The Twisted Root Burger Co

Waitin' on your order.

In Dallas, Texas, a tourist who ventures under the freeway flyovers and into Deep Ellum should proceed with caution. Deep Ellum is one of those run-down areas which is in the early stages of a nascent gentrification. One of those places that the guide books and the taxi drivers assure you is 'perfectly safe -- now'. The locals will tell you it's 'the center of all things cool and local in the city.' Yeah, OK. Just make sure you have the number of a reliable cab co to get outta there.

REALLY good burgers.

However, I encourage you to take the risk for the sake of eating at The Twisted Root Burger Co. Not only is it a very friendly joint, and excitingly quirky, you will also get to eat a SUPERB burger. Veggie if you wish. In fact, whatever you wish. In addition to their classic and exotic burger combos, you can 'build-your-own'. As they say on their website:

Three chefs, sick of eating frozen, tiny, and under-seasoned burgers, opened a real burger joint to make it the way they do at home. Fresh and seasoned meat, hand battered buttermilk fried stuff, fresh cut sweet potatoes, homemade pickles, Root Beer,  ice cream and even condiments… It’s like eating at our kitchen table!

They also say "IT'S SLAP-YO-MOMMA-GOOD" but I don't understand what that means, and I'm a bit afraid to enquire.

Make your selection.

Shabby-burger-chic decor.

Here's a sample of their menu:

The Spicy Goat – chipotle sauce, goat cheese & bacon 7.99
Bacon Bomb – 3 pieces of bacon & blue cheese 7.99
Ranch Hand – peppercorn ranch, bacon & swiss 7.99
The Lost Mexican – blue cheese & jalapeno 7.49
Lots-a-Shroom – mushroom, garlic & swiss 6.99
The Verde – green chili, guac & pepperjack 8.49
Wing Style – tangy buffalo sauce & blue cheese 7.49
The Philly – mushrooms, grilled onions, Cheese Whiz® 7.99
The Western – pepperjack, bacon, fried onion strings & jalapenos 8.99
Big Tex – cheddar, guac, fried onion strings & chipotle sauce 8.49
The Big German (aka The Dirk) - pretzel bun w/sauerkraut & swiss 7.49
Frito Bandito – Texas chili, guac, cheddar & Fritos® 8.99
Check the menu boards for Burger of the Month!
(Prices listed are for hamburger, turkey, or black bean. Upgrade to Buffalo or Game Meat for $4 more.)

Pick a peck of pickled peppers.

If that's not got you wanting to hie on over to Deep Ellum right away, there are other features of The Twisted Root that you should know about. For one thing, you can pick your own peck of pickled peppers from large jars on the counter. The folks at Twisted Root don't hand out mere boring table numbers - you could be called to collect your order a shout of "Elvis!" or by the dulcet strains of 'Clementine'. And you can bring your gun. Yes, really. As long as it's licensed. The sign says.

This is Texas, after all. And Deep Ellum.

It's Texas.

Where the magic happens.

Garage decor.

Some pics nicked from the Twisted Burger website.

Perot Museum of Nature & Science

Architects: Thom Mayne and the Culver City firm Morphosis

In a Dallas downtown stuffed full of individual architectural curiosities, the new Perot Museum of Nature & Science manages to stand out. It's impossible not to notice the cube with irregular surfaces and slashes of diagonal windows which flashes in the Texan sunlight.

Irregular surfaces

Diagonal windows

Here's the background:

Designed by 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis Architects, the building was conceived as a large cube floating over a landscaped plinth (or base) and is designed to inspire awareness of science through an immersive and interactive environment. It has a stone roof which features a landscape of drought-tolerant greenery inspired by Dallas surroundings. 

The building's design was conceived in collaboration with Dallas-based landscape architects, Talley Associates, the plinth is landscaped with a 1-acre rolling green roof consisting of rock and native drought-resistant grasses that reflects Texas' indigenous landscape and demonstrates a living system that will evolve naturally over time. By integrating architecture, nature and technology, the building's design demonstrates scientific principles and is used as a teaching tool that provides living examples of engineering, sustainability and technology at work. Building on the museum's commitment to resource conservation, the new building integrates a variety of sustainable strategies including a rainwater collection system that captures run-off water from the roof and parking lot, satisfying 74% of the museum's non-potable water needs and 100% of its irrigation needs.

The entry plaza

But not everyone has been impressed. The LA Times reviewer derided the edifice as a 'Trophy Building':

Trophy Buildings....One of the pricey, preening old breed opened recently in Dallas, stranded among surface parking lots across a wide freeway from the city's mirrored-glass skyline. The $185-million Perot Museum of Nature and Science, designed by Thom Mayne and the Culver City firm Morphosis, is a largely windowless crypt, a cube lifted dramatically above the streets around it and wrapped in puckered and striated precast concrete panels.
It is a thoroughly cynical piece of work, a building that uses a frenzy of architectural forms to endorse the idea that architecture, in the end, is mere decoration. Mayne's design appears to put innovative architecture on a literal pedestal — or a plinth, to be exact — while actually allowing it to become peripheral, noticeably separate from the heart of the museum and its galleries.
The building's apparent radicalism is tacked on, its braggadocio paper-thin. Like many of Mayne's recent buildings, it is a work of architecture without the courage of its convictions — convictions that are shouted, naturally, at top volume.
The museum, 170 feet tall, sits on a roughly 5-acre piece of land prominently visible from the highway that runs at its feet. The wide surface parking lot that serves it on the southwest is mostly for staff; members of the public park in a second lot, squeezed under the long concrete bar of a freeway onramp....The point is not that Morphosis wasn't given the job of designing the exhibits; that division of labor is common enough, and this is the firm's first museum project.
The point is that the complexity announced so loudly on the facade and in the entry sequence of the museum is never revisited elsewhere, to say nothing of being genuinely explored or extended.
The sensation will not be new to followers of Mayne's recent work. A similar approach is evident, in fainter terms, in both his Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Caltech and at his best-known Southern California building, the 2004 Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.
In each project he's put the architectural focus on the facade of the building and a single dramatic staircase. This skin-and-stair strategy then allows the client to make the rest of the building — every interior office or gallery — conventional at best and banal at worst.
A low point of the Dallas museum (funded in part by a $50-million gift from the adult children of H. Ross Perot and his wife, Margot) comes at one of the structure's higher points. The glass skin sheathing the escalator continues past the edge of the building and juts out into the sky, a formal gesture that gives the museum a bit of extra energy from afar but adds nothing inside.

Flashing....

Visitors approach

Entry

The museum was named in honor of Margot and Ross Perot as the result of a $50-million gift made by their adult children. The whole cost of $185-million was raised by public subscription enabling the museum to be built without incurring any debt or public funding.

Entry

Surprising

A cube

Dallas

I M Pei's Fountain Tower peeks through downtown Dallas

A recent visit to Dallas, Texas revealed that the city's tourist attractions are of an idiosyncratic, even peculiar, type: the death of JFK, the trial of Bonnie & Clyde, J R Ewing and Southfork Ranch, and the new George W Bush Presidential Library. Then there's the steaks, the beers and the cowboys.

But if these enticements aren't enough to attract you, or the rather empty and characterless streets of downtown Dallas don't appeal, might I suggest looking a little higher, or perhaps a little more closely, at the architectural gems embedded in an otherwise uninspiring cityscape? It seems that the rich folks of Dallas (and it's a place where that phrase really means something) like to collect architecture, with the result that the city has a cluster of superlative buildings by some very big names in modern architecture. I M Pei seems to have been quite a favourite. Many of the buildings bear the names of the provate donors - Dallas is quite a place for building public buildings from private purses.

Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House
Norman Foster & Partner, principal architect Spencer de Grey

Opera House - Norman Foster & Associates
The Annette and Harold Simmons Signature Glass Façade
wraps around the building - yep, donors for the glass facade, apparently

The bright red cap of the Opera House against the skyline

Renzo Piano - Nasher Sculpture Center

Dallas Symphony Center
The Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center (business partner of Ross Perot)
I M Pei
"It is conservative for reasons I no longer accept," he said in 2000.
"I feel that the hall doesn't fully represent what I would have liked to do. It was my first one."

Fountain Place - I M Pei

The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge

"At night, the place is even scarier but the damn thing does look
majestic as hell with the skyline in the backdrop so it might be
worth the risk of getting carjacked or murdered to come and visit.
I certainly did enjoy taking pictures of it and
 am still here to talk about it." (Yelp comment)

Perot Museum of Science & Nature

Museum Tower -  residential tower block
Scott Johnson of Johnson Fain

View of Dallas from Thanksgiving Tower

Dallas, the 3rd-most populous city in the U.S. state of Texas, is home to 262 high-rises,[1] 28 of which stand taller than 400 feet (122 m). The tallest building in the city is the 72-story Bank of America Plaza, which rises 921 feet (281 m) in Downtown Dallas and was completed in 1985. Read all about Dallas's highrises here.