Edgar Watson has had little Dallas restaurant fits and starts for years. In 1983 he launched Adriano's in the Quadrangle (where Dream Café is now), a restaurant he calls "the original yuppie Italian spot in Dallas" (where have all the yuppie Italians gone?). Adriano's was also hailed as Dallas' first "Spagolike spot" (a reference to Wolfgang Puck's L.A. establishment). Watson followed that up with Acapella on Maple in 1988 and Adagio Café in Frisco in 1992. Now that he's got all of that yuppie Italian out of his system, he's gone Texas with his latest venture, Bosque Café (named for the Texas county somewhere near Waco) on Ross and Leonard across from the Morton Meyerson Symphony Center. The 70-seat restaurant, set to open in mid-June, is parked in what Watson describes as one of the last 1920s-era art deco buildings downtown. Bosque will feature a New American menu laced with Southwestern touches, though Watson admits he has yet to find a chef to pull it off.
Operators of Angelo and Maxie's Steakhouse, a Manhattan beefery with a virile nightlife, are said to be sniffing around the McKinney Avenue space that was once home to San Simeon. The New York steakhouse opened in 1996 in Manhattan's Flatiron District. A few short years later, it was scooped up by Chicago-based Chart House Enterprises Inc., which is in the midst of aggressive expansion plans to spread the restaurant's "larger-than-life steakhouse menu and art deco décor" to Phoenix, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Florida, and the West Coast...Tracy Curts of the Uptown Improvement District says that my "grim fascination" with the "jarring caused by the bricks" on McKinney Avenue will have to subside. A new drivable surface was just opened this past Friday, and the bricks, some old but mostly new, rest on a new stable subsurface. Which means the tooth clatter and the rump rattle should be reduced to a friendly quarter-in-the-motel-room-bed kind of jitter, although the street will remain one-way northbound until construction is complete early next year. (Why is this taking so long?) Regardless, Curts is obviously selling me short on my potential for grim fascination...Reata, the restaurant shuttered by the tornado that struck downtown Fort Worth in late March, has reopened. In fact, it's been operating for about three weeks now, with all of its 35th-floor windows and everything.
Mark Stuertz
E-mail Dish at [email protected].
