Glassblowing Classes in Fort Worth: Make Something With Friends, Then Eat on Magnolia

Most weekend plans revolve around eating something somebody else made. This one starts with you making something yourself.

On West Magnolia Avenue, in a building that used to sell gasoline, you can spend half an hour working molten glass with a pro at your elbow, then be sitting down to a good meal a few blocks away before the adrenaline wears off. Bring a friend, or three. It’s the rare group outing where everybody leaves with a story and a souvenir they made with their own hands.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Gulf Soft Shell Crab Season Is Almost Over. Here’s Where to Get One in Dallas

Soft shell crab season is running out of road. The East Coast has mostly wrapped up for the year, and the fresh crabs still landing in Dallas kitchens are coming out of the Gulf, where the season opens in early April and can hang on through October, sometimes into November when the water stays warm. After that, a soft shell on a menu almost certainly came out of a freezer.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Jeffrey Yarbrough on Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day

Jeffrey Yarbrough was sitting in Mary’s Cafe in Strawn, a small town just off I-20, when the question came to him. Mangoes had their own holiday. Why didn’t chicken fried steak?

Today is October 26, which makes it Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day. That’s Yarbrough’s doing, and fifteen years after the state made it official, he’s still the one pushing it.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Wild Game in North Texas: Where to Buy, Where to Eat

Bison and elk used to be once-a-year meat in Dallas, the sort of thing you ordered at a steakhouse with a mounted head on the wall and then forgot about until the next anniversary dinner. These days a home cook can find it on a Tuesday. Between a Far North Dallas butcher counter, a frozen-meat chain that shelves kangaroo a few feet from the chicken thighs, and a Hill Country ranch that ships wild antelope to your porch, North Texas has more game within reach than most people realize.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Stillwell’s Raises Its Own Cattle, and It Shows on the Plate

photos courtesy of Harwood Hospitality

Hallie Crawford was 19 when she took her first teaching job in Presidio, just as Pancho Villa’s raids were reaching into the Big Bend. Her father figured she was off on a wild goose chase. Her reply, “Then I’ll gather my geese,” became the title of the memoir she published in her nineties. According to the Handbook of Texas, she showed up for that first job with her teaching certificate in hand and her father’s gun strapped to her side.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Your Dallas Weekend Guide: Oktoberfest, Iron & Wine and the Mavs Home Opener

The State Fair has packed up, the pumpkins are still out, and Dallas finally has weather that makes you want to leave the house. This weekend, October 23 through 25, brings Rachmaninoff at the Meyerson, a folk hero at the Majestic, a Texas songwriter in one of the city’s oldest dance halls, and three very good meals in between. Here’s how to spend it.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

From Rooftops to Beer Gardens, Five Dallas Spots Made for Day Drinking

The heat finally broke, the patios are full again, and nobody in Dallas has to sweat through a shirt just to sit outside with a cold one. This is the season the city waits all summer for. Round up a few friends, pick a spot, and let a Saturday afternoon stretch until somebody remembers they had plans.

Here are five places that do day drinking right, from Lower Greenville to Oak Cliff, with a little something for the beer people, the brunch people and the friend who only drinks mezcal.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle

Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day Anthem, Sing it With Us

Christmas has hundreds of songs. The Fourth of July has a few that can still shake a stadium. Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day, which lands on Monday, October 26 this year, has exactly one, and it came from a Dallas guy who figured the world might get along better over a plate of cream gravy.

The song is “Peace, Love & Chicken Fried Steak,” written by Jimmy Baldwin, a Dallas singer-songwriter who spends his days in advertising and his nights with a guitar. By the blessing of the State of Texas, it is the official song of the official holiday. Not many anthems can show paperwork.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under Steven Doyle