Dallas Does Dallas

[Cheesesteak]

Dallas Does Dallas

March 25, 2007 - The New York Times - By MIMI SWARTZ

There is a statue in the Nasher Sculpture Center in downtown Dallas that seems particularly fitting for this particular city. Called “The Age of Bronze,” it is by Rodin and happens to be the oldest piece in the collection, a life-size, perfectly formed male nude in a pose that is both pensive and slightly pained. It is supposed to depict, according to the director of the museum, Steven A. Nash, “the dawning of a new age of self-awareness, or self-consciousness.” Distinguishing between the two has long been a psychic struggle here, though the unqualified success of the Nasher itself — a gift to Dallas from the shopping-mall magnate and local philanthropist Raymond D. Nasher, housed in a flawless, quietly self-confident building by Renzo Piano — suggests that Dallas might finally be getting there. The city seems willing to throw off its long-held infatuation with glitz and glamour, while remaining obsessed with maintaining a reputation for impeccable, indisputable good taste.

As Mayor Laura Miller put it in “Dallas: Where Dreams Come True,” a self-congratulatory brochure, “Dallas is, once again, in the midst of a new beginning — a magnificent renaissance.” These days, you can’t visit the city without someone buttonholing you to chant a mantra of big-time architecture: a new opera center by Norman Foster, a new theater by Rem Koolhaas, a proposed bridge spanning the Trinity River by Santiago Calatrava. These buildings will take their place alongside a Latino Cultural Center by Ricardo Legorreta, a symphony hall by I. M. Pei, Philip Johnson’s Crescent Court complex and a new development by Ross Perot Jr., near the American Airlines basketball arena, which looks like something out of “Blade Runner” on a sunny day. And three of the city’s biggest art patrons — the Hoffman, Rachofsky and Rose families — have donated their world-class contemporary collections to the once struggling Dallas Museum of Art. “You can’t believe you’re in Dallas!” a friend of mine and longtime resident said.

So what if, last year, The Dallas Morning News issued a bleak report on the state of crime, schools and growth? (Sample text: “Dallas calls itself ‘the city that works.’ Dallas is wrong.”) The city’s natural optimism dominates in the enormous cranes that bob and weave all over the city center, promising a new Ritz-Carlton, a new Mandarin Oriental and assorted high-rise luxury condos. Only the new W hotel, with a 25-foot mobile of tiny toy cowboys, cowgirls, mustangs and cows, seems interested in honoring the past. Dallas these days wants to be seen as a sophisticated destination for art, culture and, of course, business.

Maybe, then, it wasn’t so shocking that a cadre of Southern Methodist University professors protested the location of the George W. Bush presidential library on campus. But few who’ve been around Texas for any length of time can’t help but be surprised that Dallas has learned to stop snubbing Fort Worth, its more secure and deeply resented cousin, so that the two cities can join forces in creating one whopping destination for art and architecture fans. As the Morning News architecture critic David Dillon told me, “The city is really coming into its own.” Particularly when considered with Louis Kahn’s Kimbell and Tadao Ando’s Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Dallas is, in a way, he said, “a place you can’t not go.”

In other words, you really can’t associate Dallas with big, brassy blondes or J. R. Ewing anymore, much less with Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. Nor can you equate it with the stuffy, post-oil-bust, shame-cycle city of the late 1980s and ’90s. Dallas hasn’t lost its passion for getting it right — this is still a city where a fashion stylist can be described in a news story, without irony, as an “avowed minimalist” — but the earnestness that can easily be mistaken for pretension has softened. “It’s learning to loosen up,” Dillon said, with just a hint of doubt in his voice.

I lived in Dallas from 1988 to 1991, on a street called Mercedes, which always struck me, and anyone else familiar with Dallas’s ambitions, as fitting. I was newly married to a busy husband, had a job that encouraged travel, and wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about settling in. Texans split hairs about the state’s major cities in a way outsiders do not. I am from San Antonio and had been living in Austin and, before that, Houston. Dallas had always seemed to me too Midwestern, too conservative and far too orderly and uptight. Still, I fell in love with the tiny brick bungalow we bought in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood and taught myself to be patient with our 90-something neighbor, who told us she had ridden in covered wagons. My husband and I contented ourselves with eating square-shaped pizza in the dark, ’40s-era dining room at Campisi’s and the mealy corn dogs at the state fair; we inspected the assassination site and checked out Southfork. In other words, we struck a pose that we were in Dallas but not of Dallas, though on special occasions we made forays to the brooding opulence of the Mansion on Turtle Creek or the chic Routh Street Café (now closed), where the chefs Dean Fearing and Stephan Pyles created New Southwestern concoctions like lobster tacos with jicama salad or catfish mousse with crayfish sauce.

In my spare time, I shopped. I do not mean that every once in a while I ventured into the original Neiman Marcus downtown or made the monthly pilgrimage to the antiques sale at Fair Park. I mean that Dallas unleashed in me a near constant mania to discover my best (looking) self. Even 20 years ago, the ways to do so in Dallas were myriad. I hate to count the days I wandered, in my flower-girl garb, from the downtown Neiman’s to the Stanley Korshak at the Crescent Court, trying on lipsticks, blush and designer clothes I couldn’t possibly afford, helped along by saleswomen who spoke to me kindly and treated me gently, like I was a hopeless refugee from the Planet of Terrible Taste. I bought a Perry Ellis gown on sale for what was then a breathtaking $300 at NorthPark Center and exchanged a wink with Calvin Klein at the Highland Park Village shopping center when he appeared for a trunk show at his first free-standing eponymous store.

As they say, when in Rome. Yes, there were major cultural institutions in town, but I understood then as I understand now that the real works of art in Dallas are those created and inspired by the retailers, particularly Stanley Marcus, whose spirit remains as venerated in Dallas as the Buddha’s in Tibet. At the heart of it all — this zeal for glamour and sophistication, a supreme faith in the transcendent power of surfaces — is a Texan’s pride and a Texan’s insecurity: you don’t leave the house without looking your best, because you never know whom you might see, and who might want to find you lacking. (It isn’t just the Cowboys who know that the best defense is a good offense.)

In other words, I made my peace with Dallas on Dallas’s terms. I know in retrospect that there were plenty of Dallas residents who left their houses without being properly turned out, who took their kids to Little League and soccer practice instead of shopping malls. But I wasn’t one of them. I had succumbed to the local fever, and it didn’t break the day my husband came home and asked how I’d feel about moving back to Houston. It was only months later, after I’d caught our new Houston neighbors snickering at my color-coordinated linens, my floral arrangement and my chicken salad with too many neo-Southwestern ingredients, that I was cured. I was way south of the Trinity again, and it was time to let go.

I hadn’t been to Dallas for any length of time when I visited recently, and my first indication that things had changed was when I spied the jewelry being raffled off at the Nasher Sculpture Center’s New Year’s Eve benefit. The stones on the white gold necklace were not small by any standard — the piece was billed in the party program as “a stunning 2 1/2-carat diamond necklace” valued at $5,900 — but it didn’t look like something J. R. Ewing or, for that matter, H. L. Hunt would have given any self-respecting mistress. It was understated. (This was a town, after all, where a father hired a three-ring circus complete with elephants for his daughter’s debutante party, long before MTV’s “My Super Sweet 16.”) The inside of the Nasher party tent looked like something from the Snow Queen — all shimmering silver and snowy white. The dinner chairwoman Heidi Dillon wore big blond hair with her silver sequined gown, but her young son was also in attendance, in a tux and matching silver sneakers, which dialed the whole thing back a bit. Some of the male guests weren’t even in black tie, another sign that the city’s days of trying too hard were perhaps numbered.

If anything was missing from the Dallas I remembered, it was that. Earlier, my husband and I had checked into the boutique Hotel ZaZa, just across the freeway from the city’s arts district. Boutique hotels speak to the Dallas soul — they’re trendy and exclusive — but the ZaZa also refuses to take itself too seriously. It is like a cross between a villa in Cannes, a West Hollywood hot spot and a zendo. There is a sun-washed pool in designer-approved Mediterranean hues; theme suites (the Rock Star, the Last Czar, the Crouching Tiger), some of which are bigger than my 2,000-square-foot home; moodily darkened hallways decorated, this being fashion-crazed Dallas, with Helmut Newton photographs; and pink thong underwear inscribed with the hotel’s name available for purchase from a glass case in the lobby. (Bible Belt Dallas always had a thing for illicit sex.)

Our non-themed room had the requisite flat-screen TV and a frosted-glass window between the bedroom and shower with an inscription debatably but frequently attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson about success (“To leave the world a bit better / whether by a healthy child, / a garden patch / or a redeemed social condition, / . . . This is to have success”). We had a terrific view of guests arriving and departing in their Porsches, Hummers and BMWs, burdened with shopping bags from Neiman’s, Barneys, etc., and I wondered whether the hotel’s designers had indulged a taste for irony not commonly associated with Dallas. Then I found the tooth whitener for sale on the minibar, and remembered where I was.

Maybe it was out of a desire for preemptive serenity that we had dined the night before at York Street. Dallas has always been a wonderful food town, somewhat surprising in a place where well-cut clothing is de rigueur. (Dean Fearing’s departure from the Mansion to create his own restaurant in the new Ritz-Carlton was treated in Dallas with the gravity of a Cold War defection.) The décor of a restaurant here is almost as important as its food: an impressive, high-end place like Local is so severely spare it approaches self-parody, while the Latin homestyle La Duni has expensive toiletries and a wide-screen TV in the restroom. On my visit, the latter was tuned to the Cowboys game.

But maybe it is indicative of the city’s semi-relaxation that York Street, its best restaurant, is tucked into a tiny space in the cozy east Dallas neighborhood known as Lakewood. We arrived straight from the highway, and no one looked askance at our casual attire; the room was full of happy diners of every sociological-economic-ethnic stripe, a vast change from two decades ago, when the only people in the city’s best restaurants were overdressed and white. There were social rituals here, but gracious ones: the manager brought us tiny sips of sherry, tangy olives and warmed towels by way of greeting. From the chef Sharon Hage’s simple, market-fresh menu, we enjoyed a sprightly parsnip and truffle soup, tender pork chops and roast chicken, along with homemade gingersnap ice cream. Everyone seemed to know everyone else — you almost expected to see plates passed from table to table. Because we had arrived late, my husband missed out on his first choice, a monkfish di Parma. “Call ahead next time and we’ll be sure to have it for you,” our waiter said, wishing us good night. Whether this was the new new Dallas or a Dallas I had never bothered to know, it was nice to feel so at home.

There is always something disorienting about returning as a visitor to a place you used to live, and this trip was no different. There was a part of me that marveled at all the changes in Dallas: the new light-rail system that ran by our old house, the new Uptown/West Village area, complete with low-rise condos, sleek restaurants and coffee houses, all in an area comprising no more than six square blocks. (“Dallas has discovered the pedestrian,” cracked my friend Skip, a longtime Dallasite.) Even the entrance ramps on the Central Expressway had been improved, meaning drivers could merge without the acceleration skills and/or the death wish of Evel Knievel.

Even so, I approached my sentimental favorite, NorthPark Center, with trepidation. I shouldn’t have worried: the Nasher family artwork collection, including Andy Warhol, Jim Dine and Frank Stella, was still showing Neiman’s in its best light, along with newer stores like Barneys New York, Nordstrom, Oscar de la Renta and Intermix. (Khajak Keledjian, a co-owner of Intermix, used to watch “Dallas” as a kid in Beirut, so when it came time to expand, he had a soft spot for Texas.) I was greeted like a long-lost relation. Way back in the ’60s, Joan Didion described a woman she had met in Dallas who was “charming and attractive” and “accustomed to the hospitality and hypersensitivity of Texas.” That’s still true at NorthPark, and it’s still true of the city at large: Dallas needs to be appreciated by the larger world, a characteristic that will always separate it from bigger, burlier American cities.

At the same time, few big cities lavish so much attention on its wealthiest citizens. It wasn’t surprising to me, for instance, that Whole Foods Market chose to improve its North Dallas store by adding both a concierge and a 4,500-square-foot wellness spa. Likewise, to the south at Forty Five Ten, Dallas’s toniest lifestyle emporium — Dries Van Noten, Givenchy, Marni — the ambience is customized for the knowledgeable, if casual, rich. “We’re trying to do something very chic but very friendly,” the co-owner Brian Bolke told me. “Our staff wears flip-flops in the summer.”

This is so not Dallas,” said Darren, the barista at the Nodding Dog cafe in Oak Cliff. When I asked why this old suburb shouldn’t be considered a part of Dallas, he explained that it was “funky, laid-back and not pretentious.” This is the way Oak Cliff plays down-home Brooklyn (okay, the Brooklyn of 20 years ago) to Dallas’s high-toned Manhattan: despite several promised rebirths — and this one seems to be taking — it has retained and even improved upon its scruffy, laissez-faire spirit. A separate city until 1903, it has had its issues with crime and poverty; the bank robber Clyde Barrow is buried in Oak Cliff and Lee Harvey Oswald lived here. Like Brooklyn, Oak Cliff has opened its heart to all comers, from poor and middle-class African-Americans to gays to Hispanic immigrants. Because the area possesses some of the city’s best housing stock, it’s also become a seductive venue for gentrifiers. In Kessler Park, there are mansions almost as fine as any on Dallas’s tony Swift Avenue and tiny turreted brick cottages similar to those in Lakewood. Oak Cliff even has its very own boutique hotel, the Belmont, which has rooms with deep soaking tubs and Kiehl’s bath products.

The part of Oak Cliff that has best resolved the Dallas/not Dallas conundrum, however, is the Bishop Arts District, a collection of small restored shops and office buildings from the 1920s that includes the Nodding Dog. Oak Cliff was once the place where you could find the best chicken-fried steak on the planet, at the much-mourned Gennie’s Bishop Grill; now there is Hattie’s, which serves pulled pork over garlic grits and fried green tomatoes on white tablecloths with an accompanying wine list. Even more to the point is Tillman’s Roadhouse. Known for 14 years as Tillman’s Corner, it has recently received a makeover; the menu includes truffled popcorn and venison Frito pie, and the interior has damask walls, crystal chandeliers, carved deer heads and the occasional showing of “Giant” on the lounge wall. This is small-town Texas and, at the same time, a reasonable, updated and upgraded facsimile. Most of the people there looked happy to have it both ways.

Maybe that is the secret of this new new Dallas. For the first time it seems possible to have Rem Koolhaas and chicken-fried steak and Givenchy and flip-flops without the accompanying angst, that longtime local fear of being branded a hick by outsiders. If I needed more proof of this self-acceptance, I found it late on New Year’s Eve at the Nasher, when dessert was served and all the women got golden eggs topped with tiny rhinestones alongside their chocolate towers. In a hushed voice, the M.C. asked us not to crack the egg until he gave the signal. Then he explained: inside one of the eggs was a Bailey Banks & Biddle ring with no less than half a dozen round diamonds. “Please wait until we give the signal,” he begged the crowd, but just when he finished his plea, a whoop went up in the center of the room, because a 90-year-old patron, Betty Blake, had already cracked open her egg to find the ring.

“She’s a little hard of hearing,” someone near me said, but I didn’t believe it for a minute.

ESSENTIALS

HOTELS: The city’s two top in-town luxury properties, Rosewood’s Mansion on Turtle Creek (888-767-3966; www.mansiononturtlecreek.com; doubles from $295) and the Hotel Crescent Court (888-767-3966; www.crescent court.com; doubles from $275), will be joined within a year by a new Ritz-Carlton (www.ritzcarlton.com) and a Mandarin Oriental (www.mandarin-oriental.com). For boutique-style options, consider the new W Dallas-Victory (877-822-0000; www.whotels.com; doubles from $239); the cozy, neighborhood Melrose Hotel (800-635-7673; www.melrosehoteldallas.com; doubles from $174); the Hotel ZaZa, with its glitzy interiors and busy bar scene (800-597-8399; www.hotelzaza.com; doubles from $259); or the Belmont Hotel, a former motor lodge in the city’s arts district (866-870-8010; www.belmontdallas.com; doubles from $179).

RESTAURANTS: Hattie’s Restaurant Homemade Southern fare. 418 North Bishop Ave.; (214) 942-7400; entrees $9 to $37. La Duni Great Latin homestyle sandwiches and salads. 4620 McKinney Ave., (214) 520-7300; 4264 Oak Lawn Ave., (214) 520-6888; entrees $8 to $24. Local Modern American cuisine. 2936 Elm St.; (214) 752-7500; entrees $28 to $38. Mia’s Popular restaurant dishing up Tex-Mex; brisket tacos are a must. 4322 Lemmon Ave.; (214) 526-1020; entrees $8 to $16. Nana Innovative cuisine with great views of the city, in the Hilton Anatole hotel. 2201 Stemmons Freeway; (214) 761-7470; entrees $29 to $52. Nodding Dog Casual coffee house. 500 North Bishop Ave.; (214) 941-1166. Tillman’s Roadhouse Creative regional cuisine. 324 West Seventh St.; (214) 942-0988; entrees $11 to $29. York Street A carefully sourced market menu and an unpredictable wine list make this a foodie favorite. 6047 Lewis St.; (214) 826-0968; entrees $25 to $35.

SHOPS: For casual window shopping, check out the antiques district on Industrial Boulevard and the smaller shops in the West Village neighborhood. NorthPark Center (8687 North Central Expressway; 214-361-6345) is the city’s ultimate luxury shopping mall. You’ll also find plenty to choose from at the 8,000-square-foot lifestyle store Forty Five Ten (4510 McKinney Ave.; 214-559-4510).

SIGHTS: Most of the cultural points of interest are concentrated in the Downtown Arts District. Be sure not to miss the Dallas Museum of Art (1717 North Harwood St.; 214-922-1200; www.dm-art.org), the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center (2301 Flora St.; 214-670-3600; www.meyersonsymphonycenter.com), the Nasher Sculpture Center (2001 Flora St; 214-242-5100; www.nashersculpturecenter.org) and the Latino Cultural Center (2600 Live Oak St.; 214-670-3320). In Fort Worth, essentials are the Kimbell Art Museum (3333 Camp Bowie Blvd.; 817-332-8451; www.kimbellart.org) and the Modern Art Museum (3200 Darnell St.; 817-738-9215; www.themodern.org).