Pegasus News content partner interview: The Law Reviewers

by Alex Bentley

In addition to the reporting on the restaurant goings-on in the North Texas area by our own Teresa Gubbins, we have welcomed several different sites/blogs to provide us with restaurant reviews. One of the earliest to join was The Law Reviewers, a blog/website started by Michael Anderson and Anthony Lowenberg, two Dallas lawyers (yes, real lawyers!). Starting with their review of Chic from Barcelona, their unique style has helped make restaurant coverage on Pegasus News more fun than should be legally allowed. Below is the interview I conducted with Anderson and Lowenberg:

Pegasus News: When did you start The Law Reviewers and what were your reasons for starting it?

Law Reviewers: We started reviewing local restaurants in the early 1990's for our high school newspaper (it made a great excuse to ask girls on double dates). Back then, girls went ga-ga over restaurant reviewers. Today, not so much. After high school, we both moved away for college and other exciting endeavors. Michael spent years eating all kinds of grub in places like Washington D.C. and London, and Anthony spent even longer in New York learning how to eat pizza the "correct" way (with his mouth). We both eventually returned to Dallas and decided to start up the ol' column again. You could say that like Jake and Elwood, we are on a mission from God, and you'd be wrong.

Pegasus News: Both of you are lawyers by trade – why did you decide to start writing restaurant reviews in the first place?

Law Reviewers: Other than reliving our high school glory years without the wedgies, we thought we could help other young lawyers like us find new and interesting places to eat that they wouldn't otherwise know about. It’s fun to be at a deposition or other adversarial setting and have another lawyer who you think hates your guts tell you that he recently tried a place you reviewed. It’s a nice reminder that we’re all in the brotherhood of man together before we get back to scheming and insulting each other.

Pegasus News: You guys have a, shall we say, unique writing style – is yours a true collaboration or does one person's personality come out more in your reviews?

Law Reviewers: It was in high school that we developed our particular "style" (if you can call it that), and some of those reviews took hours to write because we argued over every word. Every. Damn. Word. And it didn't help that we always had an MST3K episode on in the background. [Fun fact aside: Anthony's house, where we wrote most of our reviews, was featured at the beginning of the movie Bottle Rocket. Rent it from your local Blockbuster today!] In the lawyer reincarnation of the reviews, we take turns writing the first draft of each review, before passing it on to the other to correct spelling, add "teh funnay" and translate into English. Then, it's off to Anthony's wife, Sonia, who "Sonia-tizes" it for spelling, syntax and grammar, and to make sure we're not making complete asses of ourselves. She's fine with a 35% ass-making-of-selves quotient.

Pegasus News: You recently redesigned your website – what was the purpose of the redesign and why now?

Law Reviewers: We're glad you asked us that, Conan, uh, we mean Alex. We first started our website back in July 2006, but once we hooked up with Pegasus News we got lazy and said to ourselves, "Selves, we can just post our reviews on their site, we don't need to mess with a site of our own anymore!" But then we decided we wanted more of the instant fame n' glory that comes with having a website as well as all of that internet money. Also, we know a web designer who said he'd do the redesign for free so we thought "What the heck?" The revamped website allows us to make our reviews more interactive with hyper-links, tags and polls. Eventually, we want to have separate pages that list our favorite kid-friendly restaurants (with community feedback) and allow a 'jury' of burger and pizza lovers to vote on a different burger and pizza place each month. We're tentatively calling these pages "Kids' World", "Burger Court" and "War and Pizza." And that's how we will slowly take over the world one web link at a time. Baby steps.

Pegasus News: What is the process in how you choose which restaurants to review (if any)?

Law Reviewers: Usually, we get way past our deadline (for the DAYL newsletter) and one of us calls the other and says, "So, what place do you want to review this month?"

Pegasus News: You guys rarely venture outside the Dallas city limits for your reviews – are you just Big D snobs or are there any non-Dallas North Texas restaurants that make your list?

Law Reviewers: Didn't you read our review of the Snider Plaza Penne Pomodoro? It's in University Park. Seriously, though, we're not snobs by any means, we just live and work inside the "loop," and now that we both have kiddos, traveling to restaurants outside our home/work areas is trickier. We do venture outside the 214 for eats whenever we're able, especially for Asian/South Asian.

Pegasus News: What are the two or three restaurants you've reviewed that are your favorites? Along those same lines, are there any of your reviews that stand out as your favorites, regardless of the quality of restaurant?

Law Reviewers: Sadly, many of our fave places that we've reviewed are no longer with us. Our first review was of Cafe Nostra, the great New York-style pizza place on Lower Greenville that was consumed in the Great Fire of Aught-Six. We also really liked Streetside Cafe, a neat little place across from the Dallas Public Library that mysteriously closed a few years back, and we loved Olivella's, which fortunately is still with us. Our fave reviews (not places) were of Temptations, the ill-fated Indian restaurant in the spot currently occupied by Gui on McKinney, and Tahitian Noni Cafe, the "Tahitian restaurant" that tried to foist its God-awful noni juice on the masses.

Pegasus News: What new or relatively new restaurants are you guys dying to try?

Law Reviewers: One of the great things about this gig is that Dallas will never run out of new and interesting places for us to review. One of our current infatuations is Burguesa Burger, probably because their PR blitz is unstoppable. Hey, if Which Wich is deliciously bland and the Mongolian grill place is overpriced, then we figure third time's the charm! Seriously, though, it looks like a Mexican-style In-n-Out Burger concept that will probably do well, and we're looking forward to checking it out.

Pegasus News: What do you see as the future of The Law Reviewers?

Law Reviewers: Other than a 90 comment war of words with our comment-haters, we see a dystopian future where all of the restaurant reviewer/bloggers in the D/FW Metroplex duel it out Thunderdome-style in mortal combat at Burguesa Burger Cowboys Stadium in Arlington. No holds barred, those who don't survive will go home hungry!! (because after the fights, they went to Neighborhood Services for a bite, but it was 7pm on a Wednesday and the wait for a table was over two hours and eventually, they were like, man, forget this, let's just get some mini-sirloin burgers from Jack-in-the-Box down the street, but on the drive home the mini-sirloin burgers smelled really gross and the reviewer/blogger burped a little martini up in his mouth and the night ended with the mini-sirloin burgers being fed to the feral cat who lives in the backyard while the review/blogger fell asleep in front of a rerun of the premiere of Jon and Kate Plus 8.)

• Staff
• Verified User
• Anonymous