Not long ago, Mud Bugs Cajun Café was known as the House of Voodoo, but the name was jettisoned swiftly, not long after it opened. You could see the scraps of plywood stacked in the rear from which the Mud Bugs signs were cut, painted orange and posted on the…
A recent article on the Web titled “Pro Fishing is a Cash Cow” by James Swan, a media columnist for North American Hunter magazine, points out that there are more than 35 million sport fishermen (and fisherwomen?) in the United States, a number that trumps the golfer and tennis racketeer…
A tornado abruptly changed the course for Reata, the popular Fort Worth “cowboy cuisine” restaurant. In March 2000, the furious whirl ripped through Fort Worth, popping the windows out of the restaurant perched on the 35th floor of the Bank One Tower and flinging its furniture more than a mile…
Sometimes a good idea can smart right in the fly buttons. Just ask Sipango founder Ron Corcoran and his partner Eric Kimmel, founder of The Joint restaurant, publisher of the defunct Ouch magazine and international used rag hawker extraordinaire. Last spring, Corcoran and Kimmel had planned to open a hybrid…
The noodle house was supposed to conquer the Dallas restaurant front, dotting it with shanties of twisting and slurping instead of fortresses of carving and chewing. Food pundits pointed to London and New York and Los Angeles, where noodle houses proliferate, and pronounced Dallas fit to breach this clique of…
It’s hard to know when exactly you’ve come upon “a.” The sign says Abbotsford Court, a special-events facility, an indication that you’re about to enter a banquet space of some 15,000 square feet tucked behind Ferrari’s and Morton’s off Midway Road on a sea of Addison asphalt. But nothing denotes…
Jeffrey Yarbrough (founder of Club Clearview and the new Deep Ellum club Open), the visionary entrepreneur who was first to tease Dallas with the noodle-house trend that never got traction, is set to open a bigger Dallas copy of Liberty Noodles, the pan-Asian noodle residence he opened in late 1997…
The Eskimo Cookbook has the following instructions for boiled owl: Take the feathers off. Clean owl and put in cooking pot with lots of water. Add salt to taste. The instructions for cooking a loon are even more succinct: Never cook a loon. Do not make loon soup. The book…
Waterfalls are mostly good things: They beautify yards and public spaces; they create white noise that can cause blissful drowsiness; and they make swell vertical thoroughfares to traverse in a barrel. But sometimes waterfalls kind of suck, especially if they invade your space when you already have one installed. Just…
There aren’t many places around Dallas where you can eat a sea cucumber family-style. Heck, there probably aren’t many places outside of municipalities with China Town tracts that serve the wormlike sea creature. But the cucumbers are here at Chef Hsu, in various culinary treatments: braised, stir-fried and fried, and…
Mark Maguire, founder of Maguire’s Regional Cuisine in North Dallas, is dressing down. Not changing from button-downs to Kid Rock pop-top tank tops, but from North Dallas to Uptown. Maguire calls his shift Maguire’s “M” Grill & Tap, a casual departure set to open in early November in the space…
It’s easy to imagine The Metropolitan on any corner in downtown Boston or Chicago. Unlike most Dallas restaurants parked in strip malls, high-rises or on thoroughfare frontage roads, The Metropolitan is in a structure older than your average Weezer fan. Lots older. The Metropolitan is part of the Stone Street…
Restaurant creator Phil Romano has shed his Eatzi’s partner. Restaurant Giant Brinker International (Chili’s, Macaroni Grill, On the Border, Maggiano’s, Big Bowl) announced it would divest its interest in Eatzi’s and sell its share to an investment group led by Romano. “[T]he Eatzi’s transaction will allow us to concentrate on…
For once I wish someone in Dallas would create a wine bar that follows the syntax of the billing and puts the “wine” before the “bar.” More often than not, the wine-bar designation is a shallow ruse used to draw denizens hoping to lap the drippings of sophistication into what…
If Alberto Lombardi possesses one quality, it’s persistence, gobs of it. He took a huge gamble on McKinney Avenue, installing Bizú, that natty slinger of mediocre Franco-American grub, in the former Sfuzzi space, which also served as a crypt for Coco Pazzo. When Bizú bit it, Lombardi slipped in Mangia…
Even in Plano, everything about Bob’s is exaggerated, from the endless mahogany wood paneling to the near-golf-ball-sized jelly beans kept in a large bowl near the entrance. That goes for the drinks, too, especially the martinis. In truth, the martini is an appalling beverage to belt anytime before or during…
Maybe it’s no coincidence that Central Market’s serpentine maze empties into a delta of counters stocked with chef-prepared food, sandwiches and Paciugo Gelato ice cream. After all, this is the realm where margins are fattened. But will it fatten consumers, too? This Mecca of convenience dining is called Café on…
Henry Miller would be dumbstruck. The New York-born author of sexually explicit novels often castigated Americans for their chronic paralysis of taste and crude cuisine. “Americans will eat garbage,” he once wrote, “provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup, mustard, chili sauce, Tabasco sauce, cayenne pepper or any other condiment…
Tanked fish are often a default dining room décor item in the restaurant biz; a living bauble with a maintenance contract that fills the void left by enervated imaginations. You see them everywhere, mostly in salty water, flaunting their Day-Glo color schemes through a maze of rocks, vegetation and sometimes…
It’s pointless to point out how sushi restaurants have proliferated in the Dallas area over the past few years. It’s not a trend anymore. It’s a near onslaught. It’s easier to get strips of white tuna on a rice bumper than it is to get white shirts starched and on…
Caviar is the lusty ghost hovering around Marty’s Bistro, the full-service restaurant that grew out of the 59-year-old wine and gourmet food shop. And a rare ghost it must be. The left flap of the menu is riddled with explicit, blown-up color glossies of the stuff: a piece of toast…
The Dallas Morning News reported earlier this month that Phil and Janet Cobb’s Salve! was choked off by lawsuits. (Apparently this admission was contained in a press release that a manager at the Cobbs’ Mi Piaci refused to provide to the Observer stating it was crafted exclusively for DMN critic…
