Brunch here has drifted toward the reservation, the bottomless carafe and the seventy-dollar table for two. Some mornings do not call for any of that. Five Dallas rooms where the coffee keeps coming, the plates land fast and nobody upsells you a thing.
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The film opens on a finger snap. No dialogue, no exposition, just a helicopter shot dropping out of the Manhattan sky onto a playground, and then a gang of young men moving down a street with the coiled economy of dancers pretending not to be dancers. Sixty-five years on, that prologue still works, and it works partly because of something the audience in 1961 could not have known. The block they are dancing on was already condemned.
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The elevator does the work of an overture. You step in at ground level in a parking structure off Reunion Boulevard, the doors close, and by the time they open again the city is 561 feet below and coming at you through glass on every side. On a Sunday morning that light is low and eastern and it fills the whole round room at once. Somebody hands you a mimosa before you have taken off your sunglasses.
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The blind goes up somewhere west of Edmonton and the window fills with fir trees running past at speed. Then the trees drop away and the eastern wall of the Rockies stands there in the early light, pink at the top, close enough to feel rude. Coffee in hand, half the dome car still asleep, nobody says anything for a while. That is the moment people pay for on VIA Rail‘s Canadian, and it arrives on the fourth morning, without warning, whether you were awake for it or not.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle, Travel
This is the latest in our weekly Dish Explained series, where we take one dish from one culture and break down what it is, where it came from, and where to actually eat it in Dallas.
Khachapuri is Georgian cheese bread, and the name tells you exactly what you’re getting. Khacho means cheese. Puri means bread. The most famous version, called adjaruli, shapes the dough into a little boat, fills it edge to edge with melted cheese, then cracks a raw egg yolk and a pat of butter right into the middle before it hits the table. You tear off pieces of the crust and drag them through that molten well in the center. That’s it. That’s the whole ritual, and it’s every bit as good as it sounds.
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Most crepe menus hand you a finished idea and expect you to accept it. Whisk hands you the whole kitchen instead.
Julien Eelsen grew up in Paris, where crepes were as ordinary as a street snack and as elevated as a real sit-down dinner, depending on where you got them. He wanted Dallas to have both versions in one place, so he opened Whisk Crêpes Café in 2015. A decade later, the concept has outgrown its first address twice over. Whisk started in Sylvan Thirty, moved to Bishop Arts in early 2025, and has since spread well past Dallas, with locations now open in Nashville’s Assembly Food Hall and Plano’s Legacy Food Hall.
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Some wines earn their price through packaging and a good marketing budget. Cune Crianza earns it the harder way: a hundred and forty-five years of not screwing up a formula that already worked.
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Two years in, and Tiffany Derry’s food festival already feels like it’s been part of the fall calendar forever. SHEF Food + Wine returns for its third run October 9 through 11 at EpicCentral in Grand Prairie, and this time Derry didn’t just bring back the festival. She brought back the festival with the biggest guest list it’s ever had, more than 40 chefs, restaurateurs, TV personalities, and culinary names descending on North Texas for a weekend that’s stopped being a local secret.
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