Best New Restaurant

Lemonade. That's what Iris is. Here are the lemons: a space that has been home to dreadful or dreadfully performing restaurants over the last decade; a restaurant owner (Susie Priore) who fled to California to get a master's degree so that she could join the Peace Corps and teach English in Morocco; a Peace Corps mission that was soured by the prospect of a blond American woman in a Muslim country post-September 11; a Dallas restaurant mission spawned to pay off the loans used to acquire the master's degree to service the Peace Corps mission. What kind of person opens a restaurant to get out of debt? Someone who knows that the best restaurants are comfortable, engaging neighborhood haunts with food that intrigues but doesn't frighten. Chef Russell Hodges is a down-to-earth chap who comes up with dishes like a shrimp cocktail composed of two shrimp as thick as sumo wrestler thumbs surrounded by bread points, salmon carpaccio and a cleaved hard-boiled egg. Delicious foie gras, too. And rack of lamb. Don't forget the pan-seared sea bass with cannellini beans.

Readers' Pick George 7709 Inwood Road 214-366-9100