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Wednesday, 12 January 2011 09:22 |
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Can Crossroads Café Cruise?
By The Law Reviewers / Dec. 2010
Remember us? We’ve been on Hiatus for a couple of months, but he was starting to get annoyed so we got up and left. This month, we go back in time to when things were new and the late winter sun was just starting to warm the valet stand at the Equinox gym. We’re talking, of course, about breakfast. Breakfast is like your mother: you love it, but you never make time for it except once on the weekend.
So, you may recall a D Magazine article a couple of months ago about the best places to eat breakfast in Dallas. Or, maybe you haven’t seen it yet because it’s not 18 months from now when you first pick up a wrinkled copy in your proctologist’s waiting room. You know what? This review has a very high ratio of jokes::actual review, so let’s get down to the tass brax, shall we? The next “best breakfast” article in F-Deluxe City, or D Monthly, or the Pennysaver, or whatever, better dang well have the Crossroads Diner in it, mmkay?
Crossroads Diner ( www.Crossroads-Diner.com) is the brand-spanking new, yuppie-tastic diner near the Walnut Hill DART rail stop in Dallas, just down the street from your proctologist’s office at Presbyterian Hospital. It’s a little pricier than your typical American fare/diner food joint, but for good reason: the menu touts the freshness and integrity of the ingredients, and it shows on the plate and in your mouth (please close your mouth). Crossroads Diner also serves non-breakfast food, but for the purposes of this review, we’re focusing on breakfast, cuz that’s when we ate there. The corned beef hash ($7.75) was unlike anything we’ve ever had before, mainly because it was made with real corned beef. Whodathunkit? The house-made corned beef is smushed around with buttery hash browns and served with two fluffy scrambled eggs. Add some rye toast and you got yourself a fantastic breakfast.
The eggs and homemade, ahem, locally made choziro ($5.75) came with – you guessed it – two more eggs (also scrambled) and some of the spicier, tastier chorizo we’ve ever tried. An extra side of grits ($1.75) was creamy, buttery and nicely seasoned to boot.
Crossroads pushes its sticky buns ($4.25) like they’ve been famous for years, even though the place has only been open for a few weeks. The servers talk them up, the hostess goes on about the frequent buyer’s card for them, and the website has a page devoted just to the buns o’ stick. Worth the hype? The bun we tried was decadently large, smothered in sticky syrup, topped with pecans, and unevenly rolled, belying its house-made heritage. It tasted… like a sticky bun! Hey, we weren’t blown away, but it was still pretty good.
Finally, coffee at Crossroads is great: dark and rich, but also smooth – this is not typical diner coffee. But, is it worth the $2.75 price tag great? Meh – take that third cup to go and mull it over later. Like everything at Crossroads, the pricing is just the other side of being too much.
So, on our so-very-sleepy world-famous five-gavel scale, where one gavel is Breakfast at Tiffany’s (haven’t seen it) and five gavels is the lunch scene in The Breakfast Club, we give Crossroads Diner three-and-a-half gavels, or the breakfast scene in Swingers. “Our baby's all growns up!” More reasonable prices would pump it up to four gavels.
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Tuesday, 31 August 2010 00:00 |
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Dive Coastal Cuisine: Recession Buster, Or Soon-to-be-Bust?
By Sponge-Law Reviewers-Pants
Ahoy there! This month’s port of call, and other nautical allusions, took us to Dive Coastal Cuisine in SniderPlaza, where we witnessed either the end of the Great Recession, the continuation of the Great Denial That There Was Ever A Problem or, as we prefer to call it, Thursday. For many, many years, the space was occupied by a mostly beloved grease spot called Ball’s Hamburgers. But then, wearing grease-smelling fragrances went out of fashion, so the Dallas Sidekicks’ and 1970’s Texas Rangers’ memorabilia was scraped off the wall and the space became a Dunkin’ Donuts. Apparently, University Park does not “run on Dunkin” because 8 minutes later it became Dive Coastal Cuisine, awkwardly sandwiched between the innards of Snider Plaza and a bank.
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Thursday, 29 July 2010 00:00 |
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Pull Up a Chair to The Common Table
By Michael Anderson and Anthony Lowenberg
Your Gastro-Law Reviewers
We know we’ve had everybody else biting their nails, so we guess it’s time for you to stop chewing. The answer to the question everybody wants to know: In this fall… this is very tough… we’re going to take our talents to PaperCity and join the Parties section!
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Tuesday, 29 June 2010 00:00 |
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La Carreta Argentina Earns Yellow Card
By Michael Anderson and Anthony Lowenberg,
Los Law Reviewos… GOOOOOAAAAALLLLLL!!!!
After Argentina beat Mexico in this year's World Cup, the ESPN.com headline proclaimed "Lucky and Good." If La Carreta Argentina, the Argentinean restaurant that recently expanded to swankier digs in north Oak Cliff, wants to make it in this city's fickle dining scene, it's going to need to take a cue from its namesake's soccer team and find a little luck, since it wasn’t very good on our two visits. Or it could hire Maradona as its door host to yell at you as you walk in the door; with his two-tone beard and shiny silver suits, he could also moonlight as the new Crazy Ray (Curse You, Rowdy. Curse you to Green Bay!).
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Thursday, 27 May 2010 00:00 |
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Quite Possibly, the Most Interesting Taco Stand Within Spitting Distance of the Parkit Market
Stay Law Reviewersie, My Friends!
From the co-founder of Uncle Julio’s comes Rusty Taco, a squeaky clean, SMU-area – hey, wait! Where are you going? Come back! You didn’t even skip down to the end to see how many gavels it got! What turned you off more, the idea of another Uncle Julio’s or your fear of Urbandictionary.com’s definition of “Rusty Taco?” We hear ya – we had the same thoughts, too.
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Sunday, 25 April 2010 13:44 |
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ConFusion Lives Up to its Name
By Michony Andenberg,
Your ConFused Law Reviewers
March Madness – when spring is finally in the air and people get ridiculously excited about a team they knew nothing about a week ago who promptly loses and ruins their tournament bracket. This is inevitably followed by April Apathy – when you realize that summer heat is just around the corner and “One Shining Moment” is more fun than the 20 hours of college hoops you just watched. And that pretty much sums up our feelings about ConFusion, the new Asian fusion place near the Bishop Arts District in Oak Cliff.
We were excited because ConFusion has a couple of things going for it, namely the best name for an Asian fusion restaurant in the history of ever and a spot in a funky, hip area of town that north-of-downtown people like us call “funky, hip” because we’d never go there if we didn’t have a restaurant or bar to use as an excuse. Unfortunately, we can’t give ConFusion anything more than a big “meh.” Blame it on April Apathy and the “meh” generation. Just don’t blame us, we’re innocent of all charges (until a final, nonappealable determination of guilt is entered by the highest court of competent jurisdiction). Seriously though, we wanted to like ConFusion, and we gave it a couple of tries and enjoyed its earnest and friendly service, but the food is just too okay-but-pricey to give it more than a lukewarm review and some suggestions for how to fix things up.
Brought to you by the good folks behind Taqueria Tepatitlan (also a great name) in Oak Cliff, ConFusion has a tiny parking lot that quickly fills up. The exterior of the building is all about what brown can do for you and we think the interior has gone a little too far over to the dark side, if you know what we mean (we mean it’s a little too dark inside). The small outdoor patio has a nice zen fountain thing going on. The service was very friendly and prompt, with the only complaint being that no one knew how to make an Arnold Palmer (take one Mr. Palmer and one Mrs. Palmer, add a weekend getaway to Napa, and … THANK YOU! We’ll be here all week!). Finally, the half-tea-half-lemonade appeared, with a nice seltzery twist and we were on our way down the culinary rabbit trail.
ConFusion’s menu lives up to its fusion credentials by offering a variety of dishes from all over Asia – many are conveniently labeled “Cambodian,” “Laotian” or “Thai” in case you aren’t sure. As with the restaurant’s name, some of the menu items have clever titles like Kiss Me Ginger, but for some reason it’s the dishes like Banana balls and Gang Dang that make us giggle. We’d say we’re immature but you already knew that; hey, anyone want to know how to make an Arnold Palmer? Anyhoo, ConFusion’s problem is that the pricing structure is out of whack. Red flag no. 1: no lunch specials (officially, at least). And most of the menu items tend to be more expensive than at comparable Asian restaurants around town. It appears the owners are aware that most other Asian places offer lunch specials with a soup/salad/spring roll option, though, because we were mysteriously given small bowls of soup and mini spring rolls on our second visit (the spring rolls had a tasty curry zing but the soup was pretty bland).
So, how did the rest of the food taste? Starting with the starters, the Cambodian Corn Cakes ($7.50) apparently also contained both crab and shrimp, but we couldn’t really taste either and, while the crust of the cakes was nicely crunchy, the interior was a little on the mushy side. The Laotian Crab Cakes ($7.50) came in fun kid shapes like stars and hearts, which immediately made us wonder if they were purchased at a nearby Whole Foods (and would our kids eat them or just throw them at the dog like everything else). The crab tasted fine but a little pre-fabricated. The Summer Rolls ($7.50) were basically your standard Asian steamed rice paper rolls, but the half slice of shrimp to a roll seemed skimpy for the price. As for entrees, on one visit we tried the Texas and Tan An ($11.95), which is a Texas pecan crusted Vietnamese white fish fillet. Although the sauce could have used more kick, the crust had a delicious crunch and the fish was moist and tasty. On another visit we tried the green curry with calamari ($8.25 + $3 for the calamari). We ordered it spicy and it had a nice creamy, sweet taste but not so much with the spicy part. Pad key mow (ConFusion’s spelling) with tofu ($8.25), or flat rice noodles, with garlic, chilies, tomato, bell pepper and basil, tasted of salt and tamarind (?) and not much else, which was a huge disappointment for a dish that should be slightly spicy with earthy notes from the vegetables.
For dessert, the ConFusion white cake with milk ($6.50) was really expensive for what tasted like a standard tres leches cake that we suspect was brought in from the nearest Mexican dessert commissary. The Great Wall of China Chocolate Cake ($6.50) was also really pricey and they missed an easy clever dessert name – Great Wall of Chocolate Cake! – but at least it was thick and chocolatey so it didn’t feel like as much of a rip-off.
Ultimately, ConFusion lives up to its name by providing an okay but frustrating dining experience that’s just too pricey for what you get. If they’d lower their price points a smidge, add an official lunch specials menu and focus on doing fewer dishes really well then we think they’ll be just fine. On our over the top college basketball announcer five-gavel scale, where five gavels is Gus Johnson going crazy over a first round buzzer beater and one gavel is Dickie V going all Diaper Dandy over his beloved Dukies, we give ConFusion two and a half gavels or Billy Packer coming back from the grave to grump through another blowout finals game (What’s that? He’s still alive? Oopsies!).
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Wednesday, 17 February 2010 09:28 |
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“Dr.” Andrew Bell, PhD, BBQ, NoMSG
By The Law Reviewers, M.D., Anthony LowenMcDreamy and Michael AnderMcSteamy
Downtown is filling up with some mighty fine and swank restaurants, whose “chef driven” menus (we have no idea what that means either), truffle oils, and valet parkers await your fickle taste buds. That’s because said fickle buds will be at Dr. Bell’s BBQ getting their ‘Q on, at least twice a week. See, we had another restaurant all ready to go for this month’s review, but then Dr. Bell’s came along and Pretty Woman-ed us with its Lamborghini brisket, smoked turkey polo match, and a future guest spot on Friends. We’ve heard it all before, Dallas is not a barbeque town, there’s too many corporate chains, you’re within 100 feet of me and violating the restraining order, yadda yadda yadda. But Dr. Bell’s is the real deal, and we hope the chefs driving Smoke a couple of miles away take notice, for their own sake. You heard it here first: Dr. Bell’s will be around in a year, and Smoke will be but an odor in your clothes that you can’t get out (Curse that $4 pickle plate – curse it all to Houston!).
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Saturday, 09 January 2010 11:59 |
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Maple and Motor Doesn’t Need a Catchy Headline
It’s That Good, Says the By-Line
By The House-Ground Law Reviewers
There have been two recent developments in the sometimes wonderful and always artereosclerotical (note: made up word) world of hamburgers. The first was a not-so-Earth-shattering-but-still-kinda-frightening article in the Sunday New York Times several months ago about the dangers of some types of ground beef. This disturbing and revealing article got us to put down our ground beef hamburgers for a couple of days and subsist solely on lamb kebabs and turkey burgers (which taste great for breakfast, btw), just to be safe. Less noticeably, your Law Reviewers have been on a mission for the past five months to rate the best burgers in the area, and invited some of our hard-core followers (the ones who go through our garbage and have Law Reviewer tattoos) to join us. We call it Burger Court, and you can read all the rules, rankings and summary judgments here. Unless you enjoy a thorough grilling on cross-examination, you do not want to be held in contempt of Burger Court! Burger Court would be a total success, except for the fact that our two choices rank near the bottom of our burger rankings so far. We blame the NYT article.
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