Summer in Dallas is not for the timid. It is hot, it is relentless, and it demands a game plan. If you are hosting a pool party this season, the smartest thing you can do is stop trying to play bartender the whole afternoon and make one great batch cocktail that does the work for you. Then fill a tray with a few things people will actually talk about. Here is our version of a proper Crave-worthy pool day.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Most people have written off Soave entirely. That’s understandable. For decades the name meant cheap, thin Italian white wine — the kind of thing that ends up in a carafe at a red-checkered-tablecloth restaurant without anyone asking for it by name. A lot of Soave still is that. But the category has a ceiling most drinkers have never seen, and the 2023 Pieropan La Rocca is about as close to that ceiling as it gets.
The Pieropan family has been making wine in Soave since 1890. The fourth generation runs things now, and their La Rocca bottling — named for the single five-hectare vineyard it comes from on the slopes of Monte Rocchetta — has been one of the benchmarks of Italian white wine since its first release in 1978. The vineyard is farmed organically, the soils are limestone-rich clay, and the grape is 100 percent Garganega.
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Matt Balke grew up in Uvalde, a small ranching town near San Antonio where the Spanish name for the place was once Encina — holm oak. He left for Texas Tech, then changed course and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America, graduating salutatorian in 2007. None of that is what shaped him most. That came later, working under James Beard Award winner Sharon Hage at York Street in Dallas — the woman Balke credits as his real culinary education. After York Street, his path ran through Bolsa, The Rustic, SMOKE, and back to Bolsa as executive chef until its closure in early 2020.
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Pascal Cayet grew up in Argenteuil, just outside Paris, and trained at the Médéric culinary school before landing his first real job at La Tour d’Argent — the legendary Paris restaurant perched above the Seine with Notre Dame Cathedral. He was in his twenties and cooking in one of the most storied rooms in the world. Then he came to America, worked in Indianapolis alongside a young Wolfgang Puck at a restaurant called La Tour, spent a year in the French Army, five years running food and beverage in Bermuda, and arrived in Dallas in 1982 with a clear idea of what he wanted to build.
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There’s no sign outside. You pull up to Hi Line Drive, the valet points you toward a door, and you walk through velvet drapes into Tango Room. Sixty seats. Mahogany walls, burgundy booths, brass fixtures, and original Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha pieces from Tim Headington’s personal collection. The room feels like somewhere a lot of decisions get made over a lot of good wine.
Headington — The Joule, Forty Five Ten, Commissary, CBD Provisions — built this one with Simon Roberts, who owns Graileys, the members-only wine club where the two met. Roberts runs the wine program himself here, works the floor with sommelier Nick Burns, and the list reflects that personal investment. People come in having already decided what they want to drink and build dinner around it. The room accommodates that without making you feel like you’re doing it wrong.
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When Malai Kitchen opened in West Village in January 2011, the landlord pulled Braden and Yasmin Wages aside and told them he didn’t think the concept had legs. Thai and Vietnamese food in a full-service room — real cocktails, a wine list, actual service — wasn’t something Dallas had done before at this level. Opening night was dead. The two restaurants very close had lines. Malai sent staff over with drink coupons to poach customers from the wait. Fifteen years later, those restaurants are gone. Malai has four locations, its own brewery, and the landlord still comes in for dinner.
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In 1936, a wine merchant named Gabriel Farnet drove through the hills of the Saint-Tropez peninsula and stopped at a 17-acre vineyard overlooking the Gulf. There was a 19th-century château on the property, a small chapel, and vines that had been neglected during the war years. He bought it, replanted everything — Grenache, Cinsault, Syrah, Mourvèdre — and started making rosé at a time when nobody outside the South of France particularly cared about rosé.
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Stephan Courseau and Daniele Garcia have been building French restaurants in Dallas since 2013. They are both French. They have both been here long enough to become something else — not exactly American, not exactly the version of themselves that landed in Texas over a decade ago, but something in between. Frenchie is them trying to put that feeling on a plate.
“Frenchie is an American French restaurant made by French guys who are now in the American mainstream,” Courseau said when it opened. “It represents the version of the French people we are today.” That is the kind of thing that sounds like marketing until you eat there and realize it is just true.
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