Onetime Dallas wunderkind Doug Brown, who made his mark atop the Wyndham Anatole at Nana Grill before cutting bait for Palm Springs, has clawed his way back from California to the large D. It seems his stint at Murial's Supper Club went sour after the venture's main investor lost a couple hundred million and some change in the dot com bubble, or was that the high-tech fizz? Anyway, Brown is trying to get some air back into his career with a stint at Eatzi's as corporate sous chef. There, he will help them ramp up a 10,000-square-foot central kitchen that will feed all of the Eatzi's in the region. "What?" you might be saying to yourself. "There is only one Eatzi's in the Dallas area, and you couldn't fit a tapeworm in there--let alone a whole chef-load of centralized kitchen food." Think again. Dallas may soon be home to five to 10 additional Eatzi's over the next couple of years that would feed off the new kitchen, scheduled to open next summer. "It's going to be pretty fun," says Brown. Yeah, but it's hard to imagine a guy like Brown keeping his talents well oiled pumping out gourmet take-out. You might be thinking that he's thinking of opening his own place. "Always," he shoots off. In fact, the reason Brown returned to Dallas was to seal a deal for a chance to carve something personal out of the shuttered Bistral on McKinney Avenue, but that bubble popped.
Royal Tokyo, that Greenville Avenue bastion of sushi coupled with the passé art of swashbuckling hibachi, shut down earlier this month because of a fire that destroyed roughly half the restaurant. The cause of the fire, which consumed the backside of the building, is under investigation. The target date for reopening covers a wide spectrum: the first or second quarter of 2002. Open since 1973, Royal Tokyo has sloughed off at least one hyper-successful Dallas operator: Teiichi Sukurai, whose imaginative hits include Tei Tei Robata Bar, Teppo Teppo Yakatori Sushi Bar, and Moosh, the lounge Sukurai just opened next to Teppo...Pastry chef David Brawley, who jumped from Salve! not too long ago only to land at The Restaurant Life, a division of The M Crowd restaurant company, has now vaulted from that perch...Truluck's Steak and Stone Crab has announced the stone crab season is upon us. Which doesn't mean much except Truluck's has two locations in Dallas and a stone crab fishery in Naples, Florida. The 12-vessel Capri fishery dismembered 250,000 pounds of crabs last year, each time taking just one claw so the beasts can still work the remote--and regenerate harvestable claws four times over their 10-year life span.
