Steel feel As a vicarious Porsche aficionado who’s driven one only once (a 1973 urine-hued Targa with a cantankerous second gear), I’ve always appreciated the tight link between fine German gearing and refined gluttony. First there’s Voltaire moneybag Scott Ginsburg, who opened what is allegedly the nation’s largest Porsche dealership…
It’s hard to gauge what kind of a mind would turn a restaurant rooftop into a forest. But Carrabba’s Italian Grill has done it, transforming the roofs on 16 of its restaurants into sloped gardens. Engineers brace the roof with steel beams and concrete slabs, dump roughly 90 tons of…
Cork screw It seems Julie Stevens and Clancy Martin (the latter of whom is part owner of Martin’s Custom Jewelers in Arlington) have pulled out of Cork, the wine and cheese bar they opened on McKinney Avenue in the spring of last year. Only they did more than that: They…
There’s a banner outside of Red Onion Bistro in Denton making note of its “adventurous wine and beer list.” This is like pulling up to a men’s boutique and seeing an unfurled banner that says “adventurous leisure suits.” If you have to call out your daring sensibilities, you ain’t got…
If there’s anything that can be said about Addison Circle, that fabricated suburban urban village that sprang up like a tax shelter around a huge blue metal sculpture composed of supine spindles, it’s that it breeds restaurants with a gerbil-like prolificacy. There’s Antonio Ristorante, Kampai Sushi & Grill, Avanti Euro…
Bastille blip It would have been fitting. But Whit Meyers of the Entertainment Collaborative (Green Room, Gypsy Tea Room) says the hoped-for opening of their brasserie Jeroboam on Bastille Day (July 14) most likely won’t roll. The sticky wicket appears to be a small piece of air-conditioning equipment that has…
Excellent Seafood & Grill is an exercise in suburban utility. It’s Spartan, efficient, and loaded with functionality, the primary example being the $5.49 lunch specials. For a fin and four bits you can get blackened snapper with baked potato, teriyaki chicken on rice, or fried clam strips with French fries…
You see the red horse everywhere, and not only on gas pumps. It’s on buildings. In parks. In shopping malls. And now it’s become a restaurant: one each in Dallas and Fort Worth. Folks rattle on with painful seriousness about this bit of iconography, about how it symbolizes Dallas and…
Village strokes The great thing about Dallas is the seeming ease with which people morph into independent restaurateurs. Consider former country club chefs Claude Judd and Curtis Higgins. They’ve abandoned slinging silage for the fairway set and set their sights on feeding those of us who wouldn’t know the difference…
After tasting Pyramid Grill’s steak tartare, a huge mound of milky pink pulp shaped like a loaf of rye bread, I began to wonder: Why does so much of the tartare served in Dallas, no matter what its species, taste like something plumbed from a bedeviled little Underwood can? So…
Fish fissure Bill Baine, who along with Randy DeWitt co-founded Rockfish Seafood Grill parent See-Worthy Restaurants (which either means restaurants with good eye-chart test scores or watertight restaurants with poor spelling test scores), recently chucked his 49.9 percent interest in the company for a price that included Half Shells Oyster…
Avanti Euro Bistro owner Jack Ekhtiar describes his new restaurant in Addison Circle in a way that is wholly at odds with its appearance. He says he wanted to create a restaurant and bar that was causally elegant, a place where people could be comfortable and enjoy quiet conversation without…
Got beef? Lena Rumore, ex-wife of Dallas steakhouse mogul Dale Wamstad (III Forks, Del Frisco’s), will get a shot at the skillful restaurateur’s beefy wallet. On May 26, the Louisiana Supreme Court denied Wamstad’s attempt to derail his ex-wife’s damage suit seeking a portion of the $22.7 million doled out…
If you want to give a restaurant a stress test in basics, go to dinner with a bunch of computer geeks, ones drooling with fickleness. That’s what I did, a trio of them, with clearly expressed systems specializations: hardware, software, and training. Never before did I realize that hoisting digits…
Among the few things that are striking about The Old Warsaw, that stalwart fine-dining venue founded in 1949 by Polish diplomat Stanley Slawik, is the Café Pierre ($9.50). It’s hard to get a grip on the exact formula and the preparation from a distance; it’s blended on a cart in…
Elementary Watson Edgar Watson has had little Dallas restaurant fits and starts for years. In 1983 he launched Adriano’s in the Quadrangle (where Dream Café is now), a restaurant he calls “the original yuppie Italian spot in Dallas” (where have all the yuppie Italians gone?). Adriano’s was also hailed as…
, 3309 Dallas Parkway, Suite 401, Plano 75093 (972) 608-1883. Open 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 11 a.m.- 11 p.m. Friday; 2-11 p.m. Saturday; 2-10 p.m. Sunday $$-$$$
Venus fling trap Venus Steakhouse & Supper Club, the new “cheek-to-cheek” dining and dancing lounge spawned by Shelly Dowdy, formerly of the FoodStar Restaurant Group, will open June 6 in the TGI Friday’s space on Lemmon Avenue at Douglas. And it looks like Dowdy has squirreled away some FoodStar refugees…
A mural covers the wall behind Deep Sushi’s sushi bar. It’s a cartoonish landscape with a tree strategically positioned to camouflage a drainpipe and a length of conduit within the tree’s trunk. Still, it has drama, even humor. A pair of samurai swordsmen, snarls on their faces, prepare to draw…
Honchos at the Stoneleigh Hotel, onetime home of the classic continental room Ewald’s and purveyor of some of the best sushi in Dallas, have decided to sharpen the culinary edges in this circa-1923 hotel. So they shuttered Ewald’s, the dining room launched by longtime Dallas chef Ewald Scholz, hung a…
Tuscan lurch It’s hard to tell how the once-trendy Tuscan glamour hut known as Toscana, shuttered since mid-February, will be resuscitated. One rumor, at least, seems to have legs, and that is that ex-Sfuzzi pros Michael Costa and Dean McSherry, creators of the consulting firm DMC Hospitality, will attempt to…
Many things have been crafted from old gas stations: coffee bars, topiary shops, car bra boutiques, bootleg 8-track dealers, galleries with fuzzy black light paintings. But a tapas bar has to be among the most original. Yet this is exactly what Ildefonso Jimenez–a key player in the founding of Café…
