There's the seeming unrestrained application of dining tender in the form of Voltaire and Abacus. Voltaire, radio mogul Scott Ginsburg's multimillion-dollar restaurant, is a monument to distinctive French-Asian cuisine in a chicly minimalist dining room feathered with pricey artwork and design touches. Abacus, though perhaps costing much less, is rife with strikingly busy design touches drenched in garishly rich hues with vigorously eclectic cuisine that one prominent Dallas restaurateur described as a "menu from Mars."
"As a society as a whole, we are more design conscious; it's evident in what we do with our homes and the clothes that we wear," says Mabel, who denies that these upscale indulgences are worthy of trend consideration. "The economy is simply producing people with lots of money to gamble and play with restaurants."
Judy Walgren
High-dollar dish: Scott Ginsburg's multimillion-dollar Voltaire was aong 1999's notable opening.
Location Info
Related Content
More About
But if there was irreverence in 1999, it was most potent in the idiosyncratic personalities that strolled across the landscape in the final year of the century. At the beginning of 1999, oil businessman Joseph Barbaria opened Joshelé, an upscale "Texas-French" restaurant billing itself as "the ultimate experience in fine dining and live jazz entertainment" -- only to close it a few months later, stiffing various vendors for thousands of dollars in the process. Barbaria claims he got the idea for the name of his Plano restaurant from a 65-pound lobster -- named Joe Shell -- he planned to feature at the restaurant for kiddie lobster rides. But Barbaria once tried to launch a restaurant with the same name at a different location in 1995, when he reportedly came up with the tag "Joshelé" by combining his and his wife Michele's first names. Then, as Joshelé was bolted shut in early June, Barbaria sued his wife for divorce.
There's the odd case of former Mansion maître d' Wayne Broadwell and former Sipango chef and founding partner Matthew Antonovich, who paired up to launch Villa on Maple, an upscale, classic Northern Italian concept they planned to plant in the Loyd Paxton antique gallery after boasting they scooped it up for $2.5 million. Their grand plans also called for an upscale American grill called Lucille's, a Paris brasserie called the Tack Room, and a speakeasy called the Electric Room -- all to be assembled in Mockingbird Station before the end of this year.
But before the project got off the ground, Antonovich had a clairvoyant visitation from his dead grandmother, who told him he needed to open his own restaurant with his name on the door. So, in the spring, he launched Antonovich's Tuscan Steakhouse in Plano in the old Ricardo's Ristorante Mexicano, only to be locked out some five weeks later after racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in unsecured debt, igniting the fury of vendors, contractors, and his landlord. Antonovich subsequently skipped town and is rumored to be holed up in Louisville, Kentucky.
And then there's Wayne Broadwell, who, it seems, didn't actually purchase the Loyd Paxton property, but merely had a contract on it, which he let expire when his financial angels flew the coop. Now he's maître-d'-in-waiting at Salve!
All of which proves there's one strain of prognostication that's impossible to swear off. In midst of all of the fierce competition, brutal price pressure, and razor-thin error tolerances, restaurateuring in Dallas is so often daffy. In fact, predictably so.
