Avner’s labor pains Unlike Bibendum the 100-year-old Michelin Man, Bibendum the tapas bar went flat after just three months. Sources say legendary bad-boy chef Avner Samuel (Bistro A), who launched the global tapas bar in the McKinney Avenue space that housed his restaurant “Avner’s” years ago, admitted he had miscalculated…
FoodStar shamble As of yet, no buyers have surfaced to take a chance on Mediterraneo and Toscana, the beleaguered restaurants of the bankrupt FoodStar Restaurant Group. The value of the restaurants is less than the debt load it’s dragging — at least that’s how trustee Rob Milbank put it in…
It’s hard to pinpoint the birth of the first chain theme or “eatertainment” restaurant. Was it Chuck E. Cheese or T.G.I. Friday’s? Maybe it was Bennigan’s. But this would only be possible if ferns and old signs could be considered objects of compelling amusement. No, it was Hard Rock Café,…
Where’s PoPoLos? One of the first things that was supposed to re-emerge from the FoodStar Restaurant Group’s ashes was PoPoLos. Original owner Maury Jaffer, who had sold the restaurant to the group in late 1997 for $1.1 million, got it back last fall on undisclosed terms. He made plans to…
Voltaire is verbose — not the witty 18th-century writer and philosopher who penned Candide, but the restaurant dreamed up by radio mogul Scott Ginsburg after his original plans to build a hamburger joint for his kids were derailed. The servers like to talk. “Your chef tonight is a gentleman by…
By almost any measure, Mediterraneo is a morgue. It’s 8 p.m. Thursday, a time when just a few months ago the critically acclaimed Plano restaurant would be buzzing. But this night the valet attendant stands alone under the awning, shivering from mid-December gusts and watching a paper cup tumble across…
I’m swearing off restaurant prognostication. Other than accurately predicting that Chuck Norris’ stogie lounge, Lone Wolf, symbolized the death knell of the cigar craze, every other prediction has been a bust. Last year, I confidently predicted (though, of course, not on the record) that the restaurant business in Dallas would…
What makes Thai cuisine such a tongue festival is the electrical intensity of the flavors, the stark textural contrasts, and the laser-like leanness of the ingredients. Sadly, far too few Thai or Thai-influenced restaurants pull this off. Most metroplex Thai excursions descend into plodding, viscous potpourris with only the occasional…
Chicken booger boo Dallas restaurateur Gene Street sounds exhausted after letting one wiggle out of his crosshairs only to have it bagged by one of the big boys. “We worked on it for a long time,” Street sighs. “We were real close.” The “it” to which Street refers is bankrupt…
Maybe it’s not surprising that gifted chef Avner Samuel, the man who single-handedly turned the word “peripatetic” into a cliché in Dallas, adopted the name he did for his global tapas restaurant. For Samuel, a compact and volatile Israeli, had the habit of never staying in one place for more…
Zagat 2000 Nobody needs to tell Texans we eat out more than everybody else. But a couple of New Yorkers went ahead and did it anyway. The millennium edition of the Zagat Survey of America’s Top Restaurants (a book that Andrew Lloyd Weber says obliterates the need for any other…
If you do one thing at Mel’s on Main, go to the restroom. Not that you may have a choice in the matter, especially after plunging headfirst into the horrid menu of “continental cuisine with an American flair.” Even if you don’t need to “go,” visit the john anyway, just…
Back in the early ’90s, Buick began a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to lure younger motorists into its fold of stodgy sedans. The bait was the newly revamped Skylark. One television ad featured California artist Ed Lister, who composed an abstract painting before the camera, inspired by the car’s odd sloping…
Sipango boingo Sipango has a new chef: Cole Kelley, former Breadwinners night chef who has also had stints at The Mansion, Dakota’s, Atlantic Cafe Too!, and Yegua Creek Brewery. Kelley replaces chef Marc Haines, who left the restaurant last month to lay the groundwork for an Internet enterprise dubbed Net*Chef,…
FoodStar burns-out Sputtering on the brink of fizzle for several months, FoodStar Restaurant Group was euthanized just before Thanksgiving when U.S. Judge Steven A. Felsenthal allowed it to slink into bankruptcy. The company had been locked in a tug-of-war since October 7, when former FoodStar President Michael Caolo attempted to…
Exposure to a horny toad must make you garrulous. How else can you explain the incessant chatter of the servers at Horny Toad’s Cantina? They want to know what you think of the menu, how your food looks, how it tastes, if it’s still good after 30 minutes, whether you’re…
There were no sushi rolls on our table, and this drew attention. Well, maybe there was one: an untouched California roll stiffening on a small dish. It was ordered for the 4-year-old at our table, but she was more interested in the tuna sashimi, plucking thick strips from a bowl…
Big hair hazard It’s little more than a steel-studded brick bunker garnished with bright flashes of pink insulation, but Phil and Janet Cobb, owners of Mi Piaci Ristorante Italiano in Addison, were itching to show off their next restaurant. Salve! Ristorante, a $2.5 million upscale Italian eatery scheduled to open…
I’m not sure I understand the thinking behind Citizen, the new preciously hip Asian restaurant launched by the M Crowd Restaurant Group, the same folks who birthed Mi Cocina, The Mercury, Taco Diner, and Mainstream Fish House. The menu, another one of those Pan-Asian blends glued together with a little…
Dog bites Not long after Club Babalu owner Alfredo Hinojosa announced plans to transform the disheveled and shuttered Arcadia Theater on Lower Greenville into Liquid at the Arcadia, an upscale Latin dance club, a neighborhood group calling itself the Barking Dogs of Lower Greenville raised its leg. Barking Dogs founder…
Question one: Why Abacus? Why name a cutting-edge restaurant for an ancient calculator made of wood, wire, and beads? Longtime Dallas chef Kent Rathbun says he and partner Robert Hoffman, a former Coca-Cola distributor, ruminated over and ran trademark searches on a long list of names before arriving at two…
“The superfluous, a very necessary thing.” — Voltaire. Scott Ginsburg rejected an earnest request to bring a photographer. No pictures capturing the momentous opening of his multimillion-dollar restaurant, Voltaire. Then again, this isn’t really an opening. It’s a dry run, a complimentary private viewing, a guinea-pig tasting, as Ginsburg calls…
