We’re big fans of restaurant critic anonymity. It protects us from getting salads where fried capers have been intentionally replaced with bunny pellets, or having our Visa card number slipped to a Moldavian porn site after a review hits the street. That’s why we go to great lengths to protect…
Albania. Where’s that? It’s not a country most Americans–let alone Dallas residents–have much familiarity with, and for good reason. Locked into obscurity and solitary confinement throughout most of its history on account of its rugged, mountainous topography, Albania nonetheless has had a tendency to incite violent intrusions. This is because…
Nine years is an eon or two in kitchen dog years. “About three or four chef eternities,” clarifies Green Room chef Marc Cassel. Or as of this writing, former Green Room chef. After nine years steering the Green Room “feed me, wine me” stove, Cassel has packed his Deep Ellum…
Like a pair of tectonic plates, itching to lurch forward but frozen into place by geological procrastination, Watel’s changes little before making sudden leaps. It was in place on McKinney Avenue and Harwood Street for more than 10 years before scrambling up the avenue not far from Allen Street in…
His business card is simple: Chef Joseph. His trajectory is not. He trained at La Gastronome in the Basque region of France and Spain. He practiced at the Arizona Biltmore L’Orange and the Ritz Carlton in Spain. He was installed at the hip upscale Voltaire before it became that downscale…
Big Fish Little Fish Restaurant and Boathouse, the seafood shack on Henderson Avenue that managed to stay afloat since its 1998 launch before sinking last fall, will be raised in mid-April and reflagged Vickery Park. “It will not be a seafood restaurant, and it will not have the Big Fish…
Every once in a while a dining experience is of such a piece that the food is almost beside the point; you’re just content to revel in reality gone slightly askew, maybe with a drink. You-Chun Korean Restaurant doesn’t serve alcohol, but it does serve water. It’s dispensed from a…
Whither steak? Haven’t we had enough already? Are any arteries left in North Texas that don’t proudly wear the badge of sclerosis crimp? Is there a credit rating nearby not creaking under the strain of prime beef? Are you vexed by the under-representation of creamed corn, sautéed mushrooms, mashed potatoes…
There’s an old upright piano next to the altar, just in front of a banner that reads “Dallas, Our Jerusalem.” Barbecue mogul Eddie Deen sits down at the bench and begins to play a rag-style tune. He suddenly locks on one note: plink, plink, plink. “Hey, this thing’s out of…
An Open Appeal to Dr. Robert Rey: You may find this hard to believe, but before last week I had never heard of you. I had no idea you were one of the pioneers of the transumbilical procedure, which sounds suspiciously like a financial instrument designed to skirt Securities and…
Sabatino’s restaurant and sausage company in North Dallas, after a short but robust life, has been killed off by a keg of worms. This according to Peter Sabatino, who operates the 17-year-old Sabatino’s in Newport Beach, California. The story: Sabatino’s brother, who launched the Dallas version of the restaurant and…
Italian stares at us perpetually, teasing with promise. It draws us with its sassy Latin vibrato and Ferrari-like lust with hints of Fellini-esque expressiveness. But the stare is an empty leer. What you get is Ed Wood warbling Lou Reed while tooling down the road in a Kia Sorrento. Italian…
Hail the new celebrity class: chefs, sous, de cuisines, sauciers, prep cooks–maybe even dishwashers if they can lip sync. They may not get paid like 50 Cent, or have Dimebag-like memorial services when they bite the grease trap, but that’s because the blizzard of recipe rap CDs and videos hasn’t…
Here’s a twist: accidentally stumbling into the restaurant business and finding love. Usually the love comes first, spawned by the illusion of glamour inherent in the prospect of running your own canteen. A short time after the buzz wears off, these once spellbound operators start tearing their hair out by…
Out there in the cyber yards there’s a place called slick.com (political satire at its best!), a repository of assorted detritus and tripe. Here’s something useful: “The Code of Dalton.” “The Code of Dalton” lists a number of felonies and misdemeanors, outrages not covered by criminal codes. For example, under…
The sushi bar is serpentine. It also has an interesting endpoint set piece: a waterwheel. Yet the most fascinating element in this Japanese restaurant squatting in a former Uptown video rental outlet rests on the bar surface. It’s there, between the grout lines framing the large black ceramic tiles: The…
What can you say about Greek food? It’s hard to say, because there is so much to say. People tend to forget that Alexander the Great, well before he matured into an Oliver Stone gigabuck cinema dud, spread Greek culture, including cuisine, via brilliant military campaigns. Greeks are credited with…
The Landmark Restaurant has been in the Melrose Hotel for a long time, so it’s easy for it to tumble out of your dining awareness. Perhaps you spend most of your Melrose time in The Library bar, trying out different martinis while women of varying abilities croon to piano (put…
As Desert Storm fermented in Middle Eastern sands in 1991, Keith Simpson got an itch to become a soldier. He never got around to scratching it. More than a dozen years later, he dug his nails in. In the summer of 2002, Simpson chucked his job as an IBM computer…
Over on Travis Street, a man wearing a sandwich board stands on the sidewalk in front of Samba Room. He advertises dollar sushi and sake. This is how far we’ve come: a Cuban bar shilling sushi and rice brew for a buck. The city shudders, sobbing great streaming tears of…
Chaucer’s is what happens when investors have lots of money and space on their hands. You’d never know it from the outside, though. A few metal chairs and tables outside the front doors constitute a patio effort. Near the edge of the window is a lighted “open” sign, the kind…
The Greater Dallas Restaurant Association has released the results of the study it commissioned to examine the impact of the March 1, 2003, smoking ban in restaurants. And like a day-old Pall Mall butt dangling from the bright red lips of a hardened professional, the findings aren’t pretty. Drafted by…
