The Common Table

The boyfriend and I spent the weekend in Dallas, Texas celebrating my Dad's 60th birthday.  As is usual with my family, it was largely awkward and In and Out Burger was the best food I had, until we escaped "to get to the airport early" and found The Common Table.

We were just looking for a place more our style with some good beer and appetizers.  The Common Table was exactly what we needed.  The food wasn't gourmet amazing, but I was really OK with that, I didn't want a big fancy meal covered in truffles and foie gras, I wanted comfort food and that's exactly what I got.

The place itself is super cute from the outside, with a great outdoor dining area.  If I'd lived in Texas more recently and could handle the heat I'd gladly have eaten out there underneath the bright red umbrellas standing out so nicely against the painted black building.

The employees were really nice (they let me charge my dying phone in the staff area) and very passionate and knowledgeable about beer.  Sports were on, but it didn't annoy me and it wasn't overpowering the whole restaurant.  It seemed like if you wanted to watch the game, you could, and if you wanted to just sit and have a beer, that's cool too.

It was a total refuge.

I wasn't sure which beer to get until I saw they had a local beers flight.  I had no idea Texas, and the Dallas area in specific, had so many good breweries.  Next time I'm back, I'm definitely going to visit some of them.  I had:
* The Temptress by Lakewood Brewing
* Texas Pils by Community Brewing
* Velvet Hammer by Peticolas
* The Chosen One Coconut Ale by 903 Brewers (it tasted like a Samoa Girl Scout Cookie!!)

They were all fantastic. The coconut ale might have been my favorite, but I've been on a big coconut in beer kick for a while.

They also had a rare bottles list, which had Alaskan's Smoked Porter.  I'm really shocked we didn't get it, but I guess we didn't want to have too much beer before our flight .... or something was horribly wrong with us.

For food we had an appetizer called "The Three Little Pigs" which had sausage, bacon and chorizo each in a pastry with maple syrup dipping sauce.  Yum!  The chorizo one was a bit soggy, but it's hard to do much with chorizo without having grease go everywhere, so I'm going to forgive them on that one.  The sausage pastry had a serrano pepper in it, which gave it a nice kick without burning my face off and was easily my favorite of the three.

We then split a grilled cheese sandwich.  They great thing about their grilled cheese is that it has pork loin in the middle, also delicious.  We asked to split the sandwich since neither of us was super hungry so when I saw them heading to the table with two plates I thought they had screwed up.  Nope, they were super nice and put the sandwich on two plates and gave each a heaping mound of thin, crispy fries.  Sorry for not giving you the benefit of the doubt The Common Table!!!

All in all it was great, it was the perfect place to have found.  If I lived in Dallas I could easily see this place becoming one of my default places to go.