What a Dish!
Every good restaurant has at least one great specialty. Here are 66 choices for Texas’ best eating.
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Veal Chop
Adelmo’s
“Everybody who sees it goes, ‘Whoa,’” said the waiter. Whoa, indeed, to an incredible twenty ounces of meat, grilled on the bone, just sitting there looking magnificent on your plate. Because the veal chop shows up on the list of specials at this miniscule Mediterranean restaurant about half the time, the chef varies his approach: green-peppercorn sauce one night, wild-mushroom or roasted-shallot another. All are delicious. $24. 4537 Cole Avenue (559-0325).
Mashed Potatoes
Ali Baba
Anyone who has had to endure the gluey tasteless stuff that passes for mashed potatoes at many places should give thanks for the divine lemony, garlicky drift at this tiny Middle Eastern spot on lower Greenville. These potatoes are a side dish to another simple specialty, tender roasted chicken, but they’re so good they almost make you forget the main course. $4.49. 1905 Greenville Avenue (823-8235).
Spice Cake
Routh Street Cafe
At a restaurant that has made culinary history with idiosyncratic food combinations, it is reassuring to find old-fashioned spice cake on chef Stephan Pyles’s menu. Warm, slightly sticky, and shot through with bits of apple and walnut, it is drenched in caramel sauce and crème fraîche and served with a perfectly round dollop of vanilla ice cream infinitesimally flecked with bits of vanilla bean. $6. 3005 Routh (871-7161).
Goat-Cheese Enchiladas
La Suprema
Organic consciousness is a high priority here. Find out why diners pack the tiny former filling station by ordering the creamy goat-cheese enchiladas. Made with a seductively light whipped cheese and homemade tortillas, the enchiladas come with a piquant verde sauce so good that if it were soup, you’d be tempted to order a bowl. $6.95. 7630 Military Parkway (388-1244).
Banana Beignets
L’Entrecôte, Loews Anatole Hotel
Monolithic and glamorous, the Loews Anatole can be intimidating. Counteract the swank factor by ordering a silly-sounding dessert: banana beignets. The five light-as-air morsels are a fugue on the humble fritter, an interweaving of airy and subtle coconut mousse, fresh coconut shavings, and sugar-dusted essence of banana. Banana beignets available in cooler months, apple or peach at other times. $5.50. 2201 Stemmons Freeway (761-7410).
Mee Grob
Bangkok City
The gossamer tangle of crisp, puffy rice noodles is as delicate as lace. The thin sweetish sauce poured over them blends tomato, vinegar, sugar, lime juice, scallions, and other ingredients. Small rosy shrimp and crescents of cucumber are arranged just so. A fast-growing clientele and the genial family who own the restaurant offset the borderline neighborhood. $4.95. 4301 Bryan, at Peak (824-6200).
Tournedos Félix Faure
Chez Gérard
Chez Gérard is a soulful, sentimental kind of place. The fare is serious, uncomplicated, and continental, including classic tournedos Félix Faure (named after a nineteenth-century French president, whose favorite dish this was), which are simply the best pair of tenderloin filets in town. Two reasonably sized choice cuts are topped with sautéed white mushrooms and smothered in a peppercorn cream sauce. The meat is so tender you’re barely conscious of having to chew. $17.75. 4444 McKinney Avenue (522-6865).
Goi Cuon
Mai’s
The Imperial Rolls at this modest Vietnamese cafe might be compared to egg rolls, but they are really more like salad. On translucent creamy-colored rice paper are stacked bean sprouts, rice, noodles, mint, cilantro, slices of shrimp, and a bit of pork. Then the paper is rolled around the filling, and the tidy bundle chilled. It is served just like that, not fried, absolutely fresh, with a sweet deep-brown peanut sauce bristling with shreds of red pepper. $1. 4812 Bryan, at Fitzhugh (826-9887).
Chocolate Chip Cookie
Kathleen’s Art Cafe
You alert your server eight minutes before you’re ready for dessert. The server in turn alerts the kitchen. At the appointed time, a pristine white bowl arrives at your table, bearing your individually baked cookie and two small scoops of vanilla-bean ice cream, sizzling and melting and smelling fabulous. Available by request. $3.95. 4424 Lovers Lane (691-2355).
Pan Chico
White Swan
Better than chips and hot sauce, better in fact than any appetizer you can name, White Swan’s pan chico with pink cream cheese dip is already a legend, and the brick-walled, pink-ceilinged Cuban-Italian-Mexican-Spanish restaurant has been open only a little more than a year. “We usually use hot dog buns—our customers like them best—but you can use baguettes or any kind of bread,” says co-owner Chris Macho. “We brush them with olive oil, garlic salt, oregano, and cracked black pepper and then bake them. The dip we make with cream cheese, picante sauce, and chopped garlic. Oh, sometimes we throw in a little cilantro.” Complimentary with meals. 2307 Abrams (824-8122).
Fort Worth
Chicken-Fried Steak
Paris Coffee Shop
Even in a working-class, blue-plate city like Fort Worth, you can’t take CFS for granted. That’s why the lunch lines start forming at eleven. The Paris’ classic version, as one waitress put it, is “hand-breaded, cut from the roast, the whole bit.” Abundant cream gravy, vegetables, and iced tea are included. $5.15. 700 W. Magnolia Avenue (335-2041).
Canard Rôti
Saint Emilion
The only restaurant in Fort Worth to convey the intimacy, comfort, and gustatory zeal of a French country kitchen also happens to produce one of Cowtown’s favorite alternatives to beef: roast duck. No matter how the chef is garnishing it (black currant sauce, for instance), the plump fowl consistently emerges crispy on the outside, tender on the inside, and virtually greaseless. $16.50. 3617 W. Seventh (737-2781).
Soup
Kimbell Art Museum
If soupmaking is an art, then the soups at the Kimbell buffet should be hung on the wall. Two choices are offered daily. The green chile with rice has a cheddar cheese and cream base and enough of a burn to titillate natives but not torture out-of-staters. The chilled seafood tomato soup brims with chunks of crabmeat, corn, olives, red pepper, sliced mushrooms, and zucchini. When the cold winds blow, tortilla soup and versions of chili appear. Soup $3.75. 3333 Camp Bowie (332-8451).
House Salad
Mac’s House
Some things never change—thank goodness. Willis McIntosh inherited the recipe for the house salad when he bought the old House of Mole in 1968. Twenty-three years later, the salad is the same as it ever was: oil, vinegar, blue cheese crumbles, grated Romano cheese, toasted sesame seeds, and a few classified extras on a bed of iceberg lettuce—a creation so simple and popular that Mac sells the seasonings to go so you can put them on your own iceberg at home. $7. 2400 Park Hill Drive (921-4682).
The Frarej
Hedary’s
From the first fragrant whiff of this incomparable Lebanese roast chicken (Number 10—the Frarej) to the last swipe of pita bread through the glorious puddle of natural juices, lemon, olive oil, and garlic, there is no more sensual Mediterranean eating experience for miles around. $11. 3308 Fairfield Avenue (731-6961).
Dutch Babies
Ol’ South Pancake House
Dutch Babies are deceptively described on the menu of this pre-IHOP pancakery as “miniature German pancakes.” They more closely resemble French crêpes. After dousing the near-translucent cakes in sugar and butter, the waitress adds a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and ceremoniously folds the “babies” like fat burritos. $1.95 for one pancake. 1507 S. University Drive (336-0311) and 5148 E. Belknap (834-1291).
Cinnamon Bread Pudding
Cafe Aspen
A cross between a sticky bun drenched in honey and a moist, spongy version of baklava, this homey, whiskey-sauce-spiked dessert is not as glamorous as other sweets showcased at this casual but tony restaurant, but it gets raves. $3.25. 3416 W. Seventh (877-0838).
Barbecued Chicken
Railhead Smokehouse
Rather than give up barbecue altogether, the calorie- and cholesterol-conscious compromise by hitting the Railhead on Tuesdays or Saturdays. Chicken is served on those days only—with its light basting of sweet sauce and punchy hickory smoke, it’s worth the wait. $3.99. 5518 W. Vickery Boulevard (738-9808).
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