To understand The Porch, you need to understand the legend of Steve Stodghill. Stodghill is the humble Batman fanboy turned top fuel litigator who got rich investing in Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com. He rubs elbows with George Clooney, Jerry Hall and Elizabeth Hurley. Stodghill is the superconducting super-collider of the Dallas…
The long-awaited Joule Urban Resort, that 125-room $40 million-ish downtown boutique hotel and as yet unnamed restaurant to be operated by celebrity chef Charlie Palmer (Aureole in New York and Las Vegas), is now nameless. The hotel, bankrolled by Tim Headington of Headington Oil Co. LP, has dissolved its management…
Make your way to SushiSamba, even if it’s just for one thing and one thing only. If you can stand the thick swatches of bright pink, saturated red, pureed mango and searing green that merge and flood until diners are capped in bordello halos, if you can raise your threshold…
Restaurateur Robert Colombo (Trece, the upcoming The Club Dining & Drinks) is dedicating his next project to the elusive “O.” Not that “O,” but “O” as in organic and maybe ocean and original too. On June first, Colombo got ahold of the Samba Room space after Orlando-based E-Brands let it…
Maybe you’re a mutant. Maybe you’re the kind of bloke who wants to waddle down to Victory Park—noting the cognitive dissonance of the Blade Runner-esque Victory Plaza big-screen flicker dry-humping the art-deco American Airlines Center—and enjoy a relaxing nosh in a neatly trimmed banquette. Maybe you’re so creepy you even…
If you bring it to a vigorous boil, steaming off the wine lists, the flatware and the dainty flourishes with raw fish and Kobe beef, Victory Park dining can be reduced to two elements: noise and loud, color-shifting light. All the big names have it, from Nove’s wine room glittering…
Teiichi Sakurai, whose dining innovations include skewered beef tongue and live lobsters on ice that twitch and stare at diners seated in front of the open kitchen, has a jones for buckwheat. After selling off Tei Tei Robata Bar (to opening chef Katsutoshi Sakamoto) and Teppo Yakitori and Sushi Bar…
You’d think we’d get more Mexican than we do. The real stuff, the kind that grips you with such intensity you want to light a candle to the Virgin for dessert. We don’t light many candles, though. La Joya means “the jewel,” or some such. So right off the bat…
Vue is in the throes of perpetual face-lifting. Face-lift one: Vue (French for “view”), the Addison restaurant and its lounge Nine 7 Two, was changed from Veuve (French for “widow”) named in honor of Veuve Clicquot Champagne. Veuve parent Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy threw a wrench in that party with…
You can go to Nove Italiano and surrender your body and your mind to the overloaded sensory broadsides from the lights, the plasma screens and the speaker cabinets bolted to the ceiling and aimed to saturate every corner of the room with ruthless efficiency. You can gulp in the musky…
Robert Colombo specializes in reanimating the skeletal remains of Dallas’ after-dark hotspots. Or so it seems. First he and Billy Solomon stirred some tequila into Sipango and poof: out came Trece. Now Solomon and Colombo are frosting the Dralion Restaurant & Lounge or Drae or whatever it was with crocodile…
If this is the year of anything in Chinese zodiac parlance, it is the year of the disruptive tech rat, the upheaving cyber-pig, the transfiguring digital serpent commanding banks of fire-breathing servers. IPods and illicit file-sharing are pulverizing the recording industry. Google wire feeds and digital headline bundlers have transformed…
It’s a breeding pen, this North Texas prairie. Even the locals are doing it. The Porch for instance, Tristan Simon’s new casual American concept that stumbled mightily on construction delays rehabbing the old Barley House: It should be open by the time you put this under the parakeet. New York-based…
Dinner jazz. Tasty thought. Yet it never seems to take hold. Sure, there are the pianos in the steakhouses, the crooners in the bars gone smokeless, the odd guy on Wednesdays with the keyboard and the microchip section that spools out drum and bass emulations like so much warm Velveeta…
Don Ho is dead. He was laid low in mid-April by heart failure. He was 76. He was called Hawaii’s best ambassador. He was a Waikiki showroom headliner for 43 years. He hosted The Don Ho Show on ABC for two seasons. He sang “Tiny Bubbles.” Does Don Imus dare…
Greenville Avenue Seafood & Jazz actually opened December 7, but the official grand opening was just this week. Why the delay? Pipes. Wires. Fixtures. And too few nickels. “This is my first restaurant venture,” says Jason McCoy, 29, a Southern Methodist University MBA grad and former software consultant. And GA…
Roy Abraham Varghese has a God equation. It is self-evident. He sees it in a grain of sand. He sees it in bees, especially bees. By rights, bees shouldn’t fly. The haphazard way in which they beat their wings simply shouldn’t haul their pot-bellied bodies aloft. But they fly, hovering…
“Frisco’s first 4-star restaurant with a 3-star rating.” Chris Gangi says that’s a jab at The Dallas Morning News and its new restaurant rating system, which recently dispensed with awarding restaurants fractions of stars in favor of whole stars. The line appears on his Web site. Gangi thinks more of…
Jacket required. Tie recommended. No jeans. No shorts. No tennis shoes. The Mansion is not casual, not even the smart kind. But what’s this? “Y’all look at these at y’all’s convenience. Is this y’all’s first debut with our new chef?” The waiter is passing out menus. There’s been lots of…
I would like to introduce you to a very special lady… What you’ll notice first—besides the menacing rebar in a support post near the man slicing grooves into a concrete slab with a huge saw outside Isabella’s French doors—is that the waiters don’t pretend to know more than they do…
Stephen Meyer remembers the parade of prominent provocative thinkers who traipsed through McFarlin Auditorium in the mid-1980s when he was studying graduate-level mathematics at Southern Methodist University. So he’s bemused by the stance of the university’s science professors, who recently tried to shut down a conference he organized for April…
Vue restaurant and its sidekick lounge Nine 7 Two seem gripped by blunders. First, it had to change its name from Veuve (French for widow) to Vue (French for view) after Veuve Cliquot Champagne parent Louis Vuitton Mot Hennessy’s legal team threatened to bludgeon it with “trademark dilution” lawsuits. Then…
