Pat’s Pick
Pat's Pick
by Patricia Sharpe
March 2003
Pat's Pick
 |
|
 |
EDIBLE ART I had braced myself for crowds the Sunday I visited the new Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. But, no—I breezed through the galleries, only to come to an abrupt halt outside Café Modern, the museum's spacious, sunlight-filled restaurant. Joining the fast-moving queue, I soon found myself sitting at a gray-granite table in a well-designed—not to mention extraordinarily comfy—blue chair, looking out on the museum's vast reflecting pond as lazy clouds floated by practically beneath my feet. No mere filling station for weary art lovers, Café Modern actually has a chef—Mathew Freistadt—and a global, up-to-the-minute menu. My appetite and anticipation were rewarded with a pretty omelet filled with pork carnitas in a snappy cilantro salsa, sided by potato-and-caramelized-onion hash accented with rosemary. Dessert was a piece of chocolate-glazed pound cake with corners so precise they looked machine-milled. During the week, the lunch menu offers small entrées like fettuccine with wild mushrooms as well as more substantial ones like grilled salmon or steaks of American-raised Kobe beef. I think my art treks to Fort Worth could become a habit.
PATRICIA SHARPE
What's In Store
 |
|
|
BOTTOMS UP It's a good thing no one ever convinced Hamilton Rousseau that soft drinks would ruin his appetite, rot his teeth, and nuke his health. Otherwise, the cigar-chomping owner of Ifs Ands & Butts might be selling insurance or cell phones instead of the largest variety of exotic, hard-to-find soda pop in Dallas. The cola king holds court in a comfortable, smoky store at 408 N. Bishop (the "Butts" stands for imported cigars and cigarettes), where he has a lot to say about the 135-plus foreign and domestic brands he carries. His riff on pre-sixties-formula Coca-Cola is mesmerizing: Imported from the Netherlands, it is made with cane sugar instead of the more common but inferior corn sugar, contains real citric acid instead of cheap phosphoric acid, and is packaged in heavy glass bottles under one hundred pounds of pressure per square inch (instead of the more usual forty pounds) to achieve a longer level of carbonation. Particularly meaningful to Texans are special bottlings of two of the Lone Star State's native soft drinks—Dr Pepper and Big Red—each made from its original formula. To order, call 888-712-8887 or go to ifsandsbutts.com.
PATRICIA SHARPE
On the Road
 |
|
|
THIS BUG'S FOR YOU Thanks to plenty of rain last summer, Cajun country should be crawling with crawfish this year. The good news for Texans is that we don't have to go all the way to Louisiana to get our fix of mudbugs. There are plenty of Cajun-oriented restaurants in southeast Texas that serve the tasty freshwater crustaceans during the season, roughly January through June. You'll get the real deal at the Beaumont location of Don's Seafood and Steakhouse (which has five independently run outposts in Louisiana). The best deal at Don's may well be the dinner platter, a feast of crawfish six ways, including fried, sautéed with jambalaya, in an étouffée, and in a gumbo. Those ready for the pinch-the-tails-and-suck-the-heads experience should try Van Choate's Cajun Cookery, in Orange, where the tables are equipped with rolls of paper towels and plastic buckets that fill up quickly with discarded shells. The crawfish purist, however, will want to make the pilgrimage about twenty miles across the state line to the Boiling Point, in Sulphur. To find it, just ask one of the locals or look for the bright aqua roof and the happy red mudbug painted on the exterior.
EILEEN SCHWARTZ
My Library
