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Restaurant News

December 17 Food Truck Schedule and News for Dallas/Ft. Worth

By George Lewis |

Quite a few of the food trucks are starting to take their winter holiday.  They’ll use it as a time to add menu items, tweak the truck/trailer, and most importantly for these small businesses, spend time with family. Quite a few of the food trucks are also booked for private holiday parties.

This week, we are adding Unforsacon Bacon and Simply Dosa, an Indian point-of-view truck.

Update: The Village Apt. popup Tuesday event is cancelled through the Winter.

Popup events include Tuesday at the Village Apartments,  Wednesday’s Food Truck experience at Sigel’s/Greenville, and a Wednesday night Christmas Concert at the Vitruvian in Addison.

Here is your schedule for the week.  Remember to always check Facebook and Twitter feeds.  Jump.

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Fascinating People, Biography & MemoirA Legend In His Own MindBlackie SherrodOctober, 1975

A century ago, Dallas was a four-newspaper town. And when there are four newspapers in your town, it’s a lot more likely that one of those newspapers would harbor a scoundrel like the reporter Jack Proctor.


Proctor worked for the Dallas Dispatch, a competitor with the crime chroniclers at the Journal, the Times-Herald, and the Morning News. Two of those papers survived into modern Dallas history. Only one remains. And so, maybe don’t hold it against ol’ Jack that he once started a fire near the newsroom that blew up three cars when he couldn’t find anything to write about. Or that he likely made up a lot of stuff.


At the very least, his imagination ran rampant: there was the time he met with Clyde Barrow outside of San Antonio and filed a story about his conversation. The only problem was that Barrow was killing a highway patrolman at the same time he was supposedly talking to Proctor. Oops.
The legendary reporter and editor Blackie Sherrod remembered his colorful old friend in the pages of D Magazine in 1975. Sherrod’s piece captures Dallas at a very different time, and his work is as much about our city as it is about Proctor—and why someone like him fit so perfectly here.

“A Legend in His Own Mind” is one of the 50 greatest stories we’ve published in the history of our magazine, and we’re highlighting it again today.

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History, Fascinating PeopleAkin vs. DahlDavid BauerApril, 1979

George Dahl was one of the architects who built Dallas. He certainly was the drive behind Fair Park, leading the planning and construction of 26 Art Deco-style buildings ahead of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition. The Neiman Marcus building downtown, the First National Bank tower, the Statler Hilton, the old Dallas Morning News ‘Rock of Truth’ building, the News’ new digs in the old library, WFAA’s low-slung modern structure next door—all Dahl.



Which is part of why this magazine commissioned the writer David Bauer in 1979 to follow the messy family saga that capped off the end of his life. The architect’s daughter and son-in-law filed a guardianship case against him, contending that he did not have the facilities to manage his businesses and finances.



Dahl decided to fight by way of a jury trial: “the private agony of a family would now go public,” as Bauer put it. It is one of the 50 greatest stories this magazine has published, and you can read it by clicking below.

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Sex & DrugsEcstasy & Agony at the Starck ClubRichard WestOctober, 1989

Most mentions of the Starck Club are slick with a sweaty layer of nostalgia. How Grace Jones opened the place. How you entered through shiny black doors into a countercultural touchstone that blew the minds of New Order. How the strange venue even attracted a Young Republicans event attended by George W. Bush. Weekday fundraisers with Ross Perot Sr., weekends with “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” And ecstasy. Lots and lots of ecstasy.



This week’s edition of our 50 greatest stories is “Ecstasy & Agony at the Starck Club,” the writer Richard West’s chronicling of the club’s collapse. Starck opened in 1984 under a Woodall Rodgers overpass, near the West End, and quickly became the epicenter of ecstasy, (also known then as MDMA, and now as molly). It shuttered in July 1989, four years after the Drug Enforcement Agency made MDMA illegal.



West chronicles the end of the club through the story of 23-year-old Rodney Glenn Kitchens, a kid from Waxahachie who moved with his family to Dallas and was reborn as Dino in the Starck Club. He and his co-conspirators flooded the space with MDMA, well past the point in which it was legal to sell.
The story, from October 1989, is not a nostalgia bomb. It’s a portrait of decline, how the party ends even if people aren’t ready to leave the unisex bathrooms. There isn’t a single mention of the club’s namesake, the exacting French architect Philipe Starck, nor any navel-gazing at how the club changed lives as it changed the city 20 years after the assassination of JFK.



And, he still manages to make it sound like fun. For a time.

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SportsHow to Strike It Rich and FamousBill PorterfieldMarch 1976

It won’t take long to read Bill Porterfield’s 1976 story about a Carrollton postman who briefly becomes a celebrity at a Grand Prairie bowling alley. Larry Bowman is our protagonist, a working man who spends two nights a week out with his buddies. One of those nights is low-stakes gambling. “The big night” is spent bowling in the citywide post office league. Those repetitions down the lane came in handy once Channel 8 launched a syndicated competition show called Bowling for Dollars.


The match-up was simple, and bizarre for the time. Each contestant was paired with a pen pal who watched from home but shared in whatever winnings the bowler takes home. Each bowler gets two chances at hitting back-to-back strikes. The jackpot grows with every failure. Well before he was named to the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association’s Hall of Fame, Verne Lundquist was WFAA’s sports director —and the host of this nascent gameshow, which aired on Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m.


You see where this is going. Bowman wins $2,540, which, today, would be a little over $14,000. That’s $3,000 more than 10 years ago, when we first highlighted this story. But this awesome little story, which ran on the backpage of our March 1976 issue, is about the journey, when local TV tried fun little things, and small victories meant big rewards.

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Romance, True Crime, High SocietyIs Priscilla Davis’ Story True?Tom StephensonMarch, 1977

In early 1977, this magazine asked: “Is Priscilla Davis’ story true?”


The murder trial for her husband, Cullen, was set to begin that February, when he would defend himself against allegations that he shot to death his 12-year-old stepdaughter and his estranged wife’s new live-in lover inside their mansion in Fort Worth. Priscilla was shot and wounded, too, and a family friend at the scene was left paralyzed.


Cullen and Priscilla Davis were well-known socialites, he a millionaire businessman, and she his bride. “As people tried to forget the killing of a 12-year-old girl,” Tom Stephenson wrote for us then, “the murder became not a whodunit, but a gleeful trespass into the private lives of Fort Worth’s rich black sheep.”


There would be numerous magazine articles, books, and one made-for-TV vehicle starring Heather Locklear. Stephenson’s take feels urgent and unsettled, a lurid portrait, yes, but also an attempt to peel apart the many narrative threads and find some semblance of truth. It begins and ends with Priscilla, first on her velvet couch and then on her newspaper-covered bed, trying to both explain herself and make sense of her new life.


Stephenson’s story is one of the 50 greatest we’ve published. It doesn’t proclaim to know the truth, but does lay out how the puzzle could make sense—and how it might not.

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Fascinating People, Biography & MemoirMax Goldblatt’s Last HurrahSkip HollandsworthJune, 1985

In 1985, a young Skip Hollandsworth followed a bright little light around Dallas. Max Goldblatt stood out among the pressed suits and the polite politics that still occupy City Hall 40 years later. A hardware store owner from Pleasant Grove, Goldblatt decided he could be mayor, and once he found an audience, his words “flared across the auditorium like sheet lightning.” (Among other things, those words argued for turning Ross Perot’s EDS office park into an actual city park.)


“Max Goldblatt’s Last Hurrah” follows his hopeful, doomed, push to be mayor of Dallas. He narrowly lost to Starke Taylor, the moneyed and buttoned-up incumbent, but he made a whole lot of noise “in spite of the deliberate, lordly way that Dallas elects its mayors.”


He was a three-term City Councilman when he launched his campaign, a decision, he said, was partly determined by the fact that “[N]ot a single person comes up to me on the streets and calls me a little bastard.” His priority policies read like a fever dream of what-ifs: pull out of DART and spend the money building a monorail around the city; direct traffic on Central Expressway south toward downtown in the mornings and north in the evenings; replace low-income housing projects with houses and a factory “so the poor will have a place to work”; purchase a helicopter with a giant magnet to scoop up abandoned vehicles off roadways to help traffic move.


They were not realistic. They were absurd. And fun. Sometimes an extreme is the way to push against the status quo. Goldblatt was “a man who, if he did not change the Dallas political landscape," Hollandsworth wrote, "at least added a couple of thorn bushes, [retaining] an unyielding belief that every man can be a hero.”

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SportsThe Most Amazing Bowling Story EverMichael J. MooneyJuly, 2012

Twelve years ago, Michael J. Mooney set out to write a story about someone who almost made history.


His subject was Bill Fong, a 48-year-old hobbyist bowler who came within a single pin (spoiler!) of rolling 36 consecutive strikes one night at the Plano Super Bowl. As Mooney wrote, a 300 isn’t anything spectacular. “If you count all the bowling alleys all over America, somebody somewhere bowls a 300 every night.” Now, a perfect series, three 300s in a row, that’s the thing that gets you on SportsCenter. Or, in the case of an 899, a 200-or-so-word blurb in the Dallas Morning News and one of the very best sports magazine stories ever written.


“An 899 is even more rare than a 900,” Mooney says today.


After hunting down that News story, Mooney, then a D staff writer, started calling Fong at home. No answer. Eventually, he called the bowling alley and asked whether he was there. He got Fong on the phone, introduced himself, and said he wanted to write a story about that night in 2010. “He thought that I was playing a prank on him," Mooney told me. "He thought that his friends had arranged me to call him and that I was playing some sort of elaborate trick on him.”


“The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever” was published two years after Fong came so close to perfection. Mooney wrote about that night like he was there: how the 10 pin wobbled before collapsing on his fifth roll, how Fong stood and watched the nine pin sputter on the 12th, how he switched balls on his second set and was called “crazy” by a man a few lanes down. Fong kept copious, detailed notes, equating the Plano Super Bowl to Tiger Woods’ home golf course. A video posted to YouTube helped color in the scenes.


This is Mooney’s favorite story he’s ever written.

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RomanceThe Stoneleigh, Heartbreak HotelA.C. GreeneNovember, 1977

The Stoneleigh Terrace Hotel in 1977 sat across from a pharmacy that had been turned into a bar and grill, the Stoneleigh P, a few years prior. The P seemed to be where the action was, populated by “a real cross-section of humanity,” as “an earnest-looking fellow at the bar” described to a Dallas Morning News reporter around that time.



Across the street was a different scene. Stoic, a little strange, sometimes sad. Two stone lions stared out at the 2900 block of Maple Avenue from beside the steps leading to the hotel. KSKY, the “station in the sky,” had broadcast from the penthouse for more than four decades, packing in 25-piece orchestras to record in the 1940s and hosting interviews with Bear Bryant and Lyndon Johnson in the 1950s.



And down on the ground level of the hotel was the Lions Den, the smoky hotel bar where the happy hour crowd started filing out around 7 p.m. and left the lovelorn divorcees to their scotch and sodas. The writer A.C. Greene spent weeks drinking alongside these men, then turned it into one of the greatest stories we’ve ever published: “Heartbreak Hotel.”



This is a story about the past, one of those great moment-in-time pieces that captures a different stretch of Maple than the one we have today (not to mention the version that’s coming). Greene was good at that sort of thing; he was a columnist at both the Dallas Times Herald and the Dallas Morning News, and was unofficially known as “the dean of Texas letters” upon his death in 2002.



This block of Maple is changing. The Stoneleigh P, which burned down in the early 1980s and was rebuilt, will move to the nondescript highway known as Lemmon Avenue after its landlord refused to renew its lease. It will replace a restaurant called Eggcellent. Maple Terrace, a historic location itself, will soon be a collection of expensive boutique office and residential space. Uchi is doing good business down the block, and Nick and Sam’s is seemingly always humming.



Cities change. Maple already looks radically different than it did when Greene was chatting up divorcées, and the departure of the Stoneleigh P will buff away even more history. But those two stone lions out front remain, watching the buildings and people come and go, go and come.

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High SocietyWhy Hockaday Girls Are DifferentPrudence MackintoshJune 1978

The Hockaday School gave its first instructions 110 years ago to 10 students in a small house off Haskell Avenue. Its matriarch, Miss Ela Hockaday, set about creating something new in Dallas, a college preparatory program for the daughters of some of Dallas “most powerful civic leaders.”


Today, it has the highest endowment of all private schools in Texas. In 1978, the writer and former Hockaday teacher Prudence Mackintosh stashed her chalk and picked up her pen to trace how the school’s long legacy lingered in its halls. The story remains relevant today.

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Biography & MemoirYou Can Go Home AgainNancy NicholsAugust 2012

In 2011, Nancy Nichols, then D Magazine’s dining critic, got personal in our pages. Newly single and the proud owner of 2.5 pounds of Costco almonds, Nancy decided to move in with her mother. She sold her home near Bachman Creek and settled into her mom’s near Preston Center, which they soon began calling Grey Gardens. Big and Little Edie, scaring family members with Christmas gifts of old pill bottles and pantyhose, watching TV, sipping gin and tonics, sharing dog walking duties, putting Netflix DVDs back in their sleeves, (Remember that?).



“You Can Go Home Again” is one of the 50 greatest stories that has run in this magazine. It’s one of those beautiful essays that are never more perfect as when they are published in a magazine, a chance to reflect on your own life and family as you learn about someone else’s, tears and laughter and all. We don’t want to spoil it, so we’ll leave you to it. We need to go call Mom.

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