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.
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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.
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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
Parliament opened in August 2014 in the old Four Lounge space on 2418 Allen Street, in the State Thomas Historic District, and more than a decade later it is still the same low-lit, red-walled room where Eddie “Lucky” Campbell built his name pouring drinks most bartenders would need a cheat sheet to remember.
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The whistle sounds before you see the smoke. Then the smoke comes, curling up over farmland that Amish families have worked for generations, and a locomotive built for a different century pulls slowly into view. This is Strasburg, Pennsylvania, home to the oldest continuously operating railroad in the country, chartered in 1832. What happens over the following days is where the real trip lives.
A word of honesty before anything else: Strasburg Rail Road is not an overnight sleeper train. The signature excursion is a 45-minute, nine-mile round trip through 2,500 acres of Lancaster County farmland, out to Paradise, Pennsylvania, and back. There are no berths, no sleeping cars, nothing resembling the Orient Express. What Strasburg offers instead is something quieter and, in its own way, harder to replicate: a working piece of American railroading history, still running on steam, still passing through the same Amish countryside it always has. Built around three days, this is everything worth knowing before you go.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle, Travel
In 1980, in the city of Guiyang in southwestern China, a widow named Yang lost her husband at 30 years old. She had five children to raise. She started with one charcoal stall.
That stall became Yang’s Smokehouse, now open in Plano at 240 Legacy Dr #306, inside the Mitsuya Marketplace center. The path from a single grill to a Texas strip mall took 40 years, three generations, and one very determined grandmother.
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