Eating With Duy

What does it take to qualify a burger as nuts? Well, for one thing, it has to have something about it that just makes you shake your head while you whisper, "That's impossible." Lugnutz, off of US-59, near Nacogdoches, Tx Of course, for a burger to be nuts doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad burger--in fact, with Lugnutz, our main feature this week, I call their burgers nuts in the most respectful and approving way. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. This week involved more moving, a funeral, a wedding, work, etc. If I said last week was chaotic, I spoke too soon. Last week didn't hold a candle to this one in terms of the amount of work that had to be done. And as the busy days passed by, I feared Duy and I might not have the time to eat at a restaurant to review it. Luckily, we found the time, and though we were a bit rushed, we visited Lugnutz determined to get enough material for a blog post. We drove up with our friend Hamish in the midd...

Between moving houses, work, and revising my own personal writing projects, it's been a busy week. Despite how busy my life has been recently, though, it has done little to erode the warm and flavorful memory of Duy's and my time at the featured establishment of today's critique. Dolli's Diner, on 116 S Pecan St, Nacogdoches, T x This week we ate at Dolli's Diner, a smaller establishment set in downtown Nacogdoches. Having eaten there before, Duy and I already had a good idea of what to expect, but we wanted to eat there this time with new, fresh eyes, and an open--and perhaps overly critical--mind, to see how well the diner held up to a stricter standard. The unique experience that Dolli's Diner provides begins the minute you step through the doors. It's summer now, and the students in this sleepy college town have mostly gone home. Even so, the diner was packed full of hungry families, big and small. The noise level was loud but not unbearable an...

The Pho House, on N Tarrant Pkwy  right before 377 Duy and I were in Fort Worth, TX last weekend visiting our families and some family friends of mine. Of course, during our weekend stay in what I like to call the most perfect sized city in the state of Texas, we had to eat. During our first night there, literally only hours after we finished the three-and-a-half-hour long drive from Nacogdoches, we set out at midnight to find a good place to eat pho (pronounced "Fuh"). Duy had been talking about how so many vietnamese restaurants these days were open until late because of the tendency of people under the influence (whether it be drugs or alcohol) to go out and stuff their faces with whatever they can find. My parents had actually had pho earlier that day in a (for lack of a better word) whitewashed establishment that, while they served pretty good pho in my opinion, lacked a sense of authenticity. For those who don't know, pho is a staple Vietnamese soup. I...

As a first post, I thought it would be fitting to give a sort of introduction to what this blog will be about, just so you know what you might be getting yourself into. This is a restaurant critique blog, written by yours truly, Daniel. Along with me is my friend and roommate, Duy, who has an education background in the culinary arts. (Duy is on the right, I'm on the left. Ignore the middle) As a Creative Writing major, I've always heard that it would be beneficial to start up a blog; however, the only problem with that is I never knew what on earth I could write about. I'd tried starting up blogs before but they always failed because I either got bored or my content was, frankly, boring. It always felt like a hassle to keep up a weekly stream of writing and it would eventually get to the point where I would start to ramble because I had no idea what to write about. So I'm surprised at myself, actually, that I'm starting up this blog with so much dete...