“The way I have it set up is the way I grew up,” Jackson says. “We would be at my house, we would be playing guitars and barbecuing, sitting around and having a good time.”
Dennis Jackson plays bass and tries to find time for a jam session when he can, even at the restaurant.
Alison McClean
Jackson, a left-handed bass guitarist, has played in bands, at church and with his family; most of his siblings are musicians, too. He grew up in the tiny town of Joaquin, Texas, just 4 miles from the Louisiana border, surrounded by talented barbecue smokers who cooked from scratch.
I’ve been the
Dallas Observer’s food critic for five years now, and as you might expect, I’ve gotten some hate mail.
After one editorial in 2019, an angry reader blocked me on Facebook (and one restaurant owner wrote a reasoned, non-angry reply for the paper). Restaurant owners and chefs have gotten upset when I didn’t like their food, and customers get upset when my recommendations lead them astray. Just the other day, I got a message from someone calling themselves “WetStickyLove,” telling me that one of our Top 100 Restaurants is actually “mall chain level.”
But the biggest theme of five years’ worth of hate mail is something that surprised me. The most common message isn’t that I’m an asshole, or have no taste, or don’t know a haddock from a hole in the ground. The most common complaint is that I cover restaurants in Dallas’ suburbs.
The coronavirus pandemic has been good for parking lots. Well, it’s been good for people repurposing parking lots, for freeing ourselves from the belief that they’re only good for holding cars and generating ungodly summer heat.
Across Dallas and its suburbs, restaurants are putting picnic tables in former parking spaces, businesses are blocking spots off with flower boxes and, in general, people are reclaiming areas of our city that were previously reserved for empty machine storage. Of course, some local government agencies are more supportive of these efforts than others; one Dallas restaurant was threatened with fines for creating an unlicensed “parklet.”
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You can sense the excitement in the Dallas restaurant industry: Patio weather is here, thousands of people are getting vaccinated every day and dining rooms are beginning to welcome back customers who’ve previously stuck to takeout.
The excitement isn’t limited to current restaurants. In 2021, we’re poised to see a boom of new openings, and many of them are going to be very expensive.
Tasting menus are in again. At Monarch, in downtown’s National Building, diners can choose to sign up for a $290 tasting of “the best our menu has to offer.” On Greenville Avenue, two new tasting spots will debut this summer: Shoyo from longtime Nobu sushi chef Jimmy Park and Carte Blanche by married chefs Amy and Casey La Rue. Casey has worked for Michelin-starred legends Daniel Boulud, Joel Robuchon and Thomas Keller.