Allegations of sexual assault and sordid cover-ups are shaking the American restaurant industry. Mario Batali is facing a reckoning for years of alleged foul behavior toward nearly every woman in his path; New Orleans celebrity chef John Besh faces accusations of fostering a culture of sexual predation; James Beard-winning restaurateur…
Last Saturday’s false nuclear alert in Hawaii does this for us: It offers a unique window on what you and I will feel like if it ever really happens. To us. Jeff Jackson, who lives on Haleakala Mountain on Maui, and his mother, Mary Nell Jackson, who lives in the…
The State Fair of Texas, or, as I call it, Sigma Phi Tau, has always been an exclusive, secretive, good-old-boy fraternity, but it hasn’t always been easy to catch. Thank goodness Sigma-Phi has a certain penchant for showing its … let’s say its hand … as this recent example illustrates:…
When you’re a food critic, a lot of your research involves maps. Every few weeks, I scroll around Google Maps hunting for new restaurants to review, clicking on every orange fork-and-knife icon along the streets of Dallas and its suburbs. Reviews have resulted from Google Maps finds. On Jan. 2,…
Jim Schutze is going live on Facebook at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 10 from his office! That’s the plan, anyway, if we can persuade the janitorial staff to move all the cleaning supplies out of there by then. And if Schutze shows up on time. In any event, tune in…
The bloody handprint could not be more clear. In a city that should be enabling upward mobility for everybody, a core of impacted poverty only grows and deepens. The giveaway, the paw print that explains it, is Dallas Area Rapid Transit, our regional mass-transit agency. No, I’m not saying DART…
Why does Dallas always want to get the big corporate headquarters relocation? Wouldn’t we be a better candidate for and better off with the factory? Or even better, maybe, with the warehouse? In the national race to land the new Amazon subheadquarters, the depressing news for Dallas a week ago…
All right, I beg you, just this one time. Break with habit. Normally, I assume you are like me. You never really read all that fine print on a city bond proposal when you go to the polls. If it’s something about more money for the cops or the libraries,…
When I go to the state fair, as I did yesterday with my wife, I’m looking for three things. Something the same as always. Something different. And something really and truly fun. I have to have all three, or I’m not going. Yesterday my two same as always things were…
This week, an ornate box landed on my desk. Inside was an even more ornate box, a box with heft and gold accents and rich blue velvet lining. Inside that box: a gold enamel stationery set with an enamel invitation to a party at the forthcoming Bullion restaurant. Bullion, led…
Something I did not know about Amazon’s search for a new subheadquarters — I guess they forgot to tell me — is that Amazon wants to see a lot of regional cooperation and coordination coming from the metro areas vying for this $5 billion prize. Rather than a bunch of…
When I realized my nephew Chris was stranded in another part of the world and could not get home to Catherine and the kids, Nicole and Paul, in Sarasota, Florida, my first thought was to jump in my truck, drive there and somehow get them out of Florida by myself…
On Sept. 6, when the Dallas City Council sat to consider bringing down the city’s 81-year-old equestrian monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, slavery and the American Civil War flowed into the moment as if yesterday and today were one. A packed council chamber was alternately raucous and respectful…
The Confederate statues debate is coming at us so fast that nobody in Dallas should feel embarrassed about having to change footing, alter or even flip a previous position. I know I’m not. Did what I said about it a month ago even make sense back then? I wrote that…
Because the Dallas municipal system of government is this kind of headless, directionless fidget spinner, we may lose sight of something: There is a right way to go. Somewhere. A right direction. Take Fair Park, our decaying exposition park in the center of the city. Maybe you don’t want to…
Last week, Dallas Morning News food critic Leslie Brenner published an article on the state of Mexican dining in Dallas. It’s a worthwhile read and, in part, I agree with it. After all, the basic thesis is: “Wouldn’t it be cool if Dallas were a leader in modern Mexican fine…
The pirates who run the State Fair of Texas and the army of flying monkey lackeys otherwise known as the Dallas Park and Recreation Department are trying to bury all the State Fair’s loot for good before the Dallas City Council can send anybody in to police up Fair Park…
After five Dallas city appointees to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board defeated a suburban-backed, billion-dollar borrowing scheme by DART on Tuesday, the usual grumbling and ominous threats of withdrawals of membership in and support for the agency burbled up from the ‘burbs. The city, they said, had better do…
It all started innocently enough. One taco restaurateur took to Facebook to accuse another of attempting to poach his employee, and the other denied the charge. Then – mostly with light hearts – they issued an escalating series of taco challenges. But of course, Dallas foodies couldn’t leave well enough…
Great week for me. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to complain about Dallas Morning News editorials twice in one week. And as complaints go, this one is a little bit conditional. They actually said a good thing, but, lucky for me, they said it the wrong…
Dallas dining is becoming notorious, but not necessarily for good things. There’s the “fickle 500,” diners who patronize the new and the now only to disappear from dining rooms once a restaurant’s six months of fame are up. We’re famous for jumping on the bandwagon later than other cities; what’s…
Bucks Burnett has met most of his music idols. In this monthly column he shares tales from the front lines and backstage. When I saw Led Zeppelin in Dallas in early March 1975, during the Physical Graffiti tour, it started a chain of events that ended with the extremely unlikely photograph…
