While the Hilton Bella Harbor resort retail/spa/haute nosh complex takes shape on the western side of Rockwall along the shores of Lake Ray Hubbard, the east side will bloom a resort of its own. Parker Coddington, whose background is in commercial construction, will erect a 75,000-square-foot “family entertainment center” in…
Blue Canyon Kitchen is one great wail of kitschy vigor, so loud your ears ring. Aspen logs, fully barked, hang from the ceiling. Tables are ringed with chairs made from pruned sticks and branches and are upholstered in fake fur. Hollowed-out aspen stumps hold arrangements of pussy willows. Prime steaks…
From Los Angeles, a steroided-up sports bar finds its home in Victory. “It’s kind of like a pub meets ESPN Zone meets Bellagio Sports Bar,” says Lonnie Moore of the Los Angeles-based Dolce Group. It’s called The Boardroom, a $3.5 million, 7,800-square-foot upscale sports lounge to be injected this summer…
Embedded in the ceiling, high above the dining room, is a series of lighted, saucer-like depressions. Huge silvery propellers are fixed within, but they don’t spin like ceiling fans. They rotate in short, precise increments. To spin would invite bedlam. Servers would stumble with vertigo. “It’s very disruptive to the…
After plowing down the Hard Rock Café on McKinney Avenue and scraping the plot clean, Uptown developer Brett Landes is flexing his muscle with a 16-story boutique apartment complex rumored to have a couple of Dallas celebrity investors. Landes won’t confirm the celebrity part, but he has partnered with former…
Aft the Cliff Café’s gravel parking lot is a brick house—an ancestral McMansion with subtle ornate strokes that predate soaring chateau turrets and vaulted front stoop eaves. It’s perched on a patch of brown grass and spindly brush on an expansive lot. There is wood trim and mottled brick. The…
There’s magic to the kebab, properly prepped, fired with finesse over glowing coals. There’s a hairsplitting technique to properly trimming and cubing meats before stabbing and bunching them on a skewer. There’s a deep secret truth to the marinating and the seasoning and the splashing with onion juice. There’s a…
On the first Tuesday of every month, Phil Brantley hosts a conference call. He never knows who will be calling in, or from where. Brantley, a retired liquor store owner and one-time manufacturer of surge suppressors from Maggie Valley, North Carolina, took the baton from his mentor, self-made millionaire Jimmy…
Marcus Pineyro, the 20-something SMU grad who slicked up Mexico City street food with his Urban Taco taco lounge in Mockingbird Station last year, is expanding. First stop: DFW International Airport where he’ll ply his street fare in Terminal C near gate 22 come April. Then Pineyro will level a…
Chinese cuisine, with rare exceptions, is a mongrel of conformity in these parts: a risk-averse version of the intensely risky food. It’s transmogrified, morphed, tamed and sanitized, made pliant and meek. Sometimes you can barely recognize the stuff. Oh, there are the disheveled spaces here and there, hollowed out of…
There’s nothing worse than a crappy burger. OK, maybe a crappy hot dog is worse because it’s already made of crap and the crappy ones would have to be made out of something crappier. Anyway, chef Tim Love says there’s nothing worse than a crappy burger. That’s why the founder…
You can see the curving steel beams rise like a bump in the distance, cranes hovering over them like mantises, the spine arching out of a wave. Olenjack’s Grille rests in the thick of it, or what is likely to be the thick, standing ready to exploit intermittent captive audiences…
The Fish can be summed up in two words: sex and death. Not dead fish and bootylicious servers, but fish of death and high-backed banquettes done up in bordello-red suede with square portholes to draw out the sweaty voyeur in all of us. The Fish was founded in Houston. Its…
What is it about the Uptown bar business that makes bar people turn into Jell-O shot toughs, the kind who use fax blasts and stink bombs instead of baseball bats and Tommy guns? A little more than a week ago, a blizzard of faxes and e-mails swamped assorted Dallas inboxes…
The day Mark Lee opened Reikyu Sushi in Mockingbird Station five years ago he had $500 burning a hole in his business account. That was after he blazed through an $80,000 dad loan and the $180,000 bank loan he leveraged through Dad’s seed money. Back then he was 20 years…
Zen has something in it which makes it stand aloof from the scene of worldly sordidness and restlessness.” —D.T. Suzuki, May 1953 What strikes you immediately is its rigorous simplicity. Zen Sushi isn’t simmering a scene or riding a trend. It has clean, near-barren walls and stark wood tables and…
This much is obvious: Nick Badovinus wasn’t long for the Consilient Restaurants world. As founder Tristan Simon expanded his little Henderson Avenue fiefdom (Fireside Pies, Hibiscus, Cuba Libre, The Porch) into the exurbs, Badovinus’ role as dining room personality was diluted. He was governed more by economies of scale and…
James Rowland is a turnaround artist. He has taken rusted junkers, loosened stuck bolts, tightened loose nuts and finessed it all with a little salt and pepper. He’s turned greasy, grimy watering holes into coifed and tucked spots with manicured menus. Rowland breathes life into culinary afterthoughts, or more accurately,…
Chef Joel Harloff is gone from Screen Door. That’s put an opening drag on Scott Jones’ (founder of Café Italia with a new location in Oak Cliff’s Bishop Arts) new Southern cuisine concept in One Arts Plaza. Instead of opening early in the New Year, Screen Door will now open…
There’s something to be said for loose paper menus. Unlike the leather-bound ones, they’re easy to manipulate. You can fold them and slip them into your coat or purse without arousing suspicion. They’re easy reference points that can be consulted again and again—as the food arrives, as you eat, as…
Victory. It’s the biggest Dallas dining story of 2007—maybe of the new century, until some wily engineer figures out how to transform the Trinity River project into a profitable floating sushi buffet. Victory has it all: the steak; the wonderfully convenient parking chaos; the Swiss chard; the crowds in designer…
Tristan Simon and his growing and shifting (big shifts to come) Consilient Restaurants are back in the maternity ward. This week a Fireside Pies arrives in Grapevine. Next month, Fireside Pies opens in the Urban Bistro location on Inwood Road. Then in February, Simon re-sows his bar oats. After purchasing…
