Palm Beach is an easy call from Dallas — direct flight into Palm Beach International, three hours in the air, and you land somewhere that moves at a different pace entirely. Eau Resort & Spa sits in Manalapan, a small town on the barrier island just south of Palm Beach, fifteen minutes from Worth Avenue and the crowds but on seven private acres of Atlantic coastline where the beach is seaweed-free and the only noise is the water.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The frozen margarita was invented in Dallas. The machine that made it is in the Smithsonian, sitting next to Julia Child’s kitchen and the first Tupperware. And somehow, fifty-five years later, this is still not the first thing Dallas tells people about itself.
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Every July 4th since 2009, a group of mostly amateur eaters has gathered at a bar on Greenville Avenue, sat down in front of a basket of corn dogs, and spent fifteen minutes regretting every decision that led them to that table. The crowd packs in around them, the screaming starts, and somewhere around the eight-minute mark the contestants’ faces take on the specific expression of a person who has made a terrible mistake and cannot stop making it. This is the Brass Knuckle Corn Dog Beatdown, and it is the best July 4th tradition in Dallas.
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Americans will eat approximately 150 million hot dogs on July 4th. Not over the weekend. On the day itself. That is a number that requires a moment of genuine reflection — and possibly a glass of water — before anyone starts talking about the history.
The hot dog’s origin is genuinely contested, which is fitting for a food this American. Both Frankfurt, Germany and Vienna, Austria claim to have invented it, which is why we call them both frankfurters and wieners depending on the day. The most specific claim comes from 1487, when Frankfurt credits itself with creating the Frankfurter — five years before Columbus sailed, which means the hot dog technically predates European knowledge of the Americas.
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Justin Fourton grew up going to his grandfather’s ranch in Abilene — a place called Pecan Lodge. The old man taught him how to build a fire, how to manage a smoker, and how to wait. That last part turns out to be the most important. Good barbecue is a function of patience more than almost anything else, and the brisket that comes out of Pecan Lodge in Deep Ellum is eighteen hours of patience made edible.
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There’s a moment on the Cliff Walk — maybe twenty minutes in, when the path narrows and the Atlantic opens up on your right and the back lawns of the Vanderbilt mansions stretch out on your left — when Newport stops being a place you’re visiting and becomes something you’re trying to understand. The scale of it doesn’t make sense at first. These were called cottages. The Breakers, Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s 70-room Italian Renaissance palazzo, built in 1895 with hydraulic elevators, hot and cold seawater taps in every bathroom, and a Great Hall that rises two stories under a painted ceiling — that was his summer cottage. He used it for six weeks a year.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Three brothers from Lebanon started a pastry shop on East Main Street in Richardson in 2002. They called it Afrah — the Arabic word for joy and happiness — and they made sweets the way their mother taught them, from scratch, using family recipes that had been in the family long enough that nobody remembered when they weren’t. The pastries were so good that customers started asking what else the kitchen could do. The brothers obliged.
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Sean Jett grew up a few blocks from where his pie shop now sits. That detail matters more than it might seem to, because Humble: Simply Good Pies doesn’t read like a concept dreamed up by a consultant trying to chase a trend. It reads like a guy who grew up near White Rock Lake and decided the neighborhood needed a place that made pie the way his family always told him pie should be made — from scratch, with real butter, without apology for taking longer than it needs to.
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