EATS

Read Kim Harwell's latest column to get the dish on new restaurants, including Alberto Lombardi's Pesca, Dali in One Arts Plaza, TruFire Kitchen and Bar and L&L Hawaiian Barbecue, plus other news about dining in Dallas.

I told Neal Newsom when I visited him and Janice earlier this year that if Nowhere had a middle, where they live in West Texas would be it. To reach Newsom Vineyards outside Plains, I had to fly in to Lubbock, then drive across 60 miles of West Texas flatland: red soil, tumbleweeds, oil derricks, fallow cotton fields.

Along with Neal's mother, Neal and Janice grow some of the best grapes in Texas and earn vineyard designation on many wines. (They don't make wine; they just grow grapes.) Not that it hasn't come at a cost: Only after I had completed the story - which starts out with a devastating hail storm - did I learn from Fredericksburg Winery that when Neal's dad died in 2000, it was in a harvesting accident.

Dues have been paid, but the wine gods also have smiled on this small-town family, which is helping to shape Texas' nascent wine industry. Check out the story here.

The new Whole Foods Market house-baked banana bread uses "green" bananas from EARTH University in Guacimo, Limon, Costa Rica. the private university dedicated to teaching sustainable agriculture to young people in Latin America's tropical regions. To find out more about the school, click here. The bread itself is tasty and moist with walnut pieces scattered on top; 'sells for $3.99 (15 ounces). Very coffee-friendly. WFM is also sells pineapples and mangos from EARTH University.

Does that sound like heresy? Going to K.C. for three days and indulging in no steaks and no barbecue... what sacrilege!

But that's what my husband and I just did. Fact is, we couldn't look at prime beef or BBQ because we'd just spent the previous weekend chowing down on same in the Hill Country, on a Roadfood.com "eating tour" with food writers Jane and Michael Stern. [More on this in a future issue of Taste.]

We were pretty well BBQ'ed out, even a week later. So in K.C., we skipped the usual stops and didn't try out classic 'cue at Gates or strip steaks at the venerable Golden Ox. We'd already been to Arthur Bryant's and Jess & Jim's on a previous K.C. visit, so we tried a few places that were new to us.

If you're a SuperTarget shopper, you know that the store often groups grocery close-outs on an end cap somewhere among the grocery aisles. If you're an eagle eye, you also know that these are often feeble mark-downs - 20 cents off a dollar, 30 cents off a couple dollars.

But this morning, I caught one that was 50 percent off all items, and there were items worth picking up. They fell largely into the gourmet or budget categories, and many were ethnic foods, i.e. a bag of small dried red beans next to Ming Tsai lemongrass vinaigrette, canned green chiles and Iron Chef sesame-garlic sauce and glaze, Nestle canned crema and designer salsas. But also six-packs of 12-ounce bottles strawberry Gatorade and individual packets of mild taco meat seasoning and Pioneer biscuit mix.

I made off with the aforementioned Ming Tsai dressing, Casa Fiesta no-fat refried black beans, reduced-sodium tamari soy sauce and toasted sesame seed oil. My junk-food Jones was sore tempted by the Old El Paso zesty ranch Taco Topper. But the grown-up inside my head said, "No." My SuperT is at Skillman and Abrams.