EDITOR’S PAGE

YOU CAN WRITE anything you want about people’s race, religion, or their ideology and rarely get a response, but, as we’ve learned over the years at this magazine, you bring them out of the woodwork when you start tampering with their tacos, messing with their mushrooms, or prying into their pasta. People in Dallas take their food very seriously.

Surveys taken by virtually every major city magazine in the nation show that dining reviews are the number one readership item, ranking well above politics, tax issues, public education, pollution, nuclear parity, Marxism in Central America, the energy crisis, inflation, and all those other issues that seem to become so ancillary when it’s time to look for a good cheeseburger.

I could have saved a lot of city magazine editors the money they spent on readership surveys, of course, by just letting them read a little of my mail. It is very apparent to me that the first thing a person does when he starts thumbing through a D Magazine at the newsstand is turn straight to the dining reviews and look for a good place to eat. If we steer him to a place he likes, we have usually made a friend for life. If we sent him to a place that he finds less than satisfactory, we are likely to get a cheerful little correspondence like this:

“Dear Sir… You are dead wrong about the egg rolls at Peking Mandarin Szechuan Hunan. They were greasy and tasteless. So is your reviewer. I am canceling my subscription and will never read your cheap rag again. I wish you all the bad fortune in the world.”

That, with the exception of the name of the restaurant, is literally what one of our readers wrote about a recent dining review. Not all the comments we receive are that visceral, but the fact is that our readers keep us constantly reminded about their interest in food.

Food is the one area in which everyone considers himself an expert. A majority of the people in this city don’t even know the name of the current mayor. (A survey we did in June showed upwards of 60 per cent of Dallasites had never heard of Jack Evans.) But everyone in the city has a very definite opinion about one subject: food. That’s one of the reasons why this magazine has traditionally placed a heavy emphasis on dining reviews.

When we set out to write a dining review, the emphasis is honesty to our readers. We won’t try to tell you that our taste is better than yours or that we know more about food than any member of our reading audience. That would be more than pretentious. It would be absurd. What we do promise is that our dining reviews will be honest. If we don’t like what we eat, we’ll tell you. And if you read in D Magazine that something is good, you know that what you are reading is not because the restaurateur is a nice guy – or one of our advertisers. One of the most difficult jobs in the city, incidentally, belongs to the advertising representative who sells restaurant advertising for this magazine. She knows that at the very moment she has signed a restaurant owner to an ad contract, our reviewers may be writing a column saying his food is horrible. That’s because our reviewers are intentionally oblivious to the desires of our restaurant advertisers. Our allegiance is to you, our readers.

The most frequent complaint we get when someone disagrees with our taste in dining is this: “How can you say Uncle Bob’s Falafel-on-a-Stick is bad? The place is always crowded.” By that logic, of course, McDonald’s is unequivocally the best restaurant in Dallas. We don’t care how good a restaurant owner is at marketing. We care about what the food tastes like. And that’s all we care about when we set out to review a restaurant.

It is with that basic attitude that we approached this month’s cover story “Cheap Eats: 44 Five-Dollar Feasts and Where to Find Them.” We dispatched a group of reviewers, under the direction of Departments Editor Elizabeth Logan, to perform a basic, if sometimes difficult, task. Find a good meal for under $5. What we printed in the article is a compendium of the culinary experiences of about a dozen staff members, some of them experienced food reviewers, some of them totally inexperienced. They all shared what you and I share: They have very definite opinions about what constitutes a good meal. We sought quality and value, attempting to check virtually all the major inexpensive food outlets while at the same time looking for out-of-the-way places that would make good discoveries for our readers. We think our reviewers’ collective enterprise is one of the best dining articles we’ve ever published.

BOOM TOWN

ON BELT LINE

The incredible impact the restaurant industry has on other components of the economy is illustrated no better at any place in the world than in Addison. I remember getting a memo three years ago from the then editor of this magazine, Wick Allison: “Word has it that the liquor sales referendum that passed in Addison recently is going to turn Belt Line Road into a restaurant strip. Chili’s is going to open out there, as well as Steak and Ale. Belt Line could turn into another Greenville Avenue.”

That turned out to be the understatement of the year. In terms of the sheer level of commeice, Addison has passed Greenville as though it were standing still. What happened after the city went wet was like a scene out of a developer’s dream. The restaurant industry, realizing Addison was within easy driving distance of literally hundreds of thousands of affluent people who live in bone-dry North Dallas, came to Addison in droves. The shopping center planners, realizing the restaurants would bring thousands of people with money in their pockets to Addison, began putting in some of the classiest retail facilities in the state. Office buildings followed. Now Addison is a monument to this area’s economic vitality. When the voters in Piano recently turned down a liquor referendum, I doubt if anyone was happier than the people who own and manage the commercial gold mine in Ad-dison. For a full report on what happened to Addison in Wonderland, turn to “The City” on page 46.



MORE AWARDS

I’m proud to announce that for the second time in the history of D Magazine,we’ve won the Clarion Award, the national award of an organization calledWomen in Communications, Inc. The entire September 1980 issue of D won theaward for its coverage of the crisis inpublic education in our city. The issue,”This Chaos Must End,” was judged thebest in the nation in the community servicedivision of the competition. Winners inother divisions were Newsweek and theDetroit News Magazine.