Eating beignets and being American while in Dallas
By Brooklyn Rodgers | January 8, 2026 | 8:08 PM
I can go next door to get a beignet.
Not literally next door, but spiritually next door. The one thing that could draw me to Deep Ellum at lunchtime on a Wednesday is a cloud of fat pastry dough cloyed in powdered sugar from Le Bon Temps.
I’d never had a beignet before. I used to think it was something you had to go to Louisiana for- but I wasn’t prepared for a life-changing pastry in my backyard in a city everyone insists has “no culture.”
In the Keith Lee rating economy, where everything is scored from one to ten, these were a 9.7. First-time beignet eater, so don’t trust anything I say. This is the part where the beignets become about Dallas.
I’ve been bothered for a long time by the idea that Dallas has no culture. The latest example was a TikTok declaring the city full of “lustful, manipulating, unoriginal weirdos”, which stuck with me because, yeah, true.
I just finished East of Eden, and Steinbeck has a passage about Americans that could double as a Yelp review for Dallas:
“We are mundane and materialistic. We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture.”
Seventy-five years ago, and people are still saying the same thing- only now the finger is pointed at Dallas. Because Dallas is very American, and Americans don’t like being reminded that they are American.
The coasts are sure of who they are. Europeans, too, who I will use lazily as a foil. Every time I’m in Europe, I understand exactly why people left. It feels like a civilization after the climax, while America is still in the middle of becoming.
And when a place is still becoming, it turns into somewhere people go to become.
Robert Penn Warren said it best in All the King’s Men:
“For West is where we all plan to go some day…It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.”
Dallas is still a place for becoming: job opportunity, cheaper rent, the last affordable version of the American Dream. And so it fills up with people who don’t want to be here but are here anyway- which is, in its own way, the most American thing imaginable.
Having beignets next door doesn’t solve much of anything. But it does prove something: culture isn’t absent here, it’s just in flux. You don’t hate that Dallas has no culture. You hate the culture it actually has.
I am, measuredly, proud to be American and proud to be from Dallas. Maybe we have no taste. Maybe we lack proportion. Maybe, like Steinbeck insists, we are descended from
“… the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous.
If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil.”
This is the part I keep circling back to: my favorite thing about people who hate Dallas is that their hatred makes them more Dallasite than anything else. Your desire to leave, to rebrand, to become something elsewhere- that is the culture. America is a nation of people trying to run from where they began.
As Clementine von Radics once wrote, “What is a home if not the first place you learn to run from?” from Courtney Love Prays To Oregon
Brooklyn in Dallas 