84 September 21 - 27, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER contents | shopping & services | Arts & entertAinment | Food & drink | sports & recreAtion and the willingness to explore a cuisine you didn’t know existed. 5755 Grandscape Blvd., The Colony 972-777-6770, windmills-usa.com Best Soft Serve Pure Milk & Honey The name of this hidden gem in Dallas’ Mockingbird Station is the first hint of what might be the creamiest soft serve in Texas. Pure Milk & Honey gets its name from the two star ingredients in its ice cream. Organic Texas milk sourced from a local dairy farm is sweetened with natural honey and churned fresh in-house. The result is a thick, ultra-creamy soft serve that melts on the tongue almost instantaneously. But the texture is just the first part of the allure. Standard flavors such as a honey lavender and creamy milk chocolate soft serve compete with seasonal flavors like a buttery roasted pecan. Get your ice cream swirled in a cup, lick it from a cone or even order it sandwiched between layers of Pure Milk & Honey’s signature honey ice cream cake. Any way you eat it, the texture is just as divine. 5321 E. Mockingbird Lane, No. 135 972-982-2385, puremilkandhoney.com Best TacoS and Ice cream Casa Del Bro You can’t have tacos without good ice cream, and you can’t have ice cream without good tacos. That’s what Casa Del Bro will tell you. Tacos here are rightfully lauded. Chile verde carnitas and spicy chicken tinga come topped with pineapple habanero or creamy jalapeño ranch. The menu is completely customizable with other entree options like burritos, quesadillas and nachos. But our biggest advice here: don’t fill yourself with mains. It’s what comes after that merits this place a spot on our list: some of the creamiest ice cream we’ve tried. Even the usual varieties like chocolate and vanilla are packed with fresh ingredients and flavors. Sink your tongue into house specials like a cookie butter flavor, made with a marshmallow-flavored cream base and studded with globs of gooey cookie butter. A Mexican chocolate comes with a spicy cinnamon flavor buried underneath. Come early, as they run out early. And we know why. 5444 FM 423, No. 100, Frisco 469-200-5570, casadelbro.com Best BoBa Tea Daddy Brown sugar milk, golden fruit teas and a creamy taro slush are just some of the specialty drinks you can find on Tea Daddy’s menu. But what sets the hidden gem apart from Texas’ oversaturated boba scene is not so much the drinks themselves; it’s more what happens at the bottom of the cup. Tea Daddy makes all of its boba fresh in-house so that it’s scooped hot into your drink. And while hot boba and iced drinks don’t seem like a particularly enthralling combination, Tea Daddy has proven otherwise. The tea shop’s iced, lightly sweetened teas provide a perfect background for hot, sugary tapioca pearls to melt inside. Order your beverage topped with a salted egg cream or cheese foam, both of which float on top and set the stage for an even creamier drink. Enjoy your boba in-store, then grab a few signature Tea Daddy egg tarts or tiramisu cakes for the road. Neither the food nor the drinks disappoint. 800 E. Arapaho Road, No. 105, Richardson 469-778-0106, facebook.com/ MissOkitchen Best SpanISh TapaS Sketches of Spain Sample Spanish delicacies like seared prawns, seafood paellas and ham croquettes — among others — right in the heart of Dallas. Located in the Bishops Art District, Sketches of Spain has made it its mission to bring authentic Spanish tapas and snacks to North Texas. Try the patatas bravas: a plate of crispy potato wedges garnished with a drizzle of spicy mayo. Piquillo peppers come stuffed with salted cod cream and drenched in a creamy tomato purée. A zucchini platter offers sautéed vegetables and seafood encased inside four blistered zucchini cups floating in a plate of tomato sauce. The local tapas bar also sells family-style paellas, priced by-the-head. Bring a big appetite, a group to share and some time to sample some of everything on the menu … tapa- style. 321 N. Zang Blvd. 214-484-6006, sketchesofspain.com Best pIe Shop Piefalootin Tracy Dowd of Garland looks to have mastered the fine art of pie crust-ing at her hole-in-the-wall bakery Piefalootin. Six-plus years of selling pies from her home and now her own bakery has led to the creation of drool-worthy pies. Over 23 different varieties of pie come in mildly clever names like the Chocolate EuphOREO, which is stacked high with layers of Oreo cookies buried under whipped chocolate cream. The Cinco de PIE-yo is served with the same chocolate cream but scooped atop a bed of spicy cinnamon-flavored brownies. Cherry, apple and peach fruit pies are available, too, depending on what’s in season. Buy a couple of slices for $8 each Under the Influence Kathy Tran What Ales You BrIan Brown (@BeerInBIgd) keepS TaBS on north TexaS’ ever-growIng and evolvIng crafT BrewerIeS. B rian Brown, the man behind the popular craft-brewing website Beer in Big D (beerin- bigd.com), has plenty to write about these days. The region he focuses on, ranging from the Red River to counties just south of Dallas, is now home to around 90 craft breweries, and plans are in the works to add dozens more. The history of small brewers and their long, bitter fight against politically entrenched alcohol distributors and cor- porate giants has been detailed else- where — for instance, in Brown and coauthor Paul Hightower’s book North Texas Beer: A Full-Bodied History of Brewing in Dallas, Fort Worth and Be- yond. Since the Legislature allowed small breweries to both open taprooms and sell their beer outside of their own premises in 2013, and permitted them to sell beer to go in 2019, the taps have been opened wide for craft beer at last. Brown, a certified beer judge who started his Beer in Big D blog in 2013, is happy about that, naturally. Well, mostly happy, it seems. Talking with Brown, one gets the sense that he’s a little wistful for Texas craft brewing’s salad days, when a small group of beer lovers decided they wanted to try their hands at craft brewing and had to fight like the devil to win that right from lawmakers in Austin. “I’d kind of gotten interested in the community of it,” Brown says of his start in writing about craft beer. “It kind of brought back the whole pub culture.” In the 19th century, brewing beer lo- cally in small batches was a side hustle for immigrant German farmers and shopkeepers. Biergartens flourished and virtually every small town in Texas had its local brews. Dallas had Mayer’s Garden, a massive entertainment com- plex built in 1881 offering live music nightly, a restaurant, vaudeville acts, a zoo, a shooting gallery and beer, beer, beer in a family-friendly garden where all classes mingled. Prohibition and the arrival of giant corporate breweries in the mid-20th century eventually wiped out the small brewers and biergartens, but growing interest in home-brewing in ’90s sparked a revival of small-batch brew- ing. Early on in the craft beer revival, the brewers all knew and supported one an- other, banding together in Austin to gain a seat at the bar. When a brewer held an event to celebrate the release of a new beer, other brewers would come to show support. Today, Brown says, he’ll visit taprooms to try a release and never meet the person who brewed it. He seldom sees brewers mingling at one another’s events these days. It’s the price of success, one supposes. Tastes have changed, too. Younger drinkers want a variety drinks — wine, ci- der, cocktails — along with food and en- tertainment. To compete, brewers need their customers to linger and spend. “You want to be a one-stop-shop to- day,” Brown says. “You want to have beer, beer to go. You want to have a food option. … The younger kids are into canned cocktails and stuff. So, tap- rooms are introducing their owned la- beled whiskey. … These days are about diversifying.” In that way, he says, things have come full circle. So, who knows? Maybe someday we’ll all mingle again to sip suds, check out the lions and catch a vaudeville act. There are certainly worse futures to look forward to. (But a beer garden/shooting range? Let’s give that one a little more thought.) - PATRICK WILLIAMS
