Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Exploring Fort Worth via Food

Tim and I are kind of restaurant snobs. Ok, we ARE restaurant snobs. We love trying new places, different ethnic cuisines, discovering hidden gems. We're the kind of people who turn our noses up at chain restaurants and mass-produced food. With that said, we're in a new town — sans babysitters — so we've had to adjust our dining habits a tad.

For starters, when Tim was in Houston he raved about two chain restaurants: Pei Wei and Taco Cabana. In RVA I bent my no-chain rule for PF Chang's. Love that place. Turns out, they own Pei Wei: It's a fast food version of the sit-down joint. We ate there the night Nigel and I flew into town. It was quick and tasty. Taco Cabana is also fast food, but it's way above Taco Bell. The ingredients are quality and authentic.

But don't worry, our detour from locally owned restaurants was only temporary. After all, we're in Texas: land of steak and killer Mexican food. Plus, we're so fortunate that Nigel is an adventurous eater, too. Not long after Nigel and I got to FW, we ate at a small Mexican restaurant (sadly, I can't remember the name) in a strip mall near the new Cowboys stadium. The menu was totally in Spanish, so we thought we were in for a treat. Unfortunately, the food didn't really deliver. We were, however, impressed with Fuzzy's a few weeks later. Tim had a really great fish taco, as well as a crawfish taco. Nigel was into the hot and spicy salsa.

On Saturday we went to Chadra, a Lebanese restaurant near about a million hospitals in downtown FW. The food was amazing. If you come visit us, you can bet your booty we're taking you here. We each got the buffet (I normally run from buffets, but one glance convinced me it was full of homemade items) so we could sample several dishes. Nigel was in a mood (and someone had let him have a treat at Starbucks just before dinner), so he didn't eat a ton. He did like the hummus and falafel (what can we say, he's a chickpea man). There was lamb, dolmas, muhammara, a chicken dish with spinach and bacon, roasted veggies, etc. I really want to go back on Wednesdays when they have a vegetarian buffet.

We've just begun to explore this city's food culture, so stay tuned! There's a lot more to it than steaks and Mexican grub. We've seen dozens of sushi restaurants and Indian chaat houses; sadly, the closet Ethiopian restaurant is in Dallas. We're really excited about trying Spiral, a 100% vegan restaurant that serves mostly organic food, and Ellerbe Fine Foods, a seasonal, local-ingredient joint that was named one of Bon Appetit magazine's top 10 new restaurants in America! (The latter will have to wait until a babysitter is found)

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