EATING AROUND OUT TO LUNCH WITH NITEMAN

When he’s not eating East Texas hot links, Niteman earns his nom de musique as host of Niteman Calling, a raucous combination of rock, soul, and Newest Wave music, political commentary, and wild improvisatory humor on KNON (90.9 FM). The program used to take the airwaves on Saturday nights, but since The Lost Highway, the band Niteman fronts, started getting regular weekend work, the program has moved to Wednesdays from 7 to 9 p.m.

Niteman achieved his purchase on the local blue-eyed soul franchise in a roundabout fashion. After dropping out of Harvard to work as a community organizer for ACORN in Arkansas, he returned to Harvard to get his undergraduate degree in sociology and an MBA to boot. He originally came to Dallas to work for a development company. These days he works by day as a temporary for the City of Dallas because the job allows him the flexibility to pursue his musical career.

Niteman discovered East Texas hot links a couple of years ago while driving to Dallas from his ancestral home in Magnolia, Arkansas (where he was born Craig Orris Taylor twenty-eight years ago). “The first place I ever had hot links was in Mount Pleasant,” he says. “The first time, I didn’t even like them that much. But then about four months later woke up at 4 a.m. and had to have them. My friend Elmo and I were going to drive back to Mount Pleasant the next day, but then it occurred to us to check the Dallas phone book. We found a place called East Texas Hot Links, but they were disgustingly greasy there. Fortunately, we did strike up a conversation with a guy who told us the place to go for non-greasy hot links was Ponderosa Bar-B-Q. We walked in around midnight and people just started laughing at us-we were apparently the only white guys who’d walked in since dark.”

Midway through a plate of a dozen links, Niteman explains the appeal of the three-inch-long sausages: “The first one isn’t hot; it’s the cumulative effect. You want to order your hot links crispy, and what you want on the side are crackers or Wonder-style bread.”

Niteman is a repository of links lore. He remembers the near-yuppification of local links: “When Zanzibar opened, they were serving East Texas hot links, but the prices defeated the whole principle. It was something like $3 for three links.” Ponderosa’s, he notes approvingly, go for $3.50 per dozen.

Inspired by Ponderosa’s im-ported-from-Pittsburg, Texas hot links, Niteman once made a pilgrimage to the East Texas town that is to links fanciers what Mecca is to Moslems: “I went to Pittsburg on June 19th, and there were about forty people in line ahead of me at the best links place in town, all buying buckets of links. The second person ahead of me got the last links in the place.”

Discussing his fondness of Ponderosa Bar-B-Q with co-owner James Runnels, Niteman says: “It’s hard not to smile when you’re eating hot links. Yeah, when D called and asked me to pick my favorite place for lunch, it was either hot links here or a four-pound lobster at The Palm.”

Ponderosa Bar-B-Q, 3223 Pennsylvania. Telephone: 421-5387. Monday through Thursday 11 a.m. to midnight, Friday and Saturday II a.m to 2 a.m., Sunday noon to 10 p.m.



MARIANI’S MISSION



When I first met New York-based food writer John Mariani four years ago, he was a man with a mission: to put together a top-notch national dining guide. In May, Times Books will publish the 800-page result: Mariani’s Coast-to-Coast Dining Guide. Mariani recruited critics in fifty cities (I did the Dallas chapter) to select each city’s best bets in terms of edible options.

HITTING THE SALSA



Whether you call it salsa, Mexican hot sauce, or picante sauce, it’s one of the great pleas- ures in life for diners who can’t defer gratification. For fans of the Mexican-restaurant practice of set-ting out tostadas and salsa as a hunger-defuser who like to follow suit at home, there are two options. It’s a simple matter to make salsa from scratch. However, it’s an even simpler matter to open a jar. Choosing which bottled salsa is far from simple, though as I learned after a shopping expedition that netted thirty-four varieties of the stuff. With the help of my co-workers, I narrowed down the thirty-four to a trio of meri-torious options. There -was unanimity in rejecting most of the salsas (the most common flaws: extreme sweetness and heavy cumin content), but we couldn’t reach a consensus as to a single best salsa. Shotgun Willie’s Picante, in mild, medium hot, and hotter’n hell strengths, won favor for its vinegary zip and full-bodied con-sistency. Shotgun Willie’s was my favorite, but its faint-hearted detractors didn’t like its raciness. These wimps preferred Ro-Tel Picante Sauce and Pace Picante in its mild strength.