Eric Asimov, the interim New York Times restaurant critic sandwiched between Sam Sifton and his permanent replacement Pete Wells, published a story last week about his short tenure as a critical diner. Asimov reviewed restaurants before becoming a full-time wine columnist in 2004. His column compared dining during his first…
Drive around Dallas — not the suburbs, Dallas — and what do you see? You see a nice kind of new well-kept Dallas toward the northern end of the city, with a few glitches here and there. But anywhere south of Mockingbird you’re likely to see a bunch of crapped-out…
Still can’t get past the lawyer for the owner of the boycotted Shamrock gas station I wrote about yesterday. Busy. Says he’ll call me back later. I called him this morning to say I still need to hear the owner’s side. Here’s my problem. Yesterday the lawyer wouldn’t or could…
Well, I think my hat-cam is going to change my life. Now I can take you along on my daily adventures. You don’t especially want to go? Come on. Try it. Be a sport. What I do every day may not be high drama, but it beats working. I go…
Here’s an idea. Nuke the Dallas Farmers Market. Seriously. Blow it up. Scrape it. Give the poor thing a decent burial, and then start from scratch. Look at it. Everything about it says, “Dead on Arrival.” Let’s get real. The homeless issue at the market is by no means the…
Dear Mexican: In my hometown of Playa Larga (Long Beach, California), natives refer to a major avenida, Junipero Avenue, as Juan-a-pear-o. There is no “Juan” in Junipero, but that’s how everyone in this town pronounces it. I even heard a former mayor pronounce it that way. Why do white Americans…
Very mixed feelings about the city council briefing coming up this morning on proposed East Dallas storm-water projects. On the one hand, my paranoia is confirmed, which is always satisfying. On the other hand, there’s not much I can do about it. Yes, just as I thought, my house in…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans, where we get to know the people behind the scenes in Dallas/Fort Worth music. Ever look up at apartments above some of our local bars and wonder who the hell lives there? Meet Ilona Scheel, who resides just above Expo Park’s Amsterdam Bar. No, she’s…
The last time I paid some attention to poorly designed restaurant websites, I cited as the hallmarks of a terrible home page poorly chosen music played in a loop, excessive flash and clunky navigation, along with lack of applicable information. Making hours of operation, location, a basic understanding of the…
Over the holiday weekend I spent a few very enjoyable hours on the Trinity River with Trinity Rivers Expeditions outfitter and canoe guide Charles Allen. We paddled from Trinity River Mountain Creek Preserve near the intersection of Walton Walker and IH-30 in Irving to the Sylvan Avenue Bridge in West…
I’m afraid Rick Perry will evaporate soon from the presidential coverage, and I won’t get to say my little piece about him. So just in case, here it is. Months ago I was asked by the company I work for to produce a piece about Perry’s so-called economic miracle in…
New Year’s is pretty close. Time to take a good, hard look at our insides and decide what needs work, or at least what we think we can manage to work on effectively. I’ve got a few commitments I’ve made to myself involving exercise, giving up meat on Mondays and…
At the beginning of the month, I had a column in the paper talking about a study saying the Dallas area is in much better shape than many of the nation’s big metropolitan areas in terms of water supply. Now it turns out we’re betting the farm and risking the…
Former Dallas Morning News star reporter Olive Talley has a piece in the paper today saying Walker Railey killed his wife and got away with it. Not in so many words. Forgive me if you’re under 100 years old and this is all Greek to you. Railey was a certain…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans, where we get to know the people behind the scenes in Dallas/Fort Worth music. Josh Baish is the head honcho at Denton’s Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios, perhaps one of the most important venues in DFW’s music scene since opening in 1997. Baish owes its success…
Tale of two cities on today’s front pages: Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at The New York Times, presents a big-canvas panoramic of Rio Park in Madrid, Spain, where they entombed a highway to bring a river back to life. Linking Madrid’s vast and wonderful new park to trends in Europe…
There’s a slew of press releases in my inbox about New Year’s Eve menus from various local restaurants. I haven’t written about any of them for a simple reason: Dining out on New Years Eve is invariably terrible. It’s almost certainly No. 2 behind Valentine’s Day for the worst day…
This morning I finally read the late Paul Crume’s 1967 newspaper column about angels, reprinted in today’s Dallas Morning News, according to their annual custom. When I told my wife I had never read it before, she reacted with shock, dismay, disenchantment — the usual. She’s a Dallas native. She…
Here’s something scary. There’s a guy I have bumped into several times who looks like the artist’s rendering of the suspect in the sorority rapist case. I mean sort of. It’s not like, “Oh, look, it’s the guy!” But it could be. When I saw the picture in the paper…
Dear Readers: In between your 15th tamale and sixth spiked cup of ponche, you’re going to have to buy regalos for Christmas or whatever pinche holiday you celebrate. OK, you don’t have to, but you should, to support all those great indie businesses suffering during this Great Recession. Behold, then,…
City Hall starts off last week giving one of its typical bureaucratic blow-offs to plans for bike lanes throughout the city. At a briefing before a city council committee, staff experts tell the council members that bike lanes would be hugely expensive. Sorta can’t be done. Big legal headache. Maybe…
Man. I cannot believe it. Just got back in the house. Catching my breath. Had to wade into the crowd out there on the street. Major neighborhood squall. We’ve been waiting 20 years for the city to patch our street. They have big crews out there now doing it –…
