Italian cuisine has had a rough row to hoe in Dallas. Either it’s mostly mediocre, or it’s so expensive that it’s hard to digest more than on a monthly basis without rupturing something valuable. That means there’s a culinary niche for the daring to exploit, a ripe market for someone…
If there’s one thing Café Izmir founder Ali Nazary is passionate about, it’s donar k-bobs, at least for now. Though it may sound like a fund-raiser for a thousand Roberts, donar k-bobs are actually the Greek treat known as gyros (not pronounced like the term used to denote a whirligig)…
Salve Ristorante Italiano, the 9,000-square-foot, 170-seat restaurant launched by Mi Piaci founders Phil and Janet Cobb and Mi Piaci partner David Stubblefield, is closed. Opened in early 2000, the $3 million McKinney Avenue Milano-style restaurant has been the subject of death rumors for some nine months. Many restaurant-industry pundits predicted…
Beau Nash is a Crescent Court bauble, a patinated little room enclosed in glass and attached to a stylish bar planked with marble and squirted with brass. Tightly arranged works of art embroider the walls. Requisite white cloths hang from the tables. The main dining room, walled on one side…
For a while, it was kingfish. The Dallas Morning News drooled. D magazine ogled. Esquire magazine named it the best seafood restaurant in the country in 1997. When chef Chris Svalesen and businessman Steven Upright opened Fish (tagged “an upscale seafood restaurant”) in the Paramount Hotel in late 1996, they…
Geode is a restaurant I wanted to like. It’s got guts and lineage, after all. The interior is clean and crisp, with modifications that only slightly deviate from the innards it inherited from Bistral, the casual American bistro that was installed in this McKinney Avenue space by Dallas-based Richmont Corp…
Sometimes after searing acres of foie gras, you have to take a break and stuff a taco. Just ask George Papadopoulos. The much-lauded opening chef for millionaire Scott Ginsburg’s Voltaire restaurant has just landed back in Dallas after an eight-month sojourn in New York City and Philadelphia to ink a…
In many respects, Son Nguyen is a typical practitioner of Cao Dai, a Vietnamese religion that bubbled up from the spirit world in 1926. His voice is gentle but firm. He is dignified, yet relaxed. He wears a bright white tunic and a pleated black headdress. He is a refugee…
There’s a sight at Lobster Ranch I can’t seem to get out of my head. It’s in the lobster tank, which is behind a display case where other live lobsters crawl tentatively around crushed ice like Raid-misted mantises and huge North Atlantic salmon–silvery with tails that curl like scissors-scraped ribbon–are…
Last week it was reported in this space that Avner Samuel’s fledgling Bistro K, a kosher restaurant in North Dallas, had surrendered to an entity called Bagel Cowboy. It turns out that’s not exactly true. While the parent company of the restaurant is called Bagel Cowboy Café, the name of…
You wonder how long it can last. It’s tempting to put bets on it. But Paris Vendôme is a scene–a scene in a way that only Dallas can precipitate, one swollen from steroids or at least creatine. Its West Village quarters are perpetually surrounded by Lexuses, Beemers, Mercedes, Porsches and…
It feels like an old neighborhood nightclub in an aging industrial city or maybe New York, one hollowed out of the ground like a gopher den. The ceilings are low. The light is scant. And while it doesn’t have much in the way of coffin-nail clouds on account of political…
Bistro K, famed chef Avner Samuel’s stab at a kosher restaurant he sprung on North Dallas earlier this year, has suddenly shuttered. The only telling details of the demise in the kosher carcass are the disconnected phone and a sign taped in the window that mentions a soon-to-be-coming Bistro K…
Abbotsford Court, the banquet-facility arm of Wall’s Catering, has delivered an offshoot called “a,” a full-service restaurant situated inside a 15,000-square-foot facility. “a” features little flecks of dining exotica such as prime beef, Hudson Valley foie gras and timpano–a pastry crust jammed with pasta, ragu, meatballs, peas, chicken and mozzarella…
9 Fish is difficult. Not because the food isn’t good–it’s great–but because this esoteric restaurant is so infuriatingly remote, hidden deep in the monotonous bedroom community wilderness. Shoved way up in Frisco, on the leading edge of North Texas’ metastasizing strip-mall incursion, 9 Fish demands you traverse Dallas’ most notoriously…
To launch his next food, beverage and titillation projects, Sipango operator Ron Corcoron is bonding with a pair of new Dallas characters: Eric Kimmel, founder of The Joint restaurant, one-time publisher of defunct Ouch magazine and rag-picking clothing designer; and Sipango bartender Smokey Hill, a man Corcoron says can do…
The brothel burgundy that drenched everything–including the sagging velvet curtains–has been stripped away. The acoustical ceiling has been blown out and replaced by a glossy surface, recessed lighting and crystal chandeliers. Plus, there’s more window real estate now, so you can actually see the Dallas skyline instead of just a…
Chef Joseph Maher insists the color that drenches his North Dallas restaurant is not orange. “Actually, it’s papaya,” he corrects. “Papaya is my favorite fruit.” Whatever the hue, the textured color soaks Mirabelle’s walls, trim and, clumsily, the ceiling acoustical tiles. There’s a novel relationship between color and fruit swirling…
Tim Penn, who was the opening executive chef at Il Sole, has blown out of his most recent executive chef post at the lauded Bay Leaf restaurant in Deep Ellum. Bay Leaf owner Ronnie Crayton says Penn cut loose to pursue consulting exploits and to spend more time with his…
It’s difficult to approach a restaurant transplant like Roy’s with a whole lot of hope and without a whole lot of suspicion. From the press kit, Roy’s kind of seems like a Hawaiian vacation exhibit in the Palace of Wax, one with a toque-wearing Roy Yamaguchi facsimile tossing leis around…
Jennifer King has a passion for Italian ceramics. Her Plano home is punctuated with hand-painted plates, vases and pitchers in iridescent reds, greens, golds and blues. Along a wall in a small room are glimmering steel racks that hold cups, teapots, plates and loose ceramic tiles. This chamber is the…
What’s not to like about Ethiopian cuisine? It takes on different attractive personas, registering searing intensity (with jalapeño peppers and mitmita, a hot Ethiopian chili powder), manliness (lots of beef and lamb chunks) and familiarity (collard greens). But its most endearing quality is that it must be eaten with fingers…
