It didn’t take long for it to succumb to the McKinney Avenue virus. Or was it those debilitating stout trots? Whatever it was, O’Dowd’s Little Dublin appears to be on ice. Last week a simple sign on the door said as much, but it’s hard to pin down what happened…
Renowned jazz pasta operator and White Rock Lake booster Jeanie Terilli is expanding her noodle forte to Frisco. She’s squatting in the former Soprano’s spot, which she hopes to have open by September 1 as Terilli’s Sauce, sort of a cross between a Trattoria and Burger King. Not that she’ll…
Sambuca is dark and narrow. This apparently is a requirement of jazz clubs. Jazz clubs must also be sultry, smoky and have the smell of stale spilled beer on concrete. Sambuca didn’t have much smoke, but it did have an aroma suspiciously similar to urinal deodorant cakes, which, when you…
It’s been going strong in Dallas since its inception in 1984. After 17 years of critical acclaim–and a kitchen run at various times by chefs David Holben and Lombardi Mare’s Tom Fleming, and now by former Hotel St. Germain chef Michael Marshall–The Riviera has successfully thrived in Dallas’ mercilessly competitive…
Silver Fox, the prime steak vision jointly dreamed by Gene Street and III Forks founder Dale Wamstad (a.k.a. Capt. Bob Cooper and Del Frisco) finally opened in Grapevine a week ago Wednesday after the projected April opening date came and went. But there are still a few crinkles to contend…
Sunday is the big day at Italian Cowboy, a sort of steak and pasta dojo dressed in operatic cowboy gear. On the Sabbath, Italian Cowboy holds what it calls lasagna mania, an all-you-can-eat flat-noodle frenzy that is perhaps the Italian version of the stampede. This mania kind of reminded me…
Felton is a tiny town in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, right in the thick of the redwoods. There’s little there to attract visitors except for the scenery and perhaps a secret spot known as the Garden of Eden Nude Beach on the banks of the San Lorenzo River. But a…
“Some individuals may have an allergic reaction to shellfish,” the Hurricane Grill menu warns. “The Hurricane is not responsible.” So puff up, blister, itch and swallow your medicine. But is the Hurricane responsible for the hurricane? Hurricanes are terrifyingly furtive beverages, unleashing their rum pestilence long after you’ve lost count…
Maybe finding restaurant space in Dallas isn’t as hard as it used to be. Or maybe things are worse than we think. After just a few short weeks of scouring, Texadelphia President Brian Mitts says he’s found a new home for the original Philly steak sandwich shop he and his…
That spot on McKinney Avenue and Monticello, the one that sizzled and popped with Dallas couture before someone pulled the plug on the glitterati frier, the one that elevated chef Gilbert Garza to prominence before he stepped down and escaped to a little neighborhood spot called Suze, has risen from…
Amie Bergess says the structure destined to be her new restaurant looks like a big skylight. She’s being generous. The former Ruggeri’s location on Routh Street looks more like a bombing ruin or maybe a brick Stonehenge. The roof has been shorn off. All of the walls have been ripped…
Just when you thought it was safe to raise your cholesterol level without the simultaneous blare of baseball, volleyball and extreme wrestling from 30-plus TVs, along comes Cape Buffalo. Cape Buffalo is diversionary neurosis expressed in building materials and electronics–a multiuse venue with live music Friday and Saturday nights, billiard…
Patrick Esquerré compares himself to God. Not in a megalomaniacal way but in an almost self-deprecating sense. Back in 1983, Esquerré successfully took an idea for a French bakery and café and multiplied it into more than 60 offspring sloughing off revenues topping $100 million. That first Le Madeleine was…
It is well known that Bonny Doon Vineyard founder Randall Grahm has an uncommon approach to wine. To say that he marches to a different drummer is grossly short of the mark. Grahm marches to a Martian linguist employing smoke signals. While typical wine prattle includes descriptors like “delicate hints…
Arcodoro & Pomodoro is really little more than a Sardinian set of Siamese twins that provides elegant fine dining and casual but lustful meat-picking with pizza under one valet awning. Yet this genetic aberration’s dual personalities are as striking as they are similar. Everything on the menu is available in…
Soprano’s, that “AmerItalian” restaurant that Bruce Kaminski opened in February 2000 in Frisco in the former Gulf Coast Seafood & Steaks space with the help of galloping chef Marc Haines (of Fish, Cuba Libre, Sipango, North-South, etc.), was locked up April 24. Kaminski, owner of Longshots sports bar in Addison,…
Sapristi! is Italian slang for surprise, or something like that. But what surprised me at this bistro and wine bar were the posters hanging on the wall. “They’re lithographs of the originals,” a manager said. And they don’t have much to do with bistro culture, at least not as far…
When Phil Romano’s pick-up-joint-disguised-as-a-French Luby’s (also known as We Oui) went the way of all fleshpots, the supposition was that Romano would send his We Oui chef Nick Badovinus on an all-expenses paid recipe-collecting world vacation and then open a restaurant in the young chef’s name. But it’s not to…
City Café is one of those Dallas institutions that is perpetually in danger of laurel-resting, of desperately clinging to the vigor for which it was known in an earlier time. Back then, its reputation was established simply by serving up new American cuisine with the edges tweaked just a bit,…
His modest home in Little Elm on Lake Lewisville is a bachelor-pad parody. Old newspapers and heaps of junk mail sprout like mushrooms in corners and under tables. Cobwebs and balls of dust cloud the narrow spaces under the couches. Tangles of socks, T-shirts and rumpled sheets are visible through…
After more than a year of chasing investors around Dallas with fresh fish ideas, lauded ex-Fish chef Chris Svalesen has finally landed. On Venus. Svalesen plans to dramatically transform Shelly Dowdy’s “swank” Venus Steak House and Supper Club on Lemmon Avenue, shuttered earlier this year, into a seafood restaurant. Work…
Puffs of acrid smoke plume from Teppo’s yakatori grill, a narrow metal cookery box covered with a bent and loose mesh grate. If you’re seated at the sushi bar near the grill, you get to watch the chef brush a diverse assortment of skewered animal parts with sauce and turn…
