This small casual upscale chain from Iowa with clean, fresh food is a big culinary mutt of influences including Mexican, Italian, Asian, and New American. It's all generated from a two-story kitchen consuming roughly half of the restaurant's 17,500 square feet, and it prepares everything from scratch including breads and pasta. Service is efficient and briskly gracious. It isn't the best food on the face of the metroplex, but the dishes are all priced in 99-cent fractions, so the menu has that Ben Franklin dime store feel to it.

There are a lot of bad apple tarts out there: sticky, dry, old and washed-out. It's gotten so it's hard to remember what the thing is supposed to taste (or look, or feel) like. Well, refresh your memories with Paris Vendôme's apple tart (not the only tart there, mind you) galette with caramel ice cream--a simple piece of lively resilience. The pastry is delicate and light but supple. It also has valor, leaving the apple to flaunt its sassiness without getting bogged down in the juice flood. And the caramel sauce is among the smoothest, richest and most satisfying we've tasted. Order two in case you've lost some short-term memory down a water pipe.

A few times a year, we ship the kids to the baby sitter, dress up like the hip kids (plus 30 pounds) and go out for a grown-up meal. Good food, good wine, good times. Our favorite place in which to do this, as it has been for about a decade, is The Green Room. Hip enough to be fun, serious enough for sophisticated tastes, head chef Marc Cassel's restaurant continues to impress every time out. When we arrive, we always ask for the "Feed Me, Wine Me"--four courses chosen by the chef and four glasses of wine picked to match each course. The result is mesmerizing and instructive: wonderful dishes perfectly prepared, matched with always-interesting vino choices. The best part: We usually end up loaded, take a cab home and make out like teenagers. Sure beats counseling.

This Greek café is unpretentiously cozy and distinctively romantic with a roster of authentic Greek cuisine that's fresh, flavorful, and paraded past the nostrils via a host of sampler plates. This food is more comprehensible than...well, Greek.

Just as the Magnolia (and before it the Angelika Film Center) has exponentially expanded the city's movie-going options, Paciugo Gelato, the "Italian Gelato Renaissance," has broadened the city's snacking horizons. Gelato is another word for ice cream, but Paciugo's gelato is no ordinary ice cream. What makes this ideal after-movie snack so silky is it contains less air and is not as "cold" as other brands, allowing its natural flavors to tantalize the taste buds. This especially smooth treat also sits lightly in the tummy because, dieters take note, it contains less fat and sugar than the standard fare. The more tepid American can make the European leap into gelato by ordering familiar flavors, like a devilish chocolate-chocolate chip or Rocky Road, while the more adventurous might experiment with marron glacé, pannacotta or tiramisu. Our favorite is lavender.

The Observer's Mark Stuertz suggests you "feed your culinary soul" at Watel's, a French restaurant that is one of Dallas' top eateries. But we suggest you experience your fine food with some aural ambience. Chef-owner René Peeters (one of the nicest guys who'll ever confit your duck) offers $29, four-course jazz dinners every other Monday or so. (Check www.watels.com for updates.) With your music you get a soup of the day, salad, one of eight entrées (such as crabmeat lasagna, spinach ravioli with chardonnay and walnuts or petit filet mignon grilled with herbed jus) and a choice of dessert. Music to our ears.

We were going to give this to Einstein's, but something about handing out this accolade to a chain; readers do that enough anyway (fave burger in years past: Burger King; we kid you not). Besides, we love this venerable establishment, which is the Cheers of local bageltoriums; on any given morning, regulars can be spotted hanging out with owner Herschel Rayford (known solely by his first name...like Charo), discussing life, drinking jumbo cups of good (not great, but close) coffee and noshing on some of this town's finest soulful holeless breadstuffs. We're partial to the everything bagel--garlic, poppy, sesame, goodness--especially when toasted and sandwiched with egg, cheese and bacon for the aptly named breakfast special. This is the closest we've found to the New York-style bagel, and we've looked; we wandering Jews will wander far, far, far for the perfect bagel and the quintessential salami and Reuben sandwiches, of which this place serves plenty.

Lord, how we try to keep healthy--hard to stay that way when the last time you saw the inside of a gym was in sixth-grade P.E. But, hey, Central Market's expansive produce section--some 4,312 varieties of radishes alone, at last count--was gonna help us stay trim. For months we cruised the asparagus like horny frat boys at a sorority mixer; we guzzled the green-veggie mystery swirl, ate only fresh chicken and the still-twitching seafood, bought nuts in bulk and fat-free milk by the gallon. And, man, were we ever getting fit, lean enough to fit into our senior-prom tux, still a lovely hue of blue. Awesome. Then they had to go and open a Krispy Kreme right next door, and eff it if our jeans didn't suddenly look one size too small for Kate Moss. What were we supposed to do? Ignore the red sign, taunting and daring us with its promise of fresh, hot doughnuts right off the assembly line? No. No. No. Our car full of healthy goodness, we inevitably steered just inches and gained feet on our waistline, and we couldn't help it; we're junkies in need of the hot, sugary fix. But every now and then we do the guilt-free thing and get the doughnuts before they're doused in sugar; surely, that's the diet version, innit?

We were always partial to the pig sandwich here, which is simply pulled pork between two slices. And it's good, don't get us wrong, but as we've gotten older and wiser, and as other places famous for their burgers have gotten slow and sloppy, we've come to appreciate the never-declining quality of Chip's. With burgers thick enough to be tasty, thin enough to pile with toppings and still get your mouth around it, Chip's has for years been an SMU and Park Cities staple. But don't let that deter you. Everyone, even the rich, know a good burger when they see one. Just that on you, it goes right to your hips. Them, not so much.

Readers' Pick

Snuffer's

Various locations

On a recent Saturday, we stopped by our regular bagel provider for a dozen of the everythings--garlic with poppy and sesame and the wondrous addition of sunflower seeds--and were told there won't be a batch ready for 10 minutes. So we waited patiently, like Job or his second cousin, and were greeted by a bagful of the hottest, softest, moistest round of bread we've ever put between two (scorched at this point) lips. We devoured half our dozen before walking out the door--this is to bagels what Krispy Kreme is to the hot doughnut, the closest thing to nirvana since Dave Grohl was just a drummer. So beg Herschel, the owner, for fresh ones when you walk through the door. Wait if you must--skip school, ditch work, put off writing Best of Dallas entries, whatever you must to get those bagels before they cool a single degree. Cream cheese is for wussies.