Fish restaurant, the nationally lauded downtown seafood spot that businessman Steven Upright and chef Chris Svalsen launched some four years ago in what was then the Paramount Hotel, is now a floater, done in by hot air. According to Upright, one of the three air conditioner compressors on the building’s…
It isn’t hard to see why Tom Ruggeri sought to move his 15-year-old restaurant from the nook on Routh Street and Cedar Springs to across the street in the Quadrangle. After all, now he has a circular drive for Mercedes Benzes, BMWs and Cadillacs to be parked in perpetuity. Under…
Maybe he got tired of inhaling corks. Or maybe his liver joined a union and went on strike as he went from a sniff to a sip. At any rate, Dallas sommelier hotshot Daryl Beeson has cut back his involvement with Voltaire, a restaurant that has enough expensive wine to…
Somewhere in the dark corridors, behind the wood paneling, beyond the rows of mirrors framed in wood or brass, Bob’s Steak and Chop House must have hidden a couple of barrels of dining room testosterone. You can see the effects of hormonal excess everywhere. Bob’s reeks of culinary rutting gone…
It looks like a stage-prop fish market instead of something designed to dress up a restaurant. One whole corner of the bar at Sea Grill is a sloping bin filled with crushed ice. Imbedded in the ice is an assortment of sea life. Paving one slope is a batch of…
Dallas Texadelphia founder Tom Landis has a problem. It seems the original Texadelphia Philly cheese steak sandwich shop on Leonard Street is in the way of a boutique hotel that will allegedly go up on the property soon. “I think by summer there will be a 200-foot hole down there,”…
Steel is the super-hard result of a hellish fusion of iron with carbon. It’s a curious name for a restaurant that seeks to stand out from the crowd of “Asian fusion” offerings popping up like Rogaine fuzz across the Dallas area. But then again, the name wasn’t selected to serve…
Joseph Tillotson, owner of the Barley House, Eastside Grill and Muddy Waters, has just signed a lease for space at 1525 Main Street, one of the oldest (circa 1890s) buildings in Dallas’ central business district. There Tillotson plans to launch The Metropolitan, a two-story, 5,000-square-foot restaurant and bar. “We’re going…
Somehow, it’s incongruous to call a place serving American bulk cuisine levitated with Southwestern brushes The Abbey Texas Café. After all, abbeys were monasteries, and monasticism entails asceticism, or the practice of disciplined self-denial. This torment may include silence, a prohibition against private property, an embracing of bodily discomfort, poverty,…
The word that invades the mind after visiting The Silver Room is disparity–or maybe it’s dissonance. This dynamic starts with the room itself, which started out as the defunct 8.0 in the Quadrangle and ended up as 8.0 bereft of charm, or maybe interior decorating. The Silver Room simultaneously flirts…
Believe it or not, there is such a thing as palate fatigue, a condition whereby the taste buds peter out. But you’d never know it by listening to expert wine tasters. Because while their mouths say “cassis with the crisp horizontal aspects of weed ambling symmetrically into exuberant and lively…
If there is one thing Suze is about, it’s romance. Not the frilly, why-does- everything-smell- like-a- lady’s-underwear- drawer kind of romance, but the quaint, cozy, Bob Villa rusticity kind. Suze is a quietly austere, softly lit, thoughtful sort of love story, the kind that lets you fill in the blanks…
Fishbowl, that hip “Sixties pan-Asian” noodle-wok-sushi works that subsumed the lounge once soldered to AquaKnox, the posh sea-flesh parlor created by chef Stephan Pyles and Michael Cox, has now swallowed AquaKnox itself. Whole. AquaKnox owner Carlson Restaurants Worldwide shuttered the restaurant earlier this month and is in the process of…
Carson’s Palace is literally a megaplex: a huge adult entertainment game room with enough television screens (between 28 and 32, depending on which part of the press kit you read) to mush the brains of the entire population of Flower Mound. Carson’s not only sports a coat of arms with…
After two years of serving pancakes, omelets, cheeseburgers, meat loaf, and liver and onions, Buttermilk Café, that old-style diner that steakhouse mogul Dale Wamstad launched with the III Forks Trading Post months after III Forks, has blown out its pilot light. “We don’t ever want to hear the word breakfast…
You gotta love a dish that includes wet naps as dessert. Ribs are that kind of food, one that permits decent, churchgoing folks such as ourselves to behave like uncouth culinary heretics; a food that permits polite people to converse with brown rings around their mouths while spluttering chaw-hued spittle…
The amazing thing about Phil Romano’s abrupt move to ice We Oui was not that he did it so fast, but that he did it at all. Most operators, especially those with a creative streak as exuberant as Romano’s, tend to get so personally involved with their chef d’oeuvres that…
A big post card made its way into the Dallas Observer offices last week. On the front was a bright color photo of a Caribbean chicken salad with peanuts and tropical papaya. On the flip side was the recipe for the salad under the headline: “USA Peanuts…what fun tastes like.”…
Perhaps the best thing to do when visiting Gershwin’s is have a drink. Actually, this is the best thing to do when visiting any restaurant, but it is particularly important at Gershwin’s because the bar is spacious, warm, and well-stocked. Plus, it has a big fish tank with fish that…
Rumors up and down Greenville Avenue have the Milkbar, Kim and Holly Forsythe’s quasi replica of the bar in A Clockwork Orange, in a life-threatening jammiwam. “No, we’re not closing at all,” scoffs Holly, who says she’s traced the rumor to a competitor up the street. Indeed, Forsythe boasts Milkbar…
You must admit, it’s an odd name for a steakhouse. Steakhouses are more apt to tout their hangar-sized wine cellars and rosters of fine red wines. But Keg Steakhouse & Bar is more than just a place to let red-meat juice moisten your chin while dribbles of Cabernet ruin your…
One of the cool elements of the Paul Draper design in Lombardi Mare, besides the ice blues, the etched glass, and the swordfish heads jutting out of the wall above the semi-open kitchen, is the goldfish bowls strung up above the bar. Only they really need to give those fish…
