I’ll chime in. I have a second home in Dallas. I live 2.5 hours east in a town that one could characterize as a “one horse town” is that wasn’t unkind to towns that actually had one horse.
The real question is “where are you going to work.” The idea of living very far from where you work if you live in Dallas (or any other major city, if you ask me) is nothing short of insane. Who wants to drive in traffic twice a day? My business is usually down town, so I live in uptown. I can leave my condo and be downtown in in an office within 15 minutes. Twenty is there’s traffic. Time to a Mavs game is about 15 minutes. Time to get back home is seven minutes. Now, if I lived out in the boonies of far north Dallas or Richardson, those drives would be at least 30 minutes and probably closer to an hour during peak times.
Restaurants aren’t as good as they used to be, but Dallas is still a pretty good restaurant town. The places I’d call top notch would be – in order – Lucia, Gemma, Nonna and Uchi. Nipping just at their heels would be FT33, Fearings, Mesa, Rapscallion, Royal Sichuan (Richardson), Harvest (McKinney) and Tei-An. Lots of other places that are good and I don’t really disagree with any listed herein. Pappas Brothers does have a very, very good wine list and I don’t think that the markups are terribly out of line (or what passes for out of line these days). Some great values in the $200 - 400 range. Food is average for a good steakhouse, though I’m not a huge fan of steak.