There were a lot of choices in food trucks down in the Dallas Arts District on Friday. Most of my Favorites Were There – but, as always, when presented with a temptation, I chose one I had never tried before.
I have seen the Green House Truck on several occasions, but, for no good reason, hadn’t tried it yet. It was one of the first trucks in Dallas, it may be the first one – a pioneer from the days that they were highly restricted.
The Green House is known for healthy food. Looking over the menu, I chose a Portobello Mushroom sandwich on Ciabatta bread with walnut/basil pesto, grilled vegetables, and a side order of sweet potato fries.
Makes you hungry just thinkin’ ’bout it, doesn’t it.
My food was really good – I regret not trying the truck before – I’ll definitely look for them again.
Friday… there was going to be a lot going on down in the Dallas Arts District. It was the end of spring break week, the streets would be blocked off and all the venues would have events scheduled. I decided to take some pictures. My plan was to get out of work and take the train down before the sun set – taking advantage of Daylight Savings Time to get some shots off during the magic hour.
Unfortunately, everything wrapped around the spindle and I didn’t get out of work on time. When I reached the Arts District it was dark as pitch. I wandered around – there was a band playing in the garden of the Nasher, and they were going to show Hugo in 3D on a giant portable screen, but every square inch of space was already spoken for by blanket-toting families and groups of partiers that had invaded while I was still in my cubicle. Their multi-colored quilts marked off the territory of every clan like patchwork Balkans that no tardy invader could penetrate.
I retreated from the Nasher Museum and wandered the streets. A short time ago only a handful of food trucks would show up down in the Arts District for these events but the phenomenon has rapidly grown and well over a dozen lined both sides of Harwood street. There was music and food and a huge crowd surging in the darkness. Folks poured in and out of the Nasher, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Crow Collection of Asian Art.
Despite the lack of available light I experimented snapping some shots. Some day I want to learn how to use a flash properly, but, still, I have a strong desire to use available light only. I want to steal the stories of the people I’m shooting and a flash warns them of the upcoming thievery. Forget about a tripod in a crowd like this.
The problem is when there isn’t enough available light. I set ISO all the way up (grainy photographs), Aperture Wide Open (no depth of field, everything out of focus) and Speed as Slow as Possible (anything moving is extra fuzzy). There was no way to avoid blurriness, so I tried my best to minimize and control it. I’d prop my camera on a pillar or lean against a light pole, trying to gather in all the photons I could before it all goes to crap.
I don’t know if the blur is artistic or simply poor technique. I like it though… I guess that’s something.
Waiting to order at the Ssahm Korean BBQ truck.
Sharing a foam plate and a quiet moment in the surging crowd.
The colorful blur in the left is a guy walking around selling light sticks from a bag - ten dollars a piece.
(Click to Enlarge)
(Click to Enlarge)
I didn’t stay long. Shooting all these people in the dark filled me with a terrible loneliness – the kind you can only get inside of a festive crowd. So I packed in all in and headed back to the train station. When I got off in my neighborhood I still had about six hours left on my train pass so I stuck it into the money slot of the ticket vending kiosk. Hopefully somebody else could use it, out for a night on the town.
When we first lived in Nicaragua, before the earthquake, my brother and I had to catch the bus to school at the entrance to our driveway on Carretera Sur. Since the drive popped out in a narrow space between two walls, one of us had to stand there and wait for the bus – or it wouldn’t see us and wouldn’t stop.
The problem was there was this big tree – right there, splitting our driveway at the entrance to the highway. It would bloom all the time – covered thick with bright yellow blossoms. These would fall and form a carpet under the tree. It looked great- the blossoms a colorful scene of yellow against the green of the leaves, the brown of the bark, and the dark gray tarmac of the drive and highway.
But the blossoms would rot in the tropical heat. The sweet-smelling flowers would decay into a sickly foulness that was impossible to stand. The smell was unbearable. My brother and I would take turns waiting under the tree, watching for the bus while our sibling stood well back up the yard in the fresh air, until we couldn’t stand it any more and then switch places. When it was really rank we would have to hold our breath and would trade off every minute or so until the bus rumbled up.
I thought of that as I sat at the Farmer’s Market. The central passage, around the La Marketa Café, is lined in trees and the trees were in bloom. They were thick with white blossoms which were falling like a dusting of snow. A thin layer covered the ground, stirred up into tiny white flowery tornados whenever the wind circled into miniature cyclones coming around the corners of the building. They were beautiful.
And best of all, they didn’t stink.
Yet.
The trees blooming in the Dallas Farmer's Market
blooms against the sky
the petals fall in front of a mural on a restaurant
Off to the side of the Dallas Farmer’s Market is a store that I am very familiar with. It sits on a sharp corner and has a tin-roofed building and high rows of steel shelving outside. It’s a Mexican import extravaganza called Amigos Pottery. They have a factory in Mexico and produce a bewildering array of artwork and such – pottery, statuary, chimeneas, wall hangings, welded steel, fountains, and mixed combinations of all of these.
Long ago I bought a chimenea there – I’ve bought some planters, and we’ve purchased a bunch of decorative stuff over the years. Today, my friend and I wandered around with our cameras – shooting in the cramped aisles full of… all sorts of stuff.
Big digital SLRs always attract attention and a guy working there asked me for copies of my photos for his website.
I’ll send him an email as soon as I can find what I did with his business card.
A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.
—-Gertrude Stein
This last weekend, after grabbings a couple shots of the fashion shoot next door, I met up with my friend and we wandered the Dallas Farmer’s Market, Nikons in hand, taking photographs of what caught our eye. What I saw first was the vegetables (other subjects to follow in the dreary days ahead).
Some sheds at the market feature fresh local produce, others produce dealers – so I suppose what you get isn’t too much different than what you see in your local supermarket, but it looks so much more ripe and delicious lined up there in split-wood baskets in front of the trucks with hand-lettered cardboard signs. The vendors hawk their wares – holding out sample chunks of melon or wedges of grapefruit they cut in front of you with pocketknives. You can’t help but smile and salivate at this cornucopia of wonderfulness.
Filling bags with food to take home is one thing – buying fruit and eating while you walk around is another, a sweet treat – blueberries, tangerines, peaches and plums – all designed to nibble and stroll, packaged in their own skins, ready to give up their juice and pulp.
An onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.
—- Will Rogers
One vendor features tomatoes. The back of his slot is filled with pallets of tomatoes. Lots and lots of tomatoes.
Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant’s hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.
– Michael Pollan
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
—-Henry David Thoreau
In our gardens, Lord Ganesha sends His power through fruits and vegetables, the ones that grow above the ground, to permeate our nerve system with wisdom, clearing obstacles in our path when eaten. The growers of them treat it like they would care for Ganesha in His physical form.
—- Hindu Deva Shastra, verse 438, Nature Devas
I bought some of these - the broccoli and asparagus in the lower right.
I think of New York as a puree and the rest of the United States as vegetable soup.
—-Spalding Gray
Dried peppers and tomatillos
This cabbage, these carrots, these potatoes, these onions … will soon become me. Such a tasty fact!
—-Mike Garofalo
Poblano and Habanero peppers with some tomatillos.
Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head.
—-Ambrose Bierce
Apples, peaches, and plums. I love these dark, Texas plums - I love to have a cold bag of them to eat while I drive long distances.
Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.
I had plans this afternoon to meet a friend at the Dallas Farmer’s Market and shoot some photographs. For days I watched the weather and despaired that the cold and rain seemed to reign over North Texas. Sunday morning was cold, gray, and the water still fell. Looking at the forecast, though, they predicted that the precipitation would end precipitously at about two in the afternoon – so I decided to hold out hope and drove down there.
Sure enough, right at two the sun broke out. Within two hours there was not a cloud in the sky.
In a continuation of good omens, as I was driving down there, coming off of Good Latimer Freeway, I cut through a new urban condominium development and spotted someone doing a photo shoot on the sidewalk – either a fashion shoot or a set of senior pictures. There was a photographer, a model, a couple assistants off to the side, and a small collection of lights, diffusers, and reflectors.
I love taking pictures of other people’s photoshoots – like the one I stumbled across in Pirate Alley in the French Quarter. I guess it’s because I don’t have any models I can use – so I like to steal images from other people.
The problem with shooting in a condominium complex is that people keep walking by. Nobody seemed to notice anything.
I'm actually taking a photo of the STOP sign. The others just showed up by accident.
Dallas is well known for being inundated by that delicious abomination – the Tex Mex Restaurant. So, if you want to open a Mexican sit down eating place not dedicated to Velveeta Cheese Sauce or plates of tiny tacos you have to distinguish your cuisine in some way.
Candy and I have been eating our way through the restaurants in the Bishop Arts District (there are more than you would suspect). So we decided to cross one off of the list and stopped by the Veracruz Cafe.
They seperate their style of cooking from the regular pedestrian Tex-Mex by advertising themselves as: Mesoamerican, Mayan, Huasteco & Aztec Cuisine. I’m not sure about all that, but I can say that it is delicious.
The restaurant sits on a corner on an edge of the Bishop Arts district. A group was coming out the door carrying to-go boxes, Candy asked, “Is it any good?” They all said it was great and offered their leftovers – tempting, but we decided to go in and pay for our meal anyway.
Inside is attractive – dark with a unique purple color scheme. It’s cool and relaxing. The service was excellent – I was a bit dehydrated and they were able to keep my water glass going, which was no small feat. I had the special, Pescado Tajin, a Tilapia filet covered with shrimp and scallops, with a tomato sauce and vegetables. Tajin is a Mayan archeological site near Veracruz. Unique and very good.
Cafe Veracruz has a tough job competing with a number of very well known restaurants in the area. It more than holds it own, though, and seems to me to be a popular place with the locals that live in the area. I deserves a close look from visitors too.
One restaurant that everyone in Dallas has to eat at is Smoke in the Belmont Hotel. It has been the vanguard of the revitalization of Oak Cliff – about to come to fruition with the impending opening of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge (unfortunately I will be out of town for the grand opening festivities). The Bar at the Belmont is one of my favorite places and the restaurant next door is not far behind.
Smoke is an upscale Bar-B-Que sort of place – a very non-traditional Texas Bar-B-Que – no serving line where greasy slabs of meat are slopped onto your foam plate and you choose the green beans on the side (not that there is anything wrong with that). You do get the seductive smell from the smokehouse out back and the piles of wood are carefully displayed to make sure you know where the goodness is coming from.
Smoke works hard to serve selections of local, handmade, and artisanal ingredients. It is a popular and crowded restaurant. Usually I don’t like to wait very long for a table (I don’t do well with the packed, chatty crowd), but they enter your phone into an iPad and you can sneak next door to the Bar Belmont to enjoy the skyline while you wait. They’ll send you a text when your spot is ready.
The brunch menu was up when we ordered. It was all good. I had the eggs florentine – with smoked salmon and collard greens (instead of spinach). I know this sounds odd – but it was the greens that made the dish. The slightly wild and bitter flavor of the collard greens added a bit of texture.
I appreciate the effort and thought that the chefs at Smoke put into their menu and the risk they took a few years ago to move into an area that seemed to be forever moribund. Luckily, it looks like their foresight, courage, and hard work is paying off and will continue into the future.
The view of the Belmont from the porch at Smoke - Dallas skyline in the background.
A while back (Saturday February 4th to be exact) I was waiting to get on the McKinney Avenue Trolley down by the Dallas Museum of Art. Glancing over at the folks waiting in line to board, I noticed that some of them were wearing odd items of clothing – at a glance, at a distance, at first… they seemed to be some sort of colorful flowing robe. My first idea was that they had come from the Crow Museum of Asian Art (which was having some festivities that day) and were wearing some cheap imitation Asian costume of some kind.
Riding down McKinney Avenue in the Trolley, I started to notice other folks wearing these robes. Now, though I could see them a bit better and realized what they were. These people were wearing Snuggies.
A whole group of Women of a Certain Age clambered aboard wearing matching tiger-striped Snuggies, cateye sunglasses, and silver tiaras (sorry, I was so gobsmacked by the whole entourage I forgot to bring out my camera). I asked them what was up and they said it was the third annual Dallas Snuggie Pub Crawl.
All along the route I saw folks all snuggified – though a lot were cheating – they were simply wearing their bathrobes backward. I know this is alright… the rules say:
This is a Snuggie Pub Crawl even so a Snuggie of some kind is REQUIRED but you can also wear:
Slankets
Designer Snuggies
Snuggie knock-off brands
Adult Onesie or Forever Lazy
Robes
I’m sorry, but I think these rules are too lax… I don’t think robes or Forever Lazy should count. I go out in those all the time.
We chugged along through Uptown and began to pass the bars where the pub crawlers were congregating. It looked like a blast. It was tough to get decent photographs – the trolley was packed and moving fast and I had to shoot through bits of glass.
So, I assume there will be a fourth annual Dallas Snuggie Pub Crawl in or around February next year. I’ve made a note in my planner – it’s the only thing I have marked for 2013 so far.
I’ll have to buy a Snuggie, though. I am not going to go out there in a backwards robe.
The Snuggie People boarding the trolley
OK, this is Texas, so I guess the burnt orange Snuggies are all right, but what is that big green case he is lugging and why does she have such an armload of notes for a pub crawl?
When you and your insignificant other meet another couple in Uptown for drinks... is it more embarrassing to forget your Snuggies... or to remember them?
The bars were hoppin'. Are those Mandelbrot set Snuggies?
A while back, Candy had this wine at an Italian restaurant in Fort Worth. It was Lacryma de Christi del Vesuvio – which translates as “Tear of Christ.” It’s a type of wine produced on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. We had been looking for the stuff all over the Metroplex and nobody had it. They all said the same thing though, “have you looked at Jimmy’s? If anybody has it, they will.” I looked up Jimmy’s Food Store and found it was on the corner of Fitzhugh and Bryan in East Dallas. Today we had some time and drove down there.
I’m familiar with that area. For years I went through there twice a day on my way to work downtown – either driving or on a bus. It was always a poor area, pretty lively, but not the place you wanted to wander around after dark. Lately, though, a lot of the run down old apartments and crude homes have been torn down and the area is primed for redevelopment and gentrification.
Meat Case - Italian Sausage and more
Do you like Nutella? - here's an eleven pound jar for seventy dollars.
Jimmy’s Food Store is a fantastic place. It’s the motherlode of specialty Italian food and wine. I heard the owner talking – he’s been in the same location for forty-two years. The neighborhood has been through some serious changes over that time, but his store has stayed the same. It was crowded with people buying Italian groceries – about a quarter of them speaking Italian.
The store isn’t very big, but holds a lot of goodness, crammed in as tight as can be. The biggest area is dedicated to wine, a huge selection of Italian wines, arranged by region and type. You can learn a lot about wine simply walking the aisles and reading the little articles they have taped to each variety.
Sure enough, they had a couple Lachryma Christi whites (the one red they carry was sold out). There was a Mastroberardino and a Vini Nobilis. We bought one of each and a couple other bottles of wine. We picked up some pasta (Pastosa – imported from Brooklyn!) some cheese and a couple of sauces to go with the pasta.
A couple of Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio
This is the kind of place you don’t want to go when you are hungry. You will buy too much stuff. In addition to the wine and groceries, back next to the meat counter, is a little place where you can order sandwiches. We bought a Cuban and a Muffaletta, some drinks, and took them out to a little table out by the street. The day had started out crisp, but the Texas sun was warming everything up quickly.
Mufalletta - big enough for about three meals
Cuban Sandwich
Seating out on the street.
It was really nice sitting out there on the street eating sandwiches and enjoying the day. There was even live music – a partly blind man, Vincent Van Buren, playing harmonica and singing the blues (and a lot of old Beatles tunes).
Bill Chance 