For Fans With Texas-Size Appetites By SAM SIFTON

January 31, 2011
For Fans With Texas-Size Appetites By SAM SIFTON
ARLINGTON, Tex. — The faithful have started to arrive in this drab, featureless city a little closer to Fort Worth than to Dallas. They have come sweat-panted and reverent to stand along Collins Street to photograph Cowboys Stadium, to walk the sidewalk surrounding its $1.2 billion form.

The building rises up out of the immense rolling prairie as if raised by supplicants to the higher power of football, capitalism and Texas, a silver biscuit large enough that were the Statue of Liberty to be erected inside it, the torch would barely blacken the retractable roof. On Sunday it will be the stage for the Super Bowl between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

All over the city and region parking lots are being expanded or resurfaced in anticipation. Landscapers trim bushes and trees, plant flowers. Men repair streetlights and potholes along Interstate 30, the corridor that links Fort Worth to Dallas. The odor of fresh paint fills the hallways of local hotels. Enforcement of a new anti-panhandling law has been stepped up.

And from White Settlement in the west to Deep Ellum in the east — an area of north Texas that is 9,000 square miles in all — local restaurants and bars are getting ready for a rush of business.

I was part of the advance guard, a special-teams rookie sent out to feed. For four days I did so, up and down the economic ladder. I stood in for forthcoming Wisconsinites and Pennsylvanians with a taste for cheese or sausage, for media hounds, sex workers and all those who follow the money that comes with a Super Bowl game.

There was plenty to cheer. I found excellent tacos, ate glazed quail at the Ritz, stood in an all-male line of Fort Worth barbecue hounds. I followed in the footsteps of Roosevelt at the Original Mexican Eats Cafe in Fort Worth, and in those of George W. Bush at Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse in the shadow of the Southwestern Medical Center of the University of Texas.

There were double-breakfast mornings followed by quadruple-lunch afternoons, followed by dinners and more dinners still.

I had a meal at Bolsa, an art house hangout in the city’s Oak Cliff neighborhood with a grand hamburger, decent pizzas and an ambitious cocktail list, and another in a grim little barroom in the Sheraton here, just down the road from Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, across from the Six Flags Over Texas amusement park. I took in the sight of Tim Love’s Lonesome Dove restaurant near the Fort Worth Stockyards (wild boar ribs!), ate a cheeseburger loaded down with onions and jalapeño at Kincaid’s and put more than 300 miles on the odometer of a truck built right here at the G.M. plant, looking for places to eat.

One of the best was Nonna, a trattoria in Dallas that is across the street from a Whole Foods market. The restaurant, with its Italian menu, excellent wine list and cosmopolitan service style, serves as a clubhouse for some of Dallas’s most influential citizens. (Jerry Jones, the owner of the Cowboys, was there the other night in black suit and well-polished black cowboy boots, walking the dining room and shaking hands. “I used to think I could only really get excited about Dallas playing a football game,” he drawled. “But this is pretty great.”)

They wave across the spare dining room while eating sweet fried oysters and baby artichokes bathed in fiery Calabrian chili butter, and devour plates of elegant pasta with sea urchin. A cut of firm Petrale sole can follow, a Pacific flounder served crisp from the wood oven and paired with Dungeness crab and a tangle of spinach. It is a balm for anyone just in from the airport with a crick in his neck and the feeling that it is slightly insane to travel great distances just to watch television commercials on the 60-yard high-definition screen Jones installed in the middle of his stadium.

Robb Walsh, a Texas food authority who recently helped found Foodways Texas, a group devoted to the preservation of the state’s food culture, suggested another remedy: Babe’s Chicken Dinner House, in Roanoke, a short drive from the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. (“Gateway to Super Bowl XLV,” read the signs there.)

Babe’s is a family business with restaurants across north Texas. But the Roanoke location is the original and, Walsh says, the best, a restaurant founded in 1993 in a barn of a room that might have served as a stage set for “Friday Night Lights.”

Only two entrees are served. You can get chicken fried steak or you can get fried chicken. (Get both, and see your doctor when you get home.) The C.F.S., as chicken fried steak is known among the local food maniacs, is a wide plank of pounded, floured and fried beef, served with an immense bowl of peppery cream gravy on the side. The cognoscenti do not pour this over their meat, but instead dip bites into it as they go along. “You don’t want anything congealing,” Walsh said.

New York has nothing to compare with the excellence of Babe’s fried chicken. It has a shatteringly crisp and salty exterior, not at all greasy, that gives way to meat of amazing juiciness in both breast and thigh.

With these come bowls of creamy corn, buttery mashed potatoes, biscuits and as much sweet tea as you can handle. (All meals begin with a regrettable green salad.) For dessert, spread some of the salted Plugrá butter that is on each table onto a biscuit, then drizzle sorghum syrup over the top. Whoa.

Discussion of where you can get the best barbecue in the Dallas-Fort Worth area can be pitched. Many will tell you that you cannot get it at all, that you need to drive south toward Austin and Lockhart if you want brisket, beef ribs, beans.

The dry, flavorless brisket at the original Sonny Bryan’s in Dallas makes a strong argument that this is true, and the meat at Angelo’s in Fort Worth does not mount much of a defense either. (Still, both restaurants are worth a visit simply to see. They were founded in 1958, and appear to have been placed in smoke-fragrant amber.)

Daniel Vaughn, a Dallas architect and self-professed prophet of smoked meat who blogs as the BBQ Snob, believes the city can hold its own. A meal at Smoke, the chef Tim Byres’s haute barbecue restaurant, would seem to back him up, at least on the brisket front.

By insistent text message, Vaughn sent me to Mac’s, a quiet Dallas lunch spot in a low-slung brick building on Main Street, not far from the interstate. Billy McDonald runs the show there, and has for more than 30 years, after taking over the business from his father, who started it in 1955. Brisket, pork ribs, ham, turkey, jalapeño-spiked sausages and kielbasa are all available, smoked over the green hickory McDonald keeps stacked out back, and which keeps his large oven running 24 hours a day.

The brisket is hugely flavorful, with a rich crust and a melting interior. The ribs — “dirty old things,” McDonald called them — are sweet. His kielbasa will be manna for some number of Pittsburgh fans used to the flavors of Eastern Europe. But it is the moist and smoky turkey that astonishes.

There are arguments here about tacos, as well. For some, the best come from the stand inside the Fuel City station on Industrial Drive in Dallas, a business perched almost on the banks of the flood plains of the Trinity River. Corn tortillas filled with picadillo or barbacoa are favorites, slathered with hot sauce and covered with onions and cilantro, and eaten in the parking lot as traffic screams by.

Better, though, is Fuel Town 2, a Texaco station on Inwood Road practically under the Stemmons Freeway, a short drive from the airport at Dallas Love Field. The barbacoa is less greasy than at the competitors, full of flavor, and the tortillas warmer, fresher, tasting more emphatically of corn. Served with lemons, cilantro, grilled onion and whole jalapeño, with a chunky red salsa, a taco here may be the perfect Dallas snack food. And at $1.50, a good value, too.

You’ll spend more at Fearing’s, the chef and restaurateur Dean Fearing’s comfortable and excellent flagship establishment in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in the Uptown region of Dallas. Maple-soaked buffalo tenderloin runs $46, with jalapeño grits, a butternut squash taquito and a tangle of greens. The glazed quail, a rich and buttery appetizer-size bird, is $18.

It is terrific eating all the same (get the deep-fried apple pies for dessert). And Fearing is a constant and ebullient presence in the dining room, the face of a prideful city. Those who have come to the Super Bowl will not mind the prices, he said.

Tickets to Super Bowl XLV have a face value of $600 to $1,200. More than 100,000 people are expected to attend, according to N.F.L. officials. The economic impact on the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan region alone, they say, is expected to be more than $600 million.

“It’s great,” Fearing said, laughing. “I can double the minimum check and get people to pay in advance. Hey, I’m in the black for February already.”