the City of Ate readership, however.Keep in mind we still want to find a way to award prizes. Just this…
Chocolate–that’s my kryptonite. Nothing makes me weaker in the knees than feasting on a chocolate dessert after dinner! My ancestors sure knew what they were doing by using the magical cacao bean as currency back in the day. But so many Dallas confectioners bastardize their chocolate creations by incorporating dairy,…
There we were, sipping drinks on a lush patio behind some sketchy 7-Eleven when a sudden, sharp spurt of maniacal laughter interrupted our spell. Just another Saturday night in the ‘hood, except in this case, the setting was a well-worn patch of far North Dallas and the commotion began when…
Drove up to Boston Burger totally excited to be magically whisked away to Boston. Would their burgers have baked beans and clam chowder on them? Would they be made of John Kerry and Mitt Romney? The front door of the place is less than inviting, but open it. And once…
Let’s be honest folks–vegan cheese substitutes can be hit or miss. Some of those products you get at Whole Foods might taste alright, but once you nuke ’em they tend to fold instead of melt. Only a handful of vegan cheeses on the market actually do a decent job emulating…
What a great week. We got to talk about bacon, Formula 1 and beer. College football season started and I have chips and salsa left over from the Pairing Off story.All set for the long weekend.Oh–some cool prize material came in this week, too–including a bag of beans from Oak…
Our Lisa Petty likes to poke fun at me about my avoidance of salads. “Do you EVER eat salads?” she snarks. But I do eat my fair share…only I’m not usually happy about it. Allow me to explain where I’m coming from. I was a Golden Corral kid. There was…
In a famous biblical parable, a son takes his family inheritance and wastes it on riotous living in some distant land, returning home with empty pockets and a deep sense of regret—which seems like an appropriate summary of chef Marc Cassel’s professional life, though almost in reverse. Dallas’ prodigal son…
I’ve been eyeing El Pollo Regio for a while now. So, when I heard that the one on Spring Valley recently got a score of 73 (that’s four points above failing, I’m told) from the health inspector, I got a little sad. Because it’s totally cool if you go into…
August is generally a slow restaurant month and this year was no exception. Aside from KRLD Restaurant Week madness, the surprise revelation about Lola, crowds piling into Marc Cassel’s Park and the buzz about Smoke, it was one lackluster stretch.September should be even more interesting, what with a grand opening…
A lot of people ask me where they can get some good vegan Tex-Mex around town. I usually guide them to Monica’s, where vegans can get the best enchiladas in Dallas, but I understand that driving down to Deep Ellum isn’t always practical…especially if you’re on the wrong other side…
So we could have awarded just about everyone posting comments to Eddie Garza’s piece this week on the waterborne controversy at Bliss. Just a few examples: bc: “In unrelated news, I’m going to live in a hyperbaric chamber filled with angel farts. Living angel farts.”Handsome Lance Manion: “Ever since they…
My good friend Sara and I met a few years ago at a yoga class. We instantly hit it off, and started doing everything together…grocery shopping, dining, working out. She even moved into my building. But over the past couple of months, we’ve both been on crazy schedules. No more…
Sometimes trying new things sucks. Por exemplo, I joined Twitter this week. And when I went to pick a username, I found out that @bigbagodongs was already taken (total suckitude), so I had to settle for @thecheapbastard. Super lame, but I guess that’s what I get for waiting so long…
“It’s kinda weird, honestly,” chef David Uygur says of the impending closure of a restaurant he’s been associated with for seven years. “It’s only gradually becoming real.” For almost a decade Lola—the Van Roberts-owned cottage restaurant on Fairmount—stood as an icon of fine dining in the Uptown area, whether in…
We know what you’re thinking: “Man, that beer dinner tonight at The Libertine sure sounds great, but I don’t have $100 to spare on a couple of seats.” And you’re right. The dinner, which we mentioned in Hash Over on Monday, features Southern Star’s Pine Belt Ale (a Hophead fave)…
The guys at Park are awfully proud of their wine list. It is pretty impressive. They even go as far as denoting which wines are organic, produced by women (what’s that all about?), and which are vegan. But while they can “get you drunk,” as our waitress joked, their vegan…
It was an unusually frantic week at City of Ate, thanks in part to those [expletive deleted]’s at Lazare, but more to our own tedious blogging software, which one day decided–all on its own–to block all comments.Still, we had a lot to work with. And if we were giving away…
After a rough Saturday night–I’ll spare you the details, but I will say this: there was much vodka involved–Sunday’s hangover carried into Monday. Tuesday–still not human. So I got online to Tweet about my misery. Then I saw a Tweet from one of my raw food friends that read, “Alcohol…
Everyone is familiar with Dean Fearings and Stephan Pyles and the other big boys of the Dallas dining set, but this year a group of relative unknowns is challenging their celebrity chef status. Sure, both continue at the top of the table, and the return of Nick Badovinus and Marc…
With many of my favorite homegrown Dallas restaurants closing down (Mr. Barbecue Bus is gone, Big D’s Dogs bit it and now Vern’s Place is shutting its doors? I hate choo, Dallas!), it’s not as easy to find a $10 lunch here as it used to be. Of course, I…
Funny how Vapiano, the German-based fast-casual restaurant in Mockingbird Station, actually feels like Germany. Maybe it’s the color scheme–a little like the Nutelleria in Frankfurt–or maybe it’s the fact that the system here is so foreign, and words sorta get lost in translation. As Date and I entered Vapiano, a…
