Sunday, April 30, 2006




We found one of the bustling shopping areas in East Dallas that the fashionable store clerk told us about. True to her word, there were lots of shops, restaurants and folks wandering the seemingly freshly-laid sidewalks of Dallas' West Village shopping area.

It's one of those developments known as 'mixed use' in the Northwest: retail on the bottom, apartments, townhouses, condos, etc., up top, with the occasional boutique hotel and upscale supermarket thrown in for good measure.

After a couple hours of window and actual shopping, we'd worked up enough of an appetite to hit one of the many restaurants in the area. We chose Tom Tom, an asian grill and sushi bar that was pretty average.

No matter where you travel, shrimp salad rolls are pretty hard to screw up: rice noodles, lettuce, sometimes cucumbers, and shrimp all neatly wrapped up in a rice paper wrapper with peanut or some sweet dipping sauce. Pretty basic, right? Well, I had to send the shrimp rolls back twice because they'd apparently rolled them up using a paper towel, leaving quarter-sized patches of white fiber on the underside of each roll. The replacements weren't much better. This time they apparently used a lint-covered cotton towel to roll them.

Having skipped breakfast, I was willing to ignore this second gaffe and just pick the lint off (hey, cotton counts as fiber in your diet, right?). But, I discovered the small, white lint balls were actually rolled up in the rice wrappers. Apparently their kitchen staff hasn't heard about using bamboo mats to make sushi rolls. We were really hungry, so that was a big let down. But at least they took them off our bill. It was still a nice area and outing and we'd head back for dinner later that night, but the experience would turn out to be much better.

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