Dallas (Texas)

Henry's Majestic, Chef "Roe" DiLeo's New Restaurant on McKinney, Is Now Open

After well-received stints at two Dallas institutions and her currently-airing appearance on Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen, Rosanne "Roe" DiLeo is seemingly up for anything. This time, Chef Roe won't be dodging pans slung by a cursing Englishman or setting a new standard for bar food at The Liberti ... More >>

The Best Drummers in North Texas

With the 26th annual Dallas Observer Music Awards just around the corner -- in fact, voting is open right now at musicawardspoll.dallasobserver.com -- we're looking to spend the next several weeks taking the opportunity to highlight some of the nominees for this year's awards. And when we say that t ... More >>

The Best Concerts in Dallas This Week, 10/20-10/26

Sorry that the beautiful, beautiful weekend left you. It's sad, but the weekend will be back in a few days, so chill. You've got some serious clinginess issues. To tide you over, we've got a few shows to keep you company: Ne-Yo is stopping by the House of Blues, Gardens & Villa headlines a show at C ... More >>

We Did Good on Ebola. It's the Spin that Got Us.

Hoping it's not bad luck to say this so soon, knocking on wood, rubbing my figurative rabbit's foot (my wife won't let me carry a real one), but I think this city and maybe even the nation deserve praise for overwhelming equanimity in the face of the first American Ebola cases. What the response so ... More >>

Ebola in Dallas: Your Post-Weekend Update

Here's a roundup of the (mostly good) Ebola news from over the weekend: The condition of the patients: Amber Vinson is still being treated at Emory University hospital in Atlanta. Se remains in stable condition. Over the weekend, her family issued a statement asking for privacy and disputing claims ... More >>

The Best Concerts in Dallas This Week, 10/17-10/19

The weekend is here and as per usual there's a few suggestions for concerts around Dallas that we'd like to throw your way. No pressure. The choice is yours. But, just know that Pitbull and Enrique Iglesias are gonna hold it down at American Airlines Center, Sharon Van Etten hits the Kessler, pop se ... More >>

Texas Equal Access and Vice Palace Hold Fundraiser for Texas Abortions This Saturday

Over the past year, access to safe and legal abortion has taken some serious hits from the Texas Legislature. After the passage and implementation of HB2, one of the country's most restrictive abortion laws, the majority of the state's abortion facilities were forced to close. In the wake of these a ... More >>

Five Awesome Food Events in Dallas This Weekend, October 16-19

Every Thursday, the Dallas Farmers Market -- newly renovated and bustling with vendors -- stays open late. For vegetable lovers, these extended hours represent a rare opportunity to get their late-night-produce-groove on, while others see the combination of food trucks, an open-air market and beer a ... More >>

Dallas' Burger Boom Is Over, Thank God

I've been poring over local-restaurant news while trying to lay out my restaurant-review plan for the rest of the year, and the list I've compiled is strangely void of burger restaurants. I couldn't be happier. Don't get me wrong. I love burgers. (Especially this one.) But there are only so many fe ... More >>

Dallas May Soon Declare Ebola Disaster But THERE'S STILL NO REASON TO PANIC!!

On Thursday, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, Mayor Mike Rawlings, and members of city health authorities convened for an emergency commissioners court meeting to officially declare disaster in Dallas. But after a private debate, and a significantly tamer public discussion, the court agreed that wh ... More >>

Sorry, Dallas, but Your Favorite Puffy Taco Is Not a Puffy Taco at All

Despite a modest campaign to right puffy-taco wrongs, there remains a great rift in Dallas' puffy-taco universe. The issue centers around an impostor, a sham, a fraudulent taco promising supple puffiness that never makes its way to the plate. You'll find this taco at many Tex-Mex restaurants, includ ... More >>

Tickets On Sale for the Dallas Observer Music Awards Showcase

It's been a little over a week now since voting opened, so we're just going to go ahead and ask: Have you filled out your Dallas Observer Music Awards ballot yet? If yes, congratulations. You're a champ. If not, it's okay; we understand what it's like to play the long game. In fact, voting will be o ... More >>

Austin's Transmission Events, the Company Behind Fun Fun Fun Fest, is Coming to Dallas

You may not know the the name Transmission Events, but you sure know the work that they do. Based in Austin, Transmission are the folks behind Fun Fun Fun Fest, the music festival held each fall at Auditorium Shores in the capitol city. They also do all the booking for prominent Austin venue Mohawk. ... More >>

How Dallas' Young Chefs Are Remaking its Dining Scene, in Their Own Words

The Dallas of 20 years ago exists only on the margins of the current culinary climate. There are more restaurants in this city than ever, and the focus of the chefs who run its best restaurants has shifted dramatically in the last five years. No longer is Dallas known for its decadent-but-boring ste ... More >>

Ebola Story Is All About Who, What, Where and Whether To Tell Anybody

One great service Dallas could render to the rest of the country, should the dust ever settle on the local Ebola story, would be a thorough, no-holds-barred post mortem on information sharing. I am already hearing from people behind the scenes, speaking off the record, that there has been significan ... More >>

THE COG! It Has a New Idea for the Trinity Toll Road. Be Very Very Afraid!

The weird shadow government nobody knows about but that runs everything, called "THE COG!," headquartered near Six Flags amusement park in Arlington, is cooking up a plan to ram a new highway down the city's throat even if the city votes against it. Well, that would be my interpretation of a story ... More >>

Fracking Company Makes Pink Drill Bits for Cancer ... to Fight It, We Mean

Baker Hughes, a Houston-based fracking concern with three offices in Dallas, cares about breast cancer research. Just enough, in fact, that they've made 100 pink drill bits to increase awareness this month, according to New York magazine, which pointed some other interesting links between fracking a ... More >>

Rifle-Toting Huey P. Newton Gun Club Delivers Report on Police Shootings to Feds

In hopes of raising awareness of police brutality, two groups walked single-file together through downtown Dallas Monday afternoon with rifles slung over their shoulders. The Huey P. Newton Gun Club, which marched down Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in August, and the Indigenous People's Liberation Pa ... More >>

Chef Kyle McClelland Ditched Brooklyn for Dallas and Isn't Looking Back (Interview)

The ascension of Dallas' culinary scene has been a curious thing to watch from the sidelines. As a diner, Dallasites have more restaurants to choose from than ever, helmed by some of the country's brightest up-and-coming chefs. At the same time, this progress has been slow-going, and Dallas has been ... More >>

The 10 Biggest Sins of Dallas Diners, in Honor of Yom Kippur

The somber Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur begins at sundown, extending until precisely 7:44 p.m. tomorrow. So while you all are stuffing your faces with festival barbecue, Oktoberfest beers, fried fair fare and pumpkin-flavored everything, I, and millions of other Jewish folk, will be consuming absolu ... More >>

Feds Allot $9 Million for Unaccompanied Kids' Attorney Fees, But How Far Can That Money Go?

On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced an initiative to allot $9 million to help unaccompanied Central American kids pay for attorney fees. The money will be given to several cities with a high population of these kids, including Dallas, over the next two years. It's a powerful statement in ... More >>

Six Great New Burgers in Dallas

When talking food with other people that like food, it would be perfectly fine to say that Dallas has had an excellent year of making new burgers. You should feel free to clink your glass with your fork, or raise an index finger into the air, as if you are saying, I'm speaking now, and calmly let fl ... More >>

Voting for the 2014 Dallas Observer Music Awards Is Now Open

Hold onto your butts, Dallas; it's that time of year again. Dallas Observer Music Awards time. DOMA time has moved back to its latest time of year ever, but we couldn't be more excited about it. This year, our annual music awards showcase -- Chevy Music Showcase North Texas Presents the Dallas Obs ... More >>

Komali Chef Abraham Salum Knows What Dallas Wants, Knows It Will Change Next Week

When we talk about the burgeoning culinary scene that exists in Dallas today, it's sometimes easy to forget about the chefs who spent years trying to convince us that great food was worth a little extra cash. Abraham Salum's eponymous restaurant Salum has been a fixture of the Dallas food community ... More >>

Four Awesome Food Events in Dallas This Weekend, October 2-5

In case you missed last week's opportunity to hob-nob with John Tesar, fear not. Tesar will be joining a host of celebrity chefs for everyone's favorite alliterative meat and booze combo: the 6th Annual Burgers & Burgundy event. The chefs will "be rep-representin'" their slider and wine pairings whi ... More >>

Does Dallas Really Have the Most Restaurants Per Capita? And If So, Who Cares?

"Dallas has the most restaurants per capita of any city in the U.S." Have you heard this one before? The statement is as pervasive here as "Hey, where is the valet stand?" and "I'll have my steak well done." Usually, it's issued as a sort of bragging right. Dallasites who are proud of their city b ... More >>

How I Picked the Best Burger in Dallas

Best of Dallas has arrived, and in addition to arts, culture and music picks it's filled with more food than your stomach could ever hope hold for the rest of the year. I should know because I ate all of it. I love each one of those picks, much like parents say they love each and every one of thei ... More >>

Drink Beer and Without Feeling (Quite as) Bad About It

Beer is one of those paradoxical liquids that can make one feel both supremely good and devastatingly bad. In our never-ending effort to help them imbibers of Dallas maximize their good-vibes and justify their wrongdoing, we've compiled this list of local craft beer companies that make a point of gi ... More >>

The Phuss Bounce Back from Recent Turmoil with On the Prowl

Even if the Phuss "Don't Feel Good," they really ought to. You see, they've had to deal with some real emotional whiplash over the past few months. Early in the summer came the exciting news that they had signed to New York label Magnetic Eye Records, who would be releasing their third album, On the ... More >>

Dallas Apartments and Hotels Are Terrible at Recycling

It's really easy to recycle in Dallas if you live in a house. Just dump that unsorted mass of old newspapers, empty soda cans and milk cartons into a cavernous blue bin, drag it to the curb and let one the city's lumbering dump trucks haul it away. For those who live in apartments -- nearly half of ... More >>

Few of Dallas' Cops Live in the City, and Chief Brown Says They Should Know More about It

At the latest town hall meeting held by District Attorney Craig Watkins, Dallas Police Chief David Brown, speaking to a primarily black crowd, said a program to educate young officers about the police department's history with the city was in the works. He seemed to think it was badly needed. "I'm ... More >>

Kitchen LTO Chef Blythe Beck on Global Culinary Domination and Sexism in the Kitchen

In her relative short time as executive chef of the former Hotel Palomar's now-defunct restaurant Central 214, Blythe Beck quickly made a name for herself. Known as "The Naughty Chef" from both her Lifetime TV reality show and the combination of "booze, butter and bacon" that made her famous, Beck i ... More >>

Big Old Grain of Salt on all Those Dallas Morning News DISD Stories

Monday, I look at The Dallas Morning News, and I see a headline, "Dallas ISD likely breaking attendance law, former lawmaker says." So immediately right there in the same headline I see a lawmaker and a lawbreaker. I've already got a mental image of somebody at school headquarters in cuffs with his ... More >>

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World

Stand Out in a Crowd

The Best Bar Staffs in Dallas

When it comes to live music venues, Dallas has polychromatic shades of bar staffs, from its draft-pouring, quietly rustic bartenders to the sophisticated mixologists with novel ways of concocting a drink. When you frequent a venue often enough, it's nice to be remembered. This could very well mean y ... More >>

Six Stops to Make at the New and Improved Dallas Farmers Market

After the City of Dallas sold the Dallas Farmers Market off to a private entity, market goers were promised big changes. When the market reopened on September 1, it was a little difficult to tell what exactly had changed. Shed 2, the former home of Pecan Lodge, is completely closed as the group reno ... More >>

Dallas' Six Best Breakfast Spots

For the longest time, we've been told breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Without two eggs and a square of toast before 9 a.m., we'd be doomed to walk around like reverse-negative sun zombies, drooling, chewing on pencil erasers and unable to form complete sentences. Recently, though, ... More >>

What We Drank at Dallas Observer Brewfest

Ed SteeleSteven Harrell is a Dallas freelancer. He writes about beer for the Observer. On Saturday night, more than 4,000 Dallasites descended on the Farmer's Market for Dallas Observer Brewfest. The event made for great people watching if you want to get to know all of the different kinds of awkwa ... More >>

Dallas Broke Its Own Rules to Get Dirt for Its Golf Course. Now, It Wants a Free Pass.

To understand just how badly City Hall has bungled its stewardship of the section of the Great Trinity Forest sandwiched between the Trinity Forest Golf Course and the Texas Horse Park, you can visit the delicate wetland pond the city illegally let a contractor drain last month for "dust control." F ... More >>

Dallas City Hall's 10 Best Bads (Not Necessarily in Order of Egregiousness)

We're busy wrapping up our Best of Dallas 2014 issue, so we're in a stop-and-smell-the-roses state of mind. No wait. Those aren't roses. 1. Hiring a horse-abuser to run the city's new horse park. See: The Cruel and Unusual Making of the Texas Horse Park. 2. Sucking all the water out of natural ... More >>

Six Awesome Food Events in Dallas This Weekend, September 11-14

We hear you, DFW. No more screaming, "WHAT'S HAPPENING? AND IF THERE IS ANYTHING HAPPENING, ARE THERE CHILDRENS' TICKETS?" into the void. Starting this week, and every week forever after, we present you with a down-and-dirty schedule of food and drink-related events. You can always find more event ... More >>

Love toLovett

An Interview with Dee Lincoln Chef Andrew Powers, Who Makes Steak in Steaktown, USA

Ask anyone who's involved in the Dallas food scene what our signature dish is, and they'll pretty unanimously come up with one answer: steak. Even though Dallas restaurants have been throttling toward lighter, more produce-focused offerings, beef is still king. Or maybe, in the case of Dee Lincoln's ... More >>

7 North Texas Bands Shaping American Hardcore Music

With all of the space given by the local press to the nationwide impact of North Texas musicians on a variety of genres, it's shocking that so little has been written about the area's influence on the American hardcore scene. For a musical style that's all too often written off as one-dimensional, i ... More >>

A Passionate Plea for More Tiki Bars in Dallas

There are exotic plants at the Sunset Lounge on Ross Avenue, but they're in the wallpaper -- giant, two-dimensional green leaves layered geometrically over beige paint as you look left from the bar. I'm looking at them as my attentive bartender, Rodney, who's wearing a stylish Duck Dynasty shirt, te ... More >>

10 North Texas Albums You Should Be Excited About This Fall

Fall may be a sad time for some folks. For instance, those who have to go back to school. There are also those who relish the oppressive heat of the summer (we swear, it was milder than normal this year!). But for the rest of us, the fall is something to be excited about. It's especially true for mu ... More >>

The Best Dallas Electronic Concerts in September

As the summer winds down, September usually sees the kick-off of proper concert touring season for the fall. When it comes to electronic music, this month is no exception. With a big-name indie dance act like Hercules and Love Affair rolling through town alongside a Chicago house veteran like Gene F ... More >>

The Best Dallas Punk and Metal Concerts in September

A quick glance at our comprehensive Dallas concert guide might give you the impression that this month is stuffed with some real crap, metal-wise. Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Godsmack, Seether; it's like an endless parade of nightmares that has no place in 2014. So we here at DC9 thought we'd take a q ... More >>

Would Texas' Stand Your Ground Law Protect The Dallas Officers Who Shot Unarmed Suspects?

Since August 10, Dallas police officers have shot six people, killing four of them. Most were armed and a threat to others. One, Andrew Scott Gaynier, was unarmed, though police say he lunged at the off-duty officer who shot him. The events surrounding the shooting of an unarmed teen in Ferguson, M ... More >>