Hash Over

Akins still achin'; Spell check, parlez-vous

A A A Comments By Mark Stuertz Thursday, Jul 15 1999

Akins still achin'

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Mediterraneo

18111 Preston Road
Dallas, TX 75252

Category: Restaurant > French

Region: Richardson & Vicinity

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Cooking stings. Just ask chef Los Akins. Akins has had it rough lately. "I've had a bad year. It couldn't get worse," he says. He left a steadily successful stint at PoPoLos more than a year ago to do the New Creole shtick at Moonshine Café, the restaurant joined to the Palace nightclub just off Lower Greenville. But despite good business, Akins says cash came up short and the place started slipping on wages and payroll taxes. "It was a big old mess," he says. So he hooked up with Matthew Antonovich at Antonovich's Tuscan Steak House in Plano. Only there, after seven weeks in the kitchen, he was paid just once. "He didn't even write us checks to take to the labor board," he laments. Why'd he stay? "[Matt] kept saying he was going to get this investor in, and he'd catch everybody up. And then that Friday night they came and closed him down." With some extra hands to help lock the doors. Akins says the landlord walked in flanked by a pair of law officers. "[Matt] was sitting down at a table drinking, and they walked right up and said, 'You about done?'"

Akins isn't. He started at Mediterraneo in Plano this past Monday. "I'm just helping out," he says, and he hopes to have a deal sewn up for his own place within the next two weeks. And that's probably a good thing too. Things at FoodStar don't appear to be stellar. There isn't a chef in place at Mediterraneo, and Toscana is a revolving door. They've gone through two general managers over the past few weeks (former Toscana GM Michael Lakomski just started at Bizu), and Executive Chef Dan Landsberg is said to have taken a hike after just three months. Seems he threw in the towel after he was asked to scale down the menu with things like fried cheese and deep-fried mushroom caps.

Spell check

It's up there on McKinney Avenue, that banner plastered over the spot scheduled to become Jean-Michel Sakouhi's Le Paris with the funny spelling for Bistro: bistrot. Sakouhi says he just wants his place to be authentic, so he's going with an authentic French spelling. Still, it looks funny. Do you really want "trot" in anything called a restaurant? Sakouhi also says he has a new chef: Emmanuel Pose. A former sous chef at Beau Nash in the Crescent Court Hotel, Pose was most recently sous chef at the Mercury. Larry Berkowitz, the guy from Chicago slated to be the Le Paris chef, apparently bolted for North Carolina. "He decided Texas was not for him," Sakouhi says.