Orion Pictures released The Silence of the Lambs on Valentine’s Day 1991. Somebody in that office had a sense of humor.
Thirty-five years later, Jonathan Demme‘s thriller still works on every rewatch, even when you know what’s waiting at the end. If you want something for Halloween weekend that scares you without a hockey mask, start here.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Branson has a reputation for neon, dinner shows and traffic on the 76 Strip. Drive 10 minutes in almost any direction, though, and you’re in the hills with nothing around you but trees and a fire pit. Glamping has caught on fast out here, and it’s a good way to do the Ozarks without giving up a real bed or a hot shower.
From Dallas, figure on roughly seven hours in the car, so this works best as a long weekend. Here are four places to stay, plus where to eat, what to do and one spa worth the splurge.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Somewhere around 5 p.m. every night, the lights come up at Javier’s Gourmet Mexicano on Cole Avenue and the regulars start drifting in. There’s no lunch here and never has been. Javier’s does dinner, and it has been doing dinner since 1977. Do the math and you land on a big one. Next year the place turns 50, and Javier Gutierrez is still the name on the sign. That doesn’t happen much in Dallas.
Gutierrez was born in 1950 and spent his childhood in Mexico City before his family moved to Texas when he was 12. By the time he opened his own restaurant he was still in his twenties, and he knew what he wanted to cook. He wanted the food of the capital, the more continental style he grew up eating, with tenderloin and red snapper on the menu instead of combination plates.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Every city needs a place where you can order hot pastrami, a bowl of matzo ball soup and a chicken-fried steak with cream gravy at the same table, and nobody blinks. In Dallas, that place is Cindi’s NY Deli.
Cindi’s calls itself one part New York neighborhood deli, one part 1950s coffee and pancake house and one part Southern mom-and-pop diner. That describes the menu, and it describes the woman behind it.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The sign on Bryan Street doesn’t try very hard. No lemongrass, no lotus, no clever play on pho. It just says Vietnam, and it has said that since 1996.
Vietnam Restaurant sits at 4302 Bryan Street in Old East Dallas, a few blocks from the Fitzhugh corner that has become one of the more interesting eating intersections in town. It opened before Uptown filled in and before the revival east of downtown took hold. The building is older than the restaurant. So are some of the regulars.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
If you have ever eaten at a South Indian restaurant in Irving or Richardson, you have probably watched one go by. A golden, crackly crepe so long it hangs off both ends of the plate, rolled around a filling, with little steel cups of soup and chutney lined up beside it. That’s a dosa, and once you understand what you’re looking at, the menu stops being intimidating.
The dosa comes from South India, where it’s everyday breakfast food, eaten the way Texans eat a breakfast taco. Here it’s served all day.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Ask Jon Alexis what’s moving at TJ’s Seafood Market & Grill right now and he answers fast. Anything classic. Stone crab claws, caviar, a beautiful piece of king salmon. The trendy items are cooling off, and the old-school luxuries are back in demand.
Alexis has run TJ’s since 2009, when he bought the business from his parents, and the market has been selling fish in Dallas since 1989. CraveDFW checked in with him this week on what’s worth eating as we head into winter and the holidays, what’s fading out, and where the market is tight.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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 readingFiled under Steven Doyle
