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Dallas, you can keep your league-topping Stars and Mavericks teams; Arlington, you can choke on all your World Series baseball champion rings; Denton doesn’t need your sportsball baubles, cos we’ve got Lanky, undisputed champion of the gloriously weird Secret Chef reality-television competition on Hulu. Think of Secret Chef as Project Runway meets the Masked Singer, populated by food nerds, the kind who hear the question “what’s for dinner?” and immediately think “a Moroccan egg dish.” Think of it as Foucault’s kitchen, where everyone is permanently on display in a glass box and the host is a ..read more

By Rob Curran Hottestplate.com’s inaugural cooking class has not dragged the youthful publication into any serious Salmonella lawsuits, as of press time. A GoFundme site set up for a defense fund related to the March 20 Spanish tapas evening at Flour Power cooking school on East Hickory, Denton will be kept on a triumphantly dormant setting until the statute of limitations expires. A very non-threatening Spanish Tortilla. Photo by Rob Curran. Meanwhile, the guinea pigs – sorry, students – seemed to comprehend the inscrutable Irish (Rob Curran) and King of the Hill (Shea Scott) accents employe ..read more

By Rob Curran Betz Baker and Lois Robertson knew exactly how long the most momentous meeting of their business lives would last – 20 minutes…the time it took Lois to come up on an edible. Betz was working at Kimzey’s coffee shop in Argyle when they met Lois, who they would visit next door at Earl’s 377 to watch her toss pizza. Betz and Lois started dating “right before the ice storm in 2021,” fell in love, and moved in together in Denton in 2022. About this time last year, Betz and Lois were online, trying to get a deal on some bookshelves. It seemed like a low-risk activity to pair with som ..read more

By Rob Curran There’s a cosmology developed in medieval times by an Italian miller named Menocchio which holds that human life burst forth from the earth itself in the same way that worms can spring from a fermenting cheese. I first met Justin Bonard 14 years ago. We were following the same path – the one on the verge of Locust Street near the North Branch Library, each strollering a toddler to the playground at Evers Park, where, true to the Murphy’s Law of parenthood, they would nod off to sleep as soon as we arrived, allowing us to shoot the literary shit while we waited for them to surfac ..read more

Founders and Lead Pizzaiole: Dave & Stacy Dockins By Lasamee Kettavong It’s impossible to deny the curiosity evoked when you see the Dockins’ van that once served as their tiny home as they traveled along the west coast and worked remotely. It’s sleek and shiny and has surfboards strapped to one side. In Texas! This van evolved into the vessel through which Stacy and Dave would become purveyors of pizza. As a Dentonite, whenever you saw this van in 2023 parked at a market with the Aglio pizza ovens fired up and tables set up with dough and fresh ingredients, you knew it was the place to b ..read more

By Kenny Severson I’m excited. I met someone. Rosalyn. We knew each other from my last job at the university. She’s a poetry teacher. We flirted at the end-of-year potluck and over the summer when she stopped by the office with her dog, Odie. Our run-ins broke up the monotony of my Kafkaesque admin office.  I went from working admin at the university to working the grill at a vegan diner. I asked Rosalyn out on Hinge. Her grading load and my restaurant schedule made us perfect Monday night dates. The first Monday, we did coffee near campus. The next, Thai food and an arcade. By that thir ..read more

By Rob Curran James Trinh is a salt-of-the-earth type of man, and I can almost hear him laughing at being dubbed a North Texas food hero. Bear with me. Trinh comes from a long line of Vietnamese heroes, and anyone who, like me, has lined out on an indoor soccer field against his eight-year-old son can confirm that this streak of fearlessness goes on through the generations. Trinh has also taken bold risks with his food at the Viet Bites restaurant. When it first opened 10 years ago at a building Trinh bought on Elm Street, he was among the first South-Asian-born restaurateurs in town. There w ..read more

By Rob Curran L'Amitie, the new cafe next door to Osteria il Muro on West Congress and Bolivar is an intriguing mix of French chic and Denton chill. Amitie and Stan Robbins met in Denton in the 90s while both attended the University of North Texas. They moved to Keller for a minute where Amitie worked in events and Catholic charities while raising four children. Now they're back, and tapping both French and Denton roots with breakfast and brunch offerings ranging from lemon muffins to salmon dishes. The cappuccinos, espressos and cafe au laits are made with beans from local roaster Gas Coffee ..read more

By Rob Curran Humans cannot live on woolen cardigans, antique leather boots and owl glasses alone, but the evisceration of Denton’s hipster eateries and drinkeries threatens to bring about that very prospect.   The latest uber-cool joint to evacuate is Spiral Diner, a vegan restaurant that opened 2017, and rode out the pandemic with brown bags of fake-cheese dishes roller-skated to the car by double masked Goth-music fans or Doordashed to the home. Spiral joins the Golden Boy Café, AKA the Never Sleep, in Denton's glittering mythology of slumbering giants. “It is with a heavy heart that ..read more