Following months of speculation he was doing it, chef Gilbert Garza finally did it, or at least admitted he did it. After roughly a year of working in the kitchen, Garza bought Suze, the near Northwest Dallas neighborhood restaurant that was Going Gourmet before former Mediterraneo kitchen grunt Suzie Priore…
Tacky misses the point. The outside of the restaurant is painted red, the kind of crimson that occurs when you leave tomato sauce on top of a flame too long. Positioned at various points along the wall are Romanesque statues brushed with antiquing stain or maybe old clam sauce. Strings…
The warning sign came in the form of a beige Melmac plate with a floral design nuzzling the edge. It was hard to look at the faded hamachi (yellowtail), smoked salmon, and red maguro (tuna) stitched with milky strands of something and arranged over the plate, because it seemed so…
Peter Tarantino, erstwhile restaurant owner who operated Tarantino’s Restaurant, Bar & Lounge near Fair Park, is having a bumpy ride looking for that “good job” he expressed an interest in after Tarantino’s literally went down the toilet (bad plumbing). His gig with Shannon Wynn’s Eight 0 Management Inc., where Tarantino…
Maybe eating raw fish and raw sea-critter eggs is extreme, or at least it used to be in Dallas before sushi restaurants started popping up on the face of the metroplex like little red Clearasil targets. But what about fish? They have some pretty extreme dining habits too. Case in…
Spaghetti and meatballs. It’s the stereotypical Italian dish, and it’s ubiquitous. You can find it frozen, in cans made by chefs with names that sound like bathtub toys, or freeze-dried for hikers so that people who commune with horseflies, skip bathing for days on end, and dine in the dirt,…
By many accounts, the 65-plus-year-old Greenville Ave. Bar & Grill was somewhat of a sewer by the time it was clamped shut in late April, albeit one that leaked malt suds. Yet after just a few months, this watering-hole landmark is poised for a resurrection. Four bartenders from Primo’s on…
There’s little that’s special or notable about PoPoLos Café. And that’s why it’s so special. The food isn’t particularly imaginative, but it’s mostly well prepared, and this is accomplished without pretension. The atmosphere is simple and clean without a hint of hauteur. That this restaurant could get back on its…
The onset of the new millennium has not been kind to Reata, the Southwestern-style steakhouse roosting 35 floors up in the Bank One Tower in downtown Fort Worth. In fact, it’s kind of unraveling it. It began March 28 when Reata, whose name is Spanish for “rope,” got in the…
Up north, where Coit performs thoroughfare intercourse with Arapaho, where dwarf trees are bred because shade trees would create a pool-clogging crisis, a huge banner flaps in the wind. It’s tethered to Ziziki’s, a little dining room with black and white ceramic floor tiles and teal awnings that look like…
After nearly a year of collecting dust while its rows of fountain jets squirt decoratively in front of the for-lease sign, the space that was once Mediterraneo at the Quadrangle before it was PoPoLos at the Quadrangle, which before that was J. Pepe’s, has a new tenant. Ruggeri’s Restaurant is…
The thing you don’t want to do in a restaurant called We Oui is default to crass mode by playing double entendre with the name, especially in a Dallas brasserie with a menu that’s an American-French mutt. No. That would be like serving pork n’ beans at a wine tasting…
Santiago Peña is back to cutting up and bending metal for restaurants. The sculptor and construction contractor, who made his mark on Dallas dining by welding thematically relevant forms for Star Canyon and AquaKnox, recently finished work on a new restaurant, Thai Tango in Flower Mound. Peña says he studied…
The slapping pitter-patter thump of the tabla is contemplative. It’s soothing and eerie. And this is what they pipe through the sound system at Udipi Café, a restaurant in Richardson serving South Indian vegetarian cuisine. The tabla is coupled with flutes that rise and fall with the intensity of the…
It’s like an Indo-Chinese revolving door, that space. Back in 1996 it was Saigon Savor. Then it was Saigon Bistro. As Saigon Bistro is how I remember the space. It seemed more elegant back then. That’s because it was. Carpet — or maybe it was big throw rugs — hugged…
Jeroboam flight Bam. Anile’s gone. That fast. With the opening of Jeroboam–the brasserie set to crystallize in the Kirby building downtown–just a couple of weeks away, Jim Anile, the former Melrose Hotel executive chef who was set to commandeer the menu, has flown west to work at a new hotel…
It’s Saturday night, and Shelly Dowdy is gliding across the floor of her restaurant in a tight-fitting gown that envelops her Rubenesque form like an iguana skin. An animal-print wrap is slung around her waist. She looks scared. Venus Steakhouse & Supper Club is packed, and the American Cancer Society…
It’s a hard thing, dining in an Ethiopian restaurant while armed only with cocktail napkins, because no matter how hard you try, sauce drippings and food tailings always manage to smudge your palms and clog the spaces between your fingers. Ethiopian food isn’t eaten with utensils. It’s pinched with torn…
Run Daddy DMC Some have an uncanny ability to hitch on to listing ships and then bail before the water warps their loafers. But since Michael Costa (FoodStar Restaurant Group) and Dean McSherry (Sfuzzi) launched their consulting firm DMC Hospitality, they’ve affiliated mostly with floaters, Ketama Tapas Restaurant and Guitar…
EuroTex Café is a racquetball court of a restaurant that echoes with Elgar instead of slaps of spherical rubber. Trickles of sound bounce off the walls too, from a fountain with four frogs leaking water from various orifices. EuroTex Café is a clean, fresh downtown lunch and breakfast spot serving…
Poop friction Sadly, Tarantino’s is gone, flushed down the sewer. Literally. “I’m getting out,” says Peter Tarantino who opened the Italian-Mediterranean tapas restaurant across from Fair Park in September 1997 with his brothers Patrick and Matthew. “There’s a bad taste in my mouth.” It’s a taste no doubt fomented by…
La Valentina was by far the best eating experience we’d had in Cancun, though you might be thinking that isn’t saying much, as pirate ships are rarely repositories of culinary excellence.
