You can hear it, if you listen closely enough. Not the din of chitchat hanging in the high ceiling caverns like a thick blanket of smog, not the staccato of clashing flatware, but the jingle of coins muffled in plastic cups and the near-melodious throb of slot-machine bells. “No, it’s…
We’re mostly hostile to Dallas versions of Italian cuisine. It’s all so…Stouffer’s. But we had sappy soft spots for Rick Robbins of the slowly bled Eccolo and Kevin Ascolese, who turned fine Tuscan tricks at Mi Piaci and the euthanized Salve! He later found himself in the kitchen of Ferré…
“Food is life.” Promo materials for George Restaurant attribute the above quotation to George Brown, the lauded Dallas chef who just opened his own restaurant in the spot that was once home to the Riviera. Not only that, he has adopted the words as his personal motto. Though Brown may…
Café Pacific is a cliché. This is heresy. Shuffle into this bosom of Highland Park culture (Highland Park Village) and blurt such a thing, and you’ll quickly be felled by a 2-carat marquise bullet right between the eyes. But look at the place. Your feet are surrounded by black and…
Take a quick walk through the museum-like produce wing of Central Market and you will notice a frightening thing: brussels sprouts. The terror stems not so much from the sprouts themselves, which, in addition to liver, take top billing in most childhood meal traumas. It’s how they are showcased. The…
Henderson Avenue dinner and late-night cocktail conquistador (Cuba Libre, Sense, Candle Room, Fireside Pies) Tristan Simon has dumped his interest in the Mongolian-inspired Genghis Grill, the “create your own stir fry” concept he gulped from founder Jeff Sinelli two years ago. He sold the 10-unit chain to a franchisee that…
Taverna is ear-piercing. This is odd, because thought has been given to sound. While Taverna has a concrete floor, it has cloth-covered baffles in the ceiling to minimize sonic glare. Still noise sneaks through, leaving one to wonder what the roar would be if the ceiling were baffle-less. There would…
CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNIQUE TO: Stent Industry Shareholders and Venture Capitalists FROM: Stent Manufacturers Association of America President Arturo E. Bloc RE: Meat First let me congratulate you on our bold investments. Your significant funding has driven one of the most innovative medical devices ever devised: the stent, that expensive (yeah!) wire…
Saltimbocca’s! is billed as a bistro. A bistro is a small cafe, usually serving down-to-earth food and wine. But let’s look a little further: The Food Lover’s Companion says the word is also deployed to describe a small nightclub (the French bistrot means pub). Let’s scan the place. The main…
I’ve been to the Ritz. The Ritz was a hangout of mine. And diner, you’re no…So Ritzy’s is back. You remember Ritzy’s, don’t you? Of course you don’t. It’s been wounded and moaning for more than a decade (and it’s horses they shoot?). But in the early 1980s, back when…
L’Ancestral is an icon, a dignified one. It’s among the first slices of French to braise its way onto the Dallas landscape without the excessive continental puffery. An elderly man sits alone at one table, his back against the wall. He wears a coat and tie. His shirt is tucked…
Maybe the prognosticators were right, those who said the next great wave in restaurant trends is Indian fast food. This is counterintuitive on its face. Indian cuisine is by nature complex, a jet stream of reverent aromas that blast the mind into reflection in a way a sub with provolone…
The best way to beat the Dallas restaurant smoking ban is to pay homage to it with bricks and mortar. Build yourself a smoking bunker; seal if off from the rest of the dining guests. Make sure those prone to long stints in nicotine fog pass from bunker to restaurant…
Twenty years ago it was hot, this collection of retrofitted and spit-polished early-20th-century warehouses. The neighborhood’s edge was the sharpest in the city. Parking lots brimmed with the rides of the A-list. Bodies, money, sex and alcohol sluiced through the West End and its Dallas Alley “entertainment complex” of nightclubs…
Paradise means different things to different people. To some, it might mean grains of white sand speckling the lime slices in your umbrella beverage. To others, it might be a 38D casting shadows over your Bud Light. To a select few, it might mean drinking expensive gin from a Ferrari…
Joseph Gutierrez likes doubles, or so it seems. After all, he earned his big “D” fame as chef at the helm of Voltaire before it went Bamboo Bamboo before it went bust. Then he opened Rouge. Now Gutierrez is taking over the Watel’s space (Watel’s shuttled over to Allen Street)…
Think of Little Katana as the Dallas version of a city hot-dog cart. You’ve seen them in some urban locales: steam tables on wheels with potato chip sacks clipped to a riser; beverage bottles displayed in a row just above the bin where franks and sausages swelter in caged clouds…
Some whisperers contend the Dallas restaurant business is bracing for a couple of body blows. First, there’s Delta Airlines pulling out of its Dallas hub. “They’re not thrilled about it,” says Tracey Evers, executive director of the Greater Dallas Restaurant Association (the restaurateurs, she means). “Those people eat out a…
Figaro Café was Le Paris Bistrot for several years. It tanked. Owner Jean Michel Sakouhi blames it on the freedom fries syndrome: the point in time after the start of the Iraq war when the French were getting drunk on anti-American condescension and Americans were pouring Bordeaux down the bidet…
Dallas restaurant publications come and go with the regularity of…well, regularity. Dining Book, Dallas Food & Wine Journal, Vine Dallas–there are probably others. Wait a minute; didn’t The Dallas Morning News once have a quarterly insert magazine called Wine & Food that disappeared really Quick? See how fast the go…
Water. Maybe it’s a myth that the secret to great pizza is water. Dallas has notoriously bad water. It’s so hard you could break your nose splashing handfuls of it into your face in the morning, which means it’s better at waking you up than making your pizza rock. There…
Steak drives men to ramble. Specifics? Monte Morris. Before Tristan Simon and his merry band of Consolidated Restaurant operators lured him to run Cool River Café in Las Colinas, Morris was burrowed in a steak house up in Denver. Then Simon broke from Cool River to launch Cuba Libre, bringing…
