My Beef with Dallas Food

Maybe I’d been spoiled by Portland’s awesome selection of restaurants and grocery stores (you may have heard about it in one of the NY Times’ 10,000 recent articles on the subject), but I’ve so far been pretty disappointed with Dallas’s food scene. Some examples:

Soft Drinks. Yep, it’s true: I no longer live in “pop” territory. People really do call everything “coke” down here. And the ironic thing is, the most popular drink by far is Dr. goddamn Pepper. Seriously, it’s the only pop I see anyone buying or drinking, especially at restaurants. I’ve heard people attribute its Texas popularity to its roots in Waco, as well as the specific, “Texas-only” variation that uses sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. Whatever, alls I know is that it’s still the only pop that gives me heartburn when I drink it.

Also: It’s not a soft drink, but nearly every restaurant offers “sweet tea,” sometimes gratis. Since I unequivocally hate all iced teas, this doesn’t do much for me, but lots of people seem to like it. I’m told the Chick-fil-A variety is particularly choice.

Grocery Stores. Obviously, no grocery stores can touch the combined awesomeness of Portland’s Fred Meyer (my one-stop for all my grocery, beer, and jewelry needs), Grocery Outlet (cleanest, best stocked “closeout” grocery store ever) and Food Fight (vegan nachos!). I could walk to all of these and a farmers market, and besides the occasional bike to Trader Joe's, I was pretty spoiled with my selections.

So it really grinds my gears that Dallas has only one grocery store within 3 miles of my downtown apartment, and that store, Urban Market, is basically a few rows of freezer, a dozen fruits and veggies, and a beer and wine section (and all of the above are marked up about 30%). The next-closest to downtown is a Walmart “Neighborhood Market,” which is essentially just the grocery section of a Super Walmart with a green and brown exterior designed to make you forget you’re at Walmart.

You have to go two more exits up US-75 before you get to the usual suspects: Kroger, Albertsons, Tom Thumb, and a local Whole Foods-esque store called Central Market.

The silver lining, though, is that I’m but a 10-minute walk from an awesomely huge (and everyday, year-round!) Farmers Market. Seriously, this thing is big. I’ve already been burned by some crappy tomatoes, and by at least two stands that looked independent but weren’t, but there have definitely been more hits than misses. I’m this close to being one of those guys who brings a pocket notebook to keep score.

Food Carts. Portland, San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, New York. All of these cities, and many more, have a huge food cart presence, which is great for both quick, cheap lunches and late-night drunk food (I miss you, Fat Kitty Falafel and Potato Champion!). You might even run into someone mildly famous.

So naturally you’d expect Dallas, a city of 1.3 million, to have streets lined with carts. But how many have I seen in four months here? One, and it’s a fucking hot dog cart. And it’s not like there’s not a market for it; at lunchtime there’s lines out the door everywhere, even at the sit-down Quizno’s. What the fuck. Which brings me to…

Restaurants. With all the bally-ho over the supposedly great Tex-Mex food in Dallas, as well as the fact that people here eat out all the time, I’ve been let down by my experiences so far. And not just because lard and/or chicken broth is in everything here, so when I forget to ask my digestive system goes apeshit. Everything’s overpriced, over-salted, ultra greasy, and covered in cheese and bacon whenever possible. I now understand why I’ve been having a hard time finding size S shirts when clothing shopping.

Possibly inflammatory sidenote: Besides the tourists at the JFK assassination site, you almost never see Asians in Dallas. Consequently/Coincidently (whichever makes me seem less racist), there’s only a handful of Asian restaurants here (unless you count P.F. Chang’s), and they aren’t all that great. I am dying for a Thai dish that doesn’t taste like it has a quart of maple syrup in it. Seriously, it’s that bad.

Bonus sidenote: There has been one exception to this restaurant disappointment: Pasand Indian Cuisine in Irving. Their lunch buffet is outstanding, though it’s probably not healthy to eat that much Naan.

Notes from the Underground

I’ve never lived and/or worked in downtown Minneapolis, but I nonetheless have always loved its skyway system, even as a kid. It’s great being able to get from point A to point B without having to go outside more than you have to in subzero weather, and I suspect this goes double if you’re a business-y person in business-y attire and can’t get slush on your business-y pant legs. Also, it at least always seemed to me that there’s a pretty decent mixture of food courts, little shops, and other aesthetic touches that make it seem like a system.

Toronto has an underground tunnel system that's similar, only it’s underground. If anything, it’s even better because, in addition to the dozens of Tim Hortons, there are entire multi-story malls underneath the downtown. The drawback to being underground is the lack of above-ground structures to give you some kind of orientation, but I remember a pretty good map system that incorporated an overlay of the streets above.

So, when I moved to, and began working in, downtown Dallas, I was excited to find out there was a tunnel system under downtown that people used to keep cool in the 100-degree, 90-percent-humidity summers (already 90- and 90- today, yuck!). Yet it turns out that I’d romanticized the whole thing. Don’t get me wrong, the tunnels (eventually) served their purpose; I figured out how to get from my apartment to work (0.8 miles) with only about 50 feet of outside-ness. It’s just that the tunnels are completely unappealing.

It’s not bad enough that about 75% of the tunnels recall the unmarked beige doors in the back catacombs of a shopping mall, or the grey unpainted stucco of a bomb shelter. And I can handle the fact that there is little-to-no signage as to where you are and where to head (trial and error has so far led to dead ends at locked doors, hotel lobbies, and at least broken escalator with a scary-looking hole). I just can’t believe that, for all the room for tunnel storefronts, developed and undeveloped, the only businesses seem to be a sad-looking gym, a sadder-looking, over-priced convenience store, two Starbucks (“the crappy one” and “the good one”), and about two dozen Quiznos.

Besides the afternoon I used to first explore them, I’ve used the tunnels four times to get to work on rainy days. It is the fucking worst way to start a work day. It’s smelly, everything’s gray, weird side tunnels that I notice and want to check out, but never lead to anything cool. I will probably start walking outside even during rainy days.

And the thing is, there’s tons of space there for something really cool. A mini-golf course, maybe, or a bowling alley. Maybe a bar or something. At least put some color down there, so I don’t feel like I’m walking through the world’s largest parking garage.