While researching the culinary scene in Dallas I stumbled upon a Chowhound thread that went completely off-topic into a discussion about getting Vietnamese food in Dallas versus New York City. It's a widely known fact that internet posting boards are the best, most accurate places for getting information, so I was intrigued by said discussion. Apparently the DFW metroplex has a large Vietnamese population, coincidentally enough, they are known to make some great Vietnamese food.To me that was reason enough to warrant some investigation, which meant getting in a friend's rental car (damn! and we were so close to making it through the trip without a car!) and heading up to the Richardson and Garland area just north of Dallas, where a large community of Asian-Americans resides.
We were headed specifically to Pho Bang, a Vietnamese restaurant located, perhaps not surprisingly, in a nondescript strip mall in Garland. Upon being seated I was happy to this had the right amount of asian-ness to it for our group. 90% of the customers were Vietnamese, always a key thing to look for in ethnic restaurants, but they still had English translations on the menu, which meant we weren't walking into a complete minefield.
First things first we decided on ordering some pho, which for the unfamiliar is a Vietnamese soup that can be customized in countless ways and provides a backbone to the cuisine of the region. It's tasty, filling, and a staple for Vietnamese restaurants. I haven't had pho enough times to consider myself an expert, but I found the offering from Pho Bang to be as good as hoped. I did leave the restaurant wondering perhaps if my pho etiquette was a little off. I have been under the belief that the bowl of pho is much like a plate of nachos, in that you just customize it how you want by throwing in all sorts of things like chili paste, sirachi, plum sauce, greens, thai basil, and making one big bowl of super soup. But casual glances around the restaurant showed some of the locals eating theirs by mixing up small side dishes of spices and sauces in which to dip the solid contents of their soup, leaving the broth pristine and in its original form. Was I creating the Vietnamese version of the Chimichanga? By throwing in a bunch of shit into a bowl of carefully crafted soup was I just ruining the balance and delicacy of the flavor? Part of me wants to say yes, but I am not sure what the proper procedure is here, or perhaps there is none at all.
But the ethical dilemma of properly consuming a soup was nothing compared to our attempts to order an appetizer for our meal. Seeing as the menu at Pho Bang offered Spring Rolls, a light, delicious favorite of mine, I suggested we try the Summer Rolls, something different but most likely similar. Our order prompted some concern from our Vietnamese waitress, who seemed to think (correctly, I might add), that we didn't know what we were ordering. After a few minutes of her repeatedly saying something in unintelligible English and tugging at the skin of her arm, we decidedly nodded that we in fact did want to order the Summer Rolls, despite not really understanding any of what she had been trying to tell us.
"Pork Skin" was the magic translation, lost in a sea of accents and flesh grabbing. Honestly I don't remember exactly how we figured that one out, but our rolls arrived in true Vietnamese fashion, stuffed with shredded (probably boiled?) pork skin. The rubbery strings of skin snapped back and whipped your lips with each bite, a sensation unlike any I had ever had before. It was most akin to eating an egg roll with roughly chopped rubber bands in it. The rolls themselves had a pungent taste that was far from agreeable with my Western taste buds, and no amount of dipping in the bowl of sweet and sour sauce that accompanied them could dull the flavor. I did my best to finish the roll, determined 1) to be adventurous and eat something I did not like right away, and 2) to not let the waitress see that we should have heeded her warnings. My dining companion Mike perhaps summed it up best by describing them as "one of the most 'ethnic' things I have ever eaten".
But the adventure is part of the thrill of it all, and in the end we were rewarded with a delicious, authentic (at least as far as I can tell) Vietnamese meal. It was a small way to enjoy another side of Dallas, and a style of food that's not as readily available to me in Milwaukee.
This post devolved more into an exploration of Vietnamese cuisine than I was expecting, but perhaps that is much more interesting than our trip to Taqueria El Si Hay. This place was just a classically good Mexican taco shop in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas. All I can say is that when you find a solid place like that you just have to appreciate that they know what they are doing. Nothing I've never had before, but just about as good as I've had elsewhere. In fact their salsa verde was pretty kick ass, and had that rich color that I can never seem to achieve with mine. I have thought that maybe its because I don't cook mine down enough, but it could also just be that my gringo blood will never allow me to achieve perfection in Mexican cooking.
And on top of everything else it had the classic signs of good ethnic food. We were there at 2 in the afternoon, it was packed, and 90% of the customers were Mexican.
....
A few years ago, following a 3 day backpacking trip in Arizona, myself and my two hiking companions decided to make a stop off at a BBQ place just off highway 10 north of the Phoenix area. The name of the restaurant was "Kick Ass BBQ" or something similar along those lines, and appeared to be just the place three rugged campers would want their first meal to be at after 3 days in the harsh wilderness (full disclosure: a swollen river limited our penetration into the forest and made fishing fruitless so we basically spent 3 days drinking on a big rock overlooking the stream, but you get the idea).
Such an occasion called for a manly man's meal, so I decided to order the beef ribs, which were delivered to me as the full length ribs and rib meat uncut: a gigantic tower of beef and bone that looked like it was straight out of the Flintstones opening scene. Though visually impressive, the meal was average at best. The meat was dry, semi-flavorful, and unremarkable in every way. That was my impression of beef ribs from then on, and being an Iowa native, I decided that there was no reason to ever have anything but pork ribs.
....
Dallas is near the heart of cattle country, and specifically Central Texas, where the BBQ is beef based and pork runs a distant second. Arriving in Dallas, mission number one on the travel checklist was get some BBQ, and for that reason our party found ourselves heading towards Garland on the blue line, an inner suburb of the DFW metroplex. Some internet research had led us to Meshack's, basically a BBQ shack on the side of the road in a nondescript part of Garland, that enjoys a fabulous reputation amongst the locals.
Meshack's is not a restaurant, not even a food stand with outdoor seating. It is a roadside BBQ shack where Texans drive up, order large amounts of BBQ, then return to their cars and drive back home to enjoy their meal. So you can imagine how well our group of Yankees fit in when we showed up, walking down the sidewalk-less streets of Garland to get to Meshack's, and then taking our meal to a nearby baseball diamond to enjoy our delicious BBQ from the bleachers behind home plate.
I had a spiritual awakening on those bleachers, at least in regards to beef ribs. They were smoked beautifully, smothered in tangy BBQ sauce, and chopped into tender, manageable pieces. These ribs were everything that the ones I had had in Arizona were not. Texas. And the beef brisket was far better than any I had had before as well. Texas. Sausage links with BBQ sauce as a dish? Delicious. Texas. Everything we ordered as amazing, and well worth the adventure of getting there without a car. Eating this meal was probably the most connected to Texas I felt during our entire 4 day trip to Dallas.
We also ate at Twisted Root in Deep Ellum, though I swear to god I did not know at the time that Guy Fieri's hair and wrist bands had been there before. It was a friendly, entertaining place where every order is called out by celebrity or famous character names (Buzz Lightyear was one in our group) and the burgers come with a nice variety of Tex-Mex style toppings. It's a good burger joint that adds a Southwest touch to the idea of gourmet burgers. Honestly, if they could learn to properly cook them (when you have a sign that says "all burgers cooked to medium well unless otherwise requested", and someone requests medium, it helps to actually cook them to medium instead of medium well), they would have a pretty banging restaurant. The ketchup with ancho chili powder in it was all sorts of amazing. Wash it down with a Lone Star or six and you've got yourself a great meal just blocks from downtown Dallas.
Unfortunately not much to write about in the world of Texas beers as far as we could find during our trip. Lone Star proved to be a solid, low cost beer, and their caps provided a bit of entertainment for us while waiting for food. I can imagine a popular night time in the plains of Dallas suburbia might be to pick up a bunch of Lone Star and drink until you can't figure out the puzzles on the caps).Craft or Micro Beer wise I really felt that Dallas was still Boulevard territory compared to anything else. But we tried, and knowing is half the battle.
Texas. Come for the BBQ. Stay for the BBQ.
Ok, so Fuel City isn't an actual nickname for Dallas, rather the name of a place in the metroplex to buy supposedly some of the best tacos around. I didn't get a chance to eat there during my visit however, mostly due to the fact that we did not have a car in which to drive to said gas station/convenience store/taqueria located in a desolate area just southwest of downtown Dallas, surrounded by roads and highways. I've done some things I consider fairly adventurous in my travels: paragliding in Colombia, hiking a Volcano in Guatemala, showing my gringo face in Caracas, but trying to see Dallas for 3 days without a car might be one of the most irrational of all of them.
The truth is though that you don't need a car to see where Dallas puts its focus. "30,000 dollar millionaires" was the phrase that a friend used. Though I had been told that before that Dallas is a city all about showing off one's wealth, or "appearance of wealth" to be more specific, I had a hard time believing that such a blanket statement could really be so easily applied to the 4th largest metropolitan area in the country.
Rewind a couple weeks before I boarded a plane for DFW to join a couple friends on a Third Coastin' research trip to Fuel City (it's catching on already!). A combination of thriftiness and stubbornness had led us to the decision to forgo a rental car and attempt to see the city using public transportation alone. Reputation be Damned! I was determined to use the same method I would use for seeing any other city: get on a bus or train to somewhere, walk around til things were no longer interesting, and then get on a bus or train for a new part of town and repeat.
Interestingly enough, the public transportation part was not the hole in the plan. DART proved to be a more than capable transit system, and thanks to God's greatest gift to mankind, Google transit on a smart phone, it was surprisingly easy to move around the city. No, the real flaw in the whole operation was that there just wasn't much to see. Despite some research, we were left more or less underwhelmed by the various areas of town we visited. Downtown, Deep Ellum, "M" Streets, Greeneville, Oak cliff, Bishop Arts District: all of them failed to strike any sort of tone with my hipster, new urbanist soul. There were pockets of bars or shopping districts here and there, but nothing that would scream out major metropolitan center and Beta world city.
So where do the rebellious youth, the jaded hipsters, the upwardly mobile young professionals, the awkwardly lost cowboys go in Dallas? Why did everywhere we went feel about as lively as downtown Detroit? Uptown baby. The only place we heard, the only place anyone ever said to go, was Uptown. A trendy, chic area north of downtown that is the anything and everything to Dallas as far as I could tell. Populated with bars, upscale restaurants, galleries, condo buildings, this is where you want to be. It's exactly the type of area that I would've expected to find in Dallas, streets crawling with the "30,000 dollar millionaires".
I should be careful not to come off as too bitter or scathing towards people who like nice things, new buildings and post modern minimalist decor. Really I had no problem with Uptown other than the fact that it seemed to have sucked the life out of every other district in the city, which seemed a real shame to me. I say this in all honesty, that it was almost startling how few people there were out and about in the city while we were there. Downtown Dallas made downtown Milwaukee look like Manhattan by comparison. Deep Ellum was the alternative area that was either in decline or hadn't yet taken off, depending on who you asked, and though the area around "M" streets and Greeneville seemed to have a nice laid back atmosphere, there wasn't a whole lot there to begin with.
Even though this was my first trip to Texas, I want to refrain from forming too many concrete opinions of it overall. Perhaps it should be fairly obvious that Texas isn't know for its world class, cosmopolitan cities. The Texans themselves were more than friendly, constantly surprising me with their congeniality towards us as visitors and customers. The service we received at the bars and restaurants we went to was impeccable, which augmented the dining experiences even more.
To step aside for a moment, this trip represented exactly why I've started this blog in the first place, and why food has become so central to my traveling experience. If you truly want to go everywhere in the world, you will eventually come to the realization that every city is not as cosmopolitan as New York, as charming as San Francisco, or as romantic as Paris. Sometimes you're going to end up in Montgomery Alabama, in Guatemala City, Guatemala, or in Dallas, Texas. Food is the ultimate safety net in these situations, because no matter where you are, there is bound to be something good, local, traditional or best yet all three, that will help you better understand where you are right then and there.
In this respect, Dallas did not disappoint.
to be continued....
This post devolved more into an exploration of Vietnamese cuisine than I was expecting, but perhaps that is much more interesting than our trip to Taqueria El Si Hay. This place was just a classically good Mexican taco shop in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas. All I can say is that when you find a solid place like that you just have to appreciate that they know what they are doing. Nothing I've never had before, but just about as good as I've had elsewhere. In fact their salsa verde was pretty kick ass, and had that rich color that I can never seem to achieve with mine. I have thought that maybe its because I don't cook mine down enough, but it could also just be that my gringo blood will never allow me to achieve perfection in Mexican cooking.
