EATS

Victory Park eatery La Condesa celebrates Cinco de Mayo with music, half-price Cazadores tequila and $5 Cazadores margaritas. While there, check out the restaurant's menu of Mexican street food and cantina favorites. The party begins at 7 tonight. Click here for more Cinco de Mayo dining options.

Ted Allen of Top Chef, Iron Chef America and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy will conduct a cooking demo at Taste Addison this Sunday at 2 p.m. with the Robert Mondavi Special Selection Discover Wine exhibit.

Mr. Allen, who is as easy to talk to as he seems on TV, has been working with the Napa Valley winery as an educational spokesman for about four years. "I have no intention of perpetuating wine snobbery," he said. He prefers talking to people who are not experts, people who just want to enjoy wine and be more comfortable buying and serving it.

His advice is to "taste, taste, taste" in wine shops, restaurants and at festivals like Taste Addison and don't be afraid to ask for help at a retail store or restaurant.

Mr. Allen is excited to be working with the Mondavi winery because of Robert Mondavi's history and contribution of wine in America. The Discover Wine exhibit is a way to bring the excitement of harvest time, or the "crush," to people who don't live in wine country. The winery road show has an exhibit showing how wine is made, a tasting bar and a demo kitchen where Mr. Allen will be on Sunday.

Mr. Allen's had a bit of experience with Dallas and Dallasites. He spent nearly a month in Dallas filming three episodes of Queer Eye. He has also judged the work Dallas chefs both on Top Chef and Iron Chef America. He was particularly impressed with the Rathbun brothers, Kent and Kevin, who won against Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America. He noted that it is very hard for a challenger to beat the Iron Chef, but Kent and Kevin had the showmanship for TV and big, bold flavors in their food to impress the judges.

Rebecca Murphy

Not to slobber all over the Rosewood Mansion Restaurant, but these days when I get to attend a special dinner there, I anticipiate that it will in some way push the envelope.

I wasn't disppointed over the weekend when exec chef John Tesar and wine director Michael Flynn devised their wine dinner for Spring Mountain Winery in the Napa Valley. "This is the first time we're doing a wine retrospective of this magnitude," said winemaker Jac Cole, there for commentary. To wit: an 11-year vertical tasting. (Great slide show of the estate here.)

What's a vertical tasting? You taste one wine through several vintages, in this case the Spring Mountain Vineyard Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, later renamed Elivette, from 1993 through 2003. Read on to see what the Mansion duo did with these wonderful wines.

Chances to see Gordon Ramsay on TV are endless -- Hell's Kitchen every Tuesday on Fox (Channel 4), various BBC America showings through the week of the British version of Kitchen Nightmares and The F Word .

But it seems I can't get enough of the potty-mouthed super chef, so I added to the load by reading about him in his autobiography, Roasting in Hell's Kitchen. It's an engaging look at a complicated guy, with insights on why he's such a driven entrepreneur. The book details his desperately poor upbringing with a cruel and mostly absent father, his injury-thwarted soccer career, and what it took to build his culinary empire.

He comes off as a pretty earnest and dedicated person -- much like when he's trying to save those disaster restaurant owers on Kitchen Nightmares from themselves.