Downtown Dallas has never had much in the way of Indian food, and if you’ve noticed that too, you’re not imagining it. Most of the city’s best options sit out in Irving, Plano, Richardson, and Frisco, which makes sense given where a lot of Dallas’s Indian community has settled, but it’s always meant a drive if you wanted a proper curry after work. Gymkhana just changed that math.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Oak & Stone is getting into the Oktoberfest spirit a little early this year, and it’s doing it with beer cheese in nearly everything. Starting September 15 and running through October 31, the McKinney restaurant is rolling out a limited-time menu built around Bavarian classics with an Oak & Stone twist, which mostly means finding new ways to work Shiner Bock and beer cheese into the lineup.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
There is a certain type of night that beats dinner every time, and it doesn’t involve an entree at all. It’s the night where you and a friend claim two stools at the bar, order something small and shareable, and let a good cocktail do the rest of the talking. Nobody’s watching the clock. Nobody’s splitting a check three ways over who ordered the extra side. You just eat with your hands, sip something someone actually thought about, and let the evening go wherever it wants to go.
Dallas-Fort Worth has gotten very good at this kind of night lately. Between new openings and old standbys sharpening their bar programs, there’s no shortage of places built for exactly this pace. Here are six worth building a whole evening around, appetizer and cocktail already paired so you don’t have to think too hard about it.
Continue readingFiled under Cocktails, Steven Doyle
The Miracle of Marcelino opens the way a lot of great fables do, with an ending. A priest is called to the deathbed of a woman he doesn’t know, and to comfort her he tells the story of a boy named Marcelino. From there the film drops back decades, to a war-scarred Spanish monastery where the friars find an abandoned infant on their doorstep. They decide, over the objections of at least one grumbling brother, to raise him themselves.
Continue readingFiled under Movie Reviews, Steven Doyle
Somewhere in the middle of “Do-Re-Mi,” a flag with a swastika on it gets hung over the front door of a house that used to feel safe. That’s the version of The Sound of Music landing at Music Hall at Fair Park September 8 through 20, and it isn’t the soft, sanitized family musical some people remember from childhood. Director Jack O’Brien has pulled the politics of 1938 Austria closer to the surface than any tour in recent memory, and audiences in city after city have noticed.
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In February 2016, Isaac and Lauren Hadley spent what savings they had on an old ambulance. They hauled it into Isaac’s parents’ backyard, stripped it down, and repainted it into something that no longer looked like it belonged to a hospital. What came out the other end was a food truck, and what it served was Hawaiian-style shrimp plates built on flavors the Hadleys had picked up during four years at BYU-Hawaii, where they’d fallen for the shrimp trucks lining Oahu’s North Shore.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The building at 110 W. Bailey Street in Ponder has been standing since 1903, and for most of the past 78 years it has smelled like fried chicken and hot grease. That smell is back. Ranchman’s, the small-town steakhouse that once pulled Hollywood and literary royalty off the highway, reopened the first week of July under new ownership, and the people running it went out of their way not to mess with what made it famous in the first place.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Let’s start with a question. What do you think is the perfect food while watching Thoroughbreds compete at Saratoga Racecourse? Something elegant, or something traditional?
Saratoga is obviously one of the rare American sporting venues where bringing a proper picnic still feels like part of the experience rather than an attempt to avoid concession prices. This is one of the few remaining racetracks that allow you to pack your food in personal coolers (maximum size 12” x 18”), which honestly makes watching the event even more exciting.
Continue readingFiled under Crave
