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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

A spread of dishes at Katami, in Houston.The Texas restaurant scene is as delicious as it’s ever been. I said, “THE TEXAS RESTAURANT SCENE IS AS DELICIOUS AS IT’S EVER BEEN!” It is also noisy (not to mention expensive and in a state of serious flux). Last year I was all worked up about small plates and the chaos they bring to the tabletop. This year, though I indulged in many glorious bites, I found myself stewing over another unsavory development. Where is all this noisy energy coming from? Clubstaurants, mostly, and they’re here to stay. (In case you’re wondering, I didn’t make up that word.) Most restaurants cannot survive selling food alone. They need booze to stay in the black, especially in the big cities. That’s why more and more new…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Composer Graham Reynolds Collaborated With UT Entomologists To Record An Homage To BugsBird-watching—and, necessarily, listening—has exploded in popularity in recent years. But put your ears a little closer to the ground, and you might hear a quieter but just as potent kind of song coming from a little further down the food chain. That is, if you don’t squash the singer first. Yes, bugs make complex and fascinating sounds, and they’re not just coming from the cicadas and crickets that keep you up on hot summer nights. Take the leafcutter ant, which is active in Texas in the winter. “You can pick one up and hear it squeak,” says University of Texas entomologist Alex Wild. “There are all sorts of insects singing to each other for the same reason that birds are doing it. If you just…

The post Meet the Beetles on Graham Reynolds’s New Album Celebrating the Sounds of Insects appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

The Checklist: Grupo Frontera at Besame MuchoFESTIVALBesame Mucho, AustinMarch 2Less than two years ago, Grupo Frontera was dishing out its blend of norteño and cumbia at weddings and other events in Edinburg, just north of McAllen, where the band’s six members were living and working day jobs. But after a string of hit singles and a collaboration last year with Bad Bunny on the track “un x100to,” which won a Latin Grammy, those days of relative anonymity outside the Rio Grande Valley are behind them. Now Grupo Frontera will be the biggest name repping the Lone Star State at Besame Mucho, a Los Angeles–based Latin music festival making its Texas debut, alongside norteño legends such as Banda El Recodo and Los Tigres del Norte.TELEVISIONGirls5eva (Netflix)March 14This Tina Fey–produced comedy, which stars…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

ASME awards and finalistsThe American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) announced on Thursday the finalists for the fifty-ninth annual National Magazine Awards. Texas Monthly was nominated for two National Magazine Awards: the February 2023 “Texas Icons” issue is a finalist in the single-topic issue category, and executive editor Michael Hall’s May 2023 profile of Houston folklorist Mack McCormick, “Hellhounds on His Trail,” is a finalist in the profile-writing category.Executive editor Jeff Salamon spearheaded the February 2023 issue, which commemorated Texas Monthly‘s fiftieth anniversary; it was an enormous team effort, involving dozens of writers and contributions from much of the editorial staff. The Mack McCormick profile, which followed up on a feature Hall wrote in 2002 and had been years in the making, was also edited by Salamon. ASME…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

The Texas companies behind election interference in NHWhen Walter Monk was first building out his telecom empire, he began with Singles Telephone Company, which was pretty much what it sounds like—a hotline for those looking for love to connect by phone. Decades later, in the sort of twist we’ve come to expect in today’s bizarre political climate, his company, based in Arlington, just east of Fort Worth, is being investigated by the Federal Communications Commission over allegations that it made thousands of illegal robocalls. Those calls reportedly used AI voice technology to impersonate President Biden and had him urging New Hampshire Democrats not to vote in the upcoming primary election. Thousands of New Hampshire Democrats received the fraudulent robocalls ahead of their January 23 primaries. “Republicans have been trying to push nonpartisan and…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Meanwhile in Texas Spaghetti in Front YardA Wise County sheriff’s deputy, responding to a complaint that someone had dumped spaghetti on a man’s yard, determined that the culprit was the caller’s neighbor, who had thrown a dish his mother made for him onto the man’s property. A man lying unconscious in a bullet-hole-ridden truck in a San Antonio parking lot failed for hours to awaken as law enforcement officers, worried because they spotted a gun beside him, yelled at him through a loudspeaker, detonated a flash-bang grenade, and only managed to rouse him from his slumber when a SWAT team forced its way into his vehicle. Two dogs were taken to an animal control shelter after being caught on camera scratching the paint and biting the front panels off of cars…

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As Texas politics drifted toward Christian nationalism and right-wing extremes, staff writer Russell Gold wanted to know who was calling the shots. All roads led to Tim Dunn, the focus of his March 2024 feature, “The Billionaire Who Runs Texas.”

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

ocelot critterLatin Name: Leopardus pardalisSize: Thirty to forty inches long and no more than thirty poundsHabitat: Dense thornscrub near waterThe ghost cat pads through the brush on silent, velvety paws. Creeping nimbly under low-lying branches, it uses highly evolved night vision to zero in on prey. A sudden flash of golden brown eyes is swiftly followed by the swipe of razor-sharp claws, a hiss, and a fatal pounce upon an unlucky mouse or rabbit. Then the cat vanishes into the night, where it’s always watching but rarely seen. We’re talking, of course, about what may be Texas’s most elusive and beautiful creature: the ocelot, a small but powerful wildcat that has captivated humans for millennia. It frequently appears in ancient Mesoamerican art, and Salvador Dalí kept…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Jennifer Hwa Dobbertin.Taco Bell’s experiential marketing campaigns and eyebrow-raising menu items never cease to surprise. Now the company that gave the world a boutique hotel in Palm Springs and the Baja Blast Pie is collaborating with notable American chefs to reimagine its iconic Crunchwrap Supreme. Texas’s very own Jennifer Hwa Dobbertin, the James Beard Foundation Award semifinalist and executive chef–owner of Chinese-Texan restaurant Best Quality Daughter, in San Antonio, is one of three participants selected by TBX, a new program Taco Bell has launched to support culinary talent. (The other two chefs are Reuben Asaram of Reuby, in Philadelphia, and Lawrence Smith of Chilte, in Phoenix.)In case you don’t know, the Crunchwrap Supreme was added to the Taco Bell menu in 2005 and is composed of a…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Nutria young (Myocastor coypus) playing and fighting in Houston.Maybe you’ve heard that old urban legend about the guy who adopts what he thinks is a puppy. The location changes: sometimes it’s Mexico, sometimes the Bay Area. The “guy” can be anything from a tourist unfamiliar with the fauna of the region he’s visiting to a mom coerced by her puppy-loving kids. But one aspect is consistent: the “puppy” is not actually a puppy. It’s a giant, monstrous rat. In Texas and Louisiana, this urban legend usually ends with a nutria. Quite literally a rodent of unusual size, nutria (Myocastor coypus, scientifically) can reach 22 pounds and two feet in length (not counting their ratlike tail, which can grow as long as a foot and a half). The species is originally from South America and…

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