I’m wondering how much more mileage will be drawn from the culinary fusion trends that have swept through the restaurant industry like Macarena-twitching through a political convention. Everywhere you look, someone is trying to fuse Asian ingredients with, say, the line of fine foods from Hormel, or fried bananas marinated…

Restaurateuring is a hard way to make a living, harder than any honest profession except perhaps those involving a set of erasable markers and an Amway starter kit. Running a restaurant is a risky endeavor fraught with start-up glitches, long hours, and little financial reward. But no matter how backbreaking…

What can you say about Watel’s? After 10 years in Dallas–defying the restaurant laws of the universe by getting better instead of lazier and crankier–the one thing above all others that you can say about Watel’s is that it’s a great place to eat an organ. In fact, in many…

Like the emissions-obsessed alarmists who just departed Kyoto in limousines and huge jet aircraft designed to carry a dozen people and a cocktail lounge, I’m concerned about an impending global crisis. Not the Al Gore kind of crisis where the planet warms and sea levels rise so that snorkeling skills…

The first thing that struck me about Palomino Euro Bistro is its name: Why would a place ostensibly patterned from a European cafe name itself after a horse popularized by Roy Rogers and his ride Trigger? General Manager George Korbel assured me there’s no special meaning associated with the name,…

There’s one thing that you can almost always count on in the restaurant business: A fairly decent, reasonably priced dining concept will inevitably evolve into a chain and go public, or its chef will become a licensed character and star in a Saturday-morning superhero cooking cartoon. This sort of evolutionary…

What I love most about Rainforest Cafe, that strenuously earth-conscious restaurant that looks like a foliage riot designed by Phillips Petroleum Co., is its seeming blindness to the juicy irony it serves up like a dribbling half-pound beef patty. This garish theme feedery and ecologically fortified gift shop was launched…

At first glance, the Yorkshire Club is a confusing venue. Situated on the 48th floor of the Republic Towers downtown, it’s spacious, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a long hallway decorated with original sketches leading to the dining room. Its whitewashed wood paneling and brick walls hold a few abstract paintings…

Over the last few years, regional cuisine has evolved beyond mere food. Today, the focus is less about what’s on the plate and more on “theme.” A cuisine is developed, primped, tweaked, tested, and cross-dressed with other regionally influenced grub until it becomes the basis for a restaurant concept. Then…

Dining at Hotel St. Germain is odd in a haunting, Ross Perot sort of way. While the space is rich and says all of the right things–historic elegance with an engaging personality derived from comfortable turn-of-the-century furnishings–little crazy-aunt-in-the-basement details and daughter’s-wedding-disrupted-by-Republican-operatives missteps crop up, making you wonder what the heck…

My first foray into Vietnamese cuisine was memorable not for the meal, but for the weather. The evening I visited a run-down storefront Vietnamese restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, it was 15 below zero, and sheets of ice covered the city with a hair-gel luster. And this restaurant’s idea of central…

As a representative for a New York book publisher several years ago, I spent a good deal of time traversing a few of the more scenically challenged states such as Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Illinois. Until I got my “Super 8 V.I.P. Club” card, I stayed in motels that…

There’s something about Joey’s that’s just slightly out of kilter, even a little manic. And in the two years since 24-year-old Joey Vallone–son of Houston restaurateur Tony Vallone–opened the place after raising an estimated $1.5 million in start-up capital on his own, the balance remains skewed. It’s not the round…

I don’t know what it takes to create perfect dining atmospherics. Something homey, perhaps, with lots of rich wood, rough-hewn stone, a roaring fire, fresh flowers, gauzy window treatments, and tables with thick padding so your elbows don’t get sore between courses. I do know, however, what it takes to…

“I’m going to have to get into this horse-racing thing,” an elderly woman chirped as she made her way from the betting window back to her table at Silks. “If for no other reason than to come here and enjoy all of this.” And that’s what you’ll find at Lone…

Aside from being situated at opposite ends of the hemisphere, it’s hard to imagine what Brazil and Texas have in common. All attempts to uncover harmonious congruence seem to put a gasket-blowing strain on credulity. Brazil is a geologically integrated nation with a web of rivers and tributaries spread over…

The thing I like most about Americans–about being an American–is that we alone among the world’s cultures really know how and what to eat. We consume food with speed, gusto, and purposeful inattention. For us, eating is nothing more than scheduled maintenance to be performed while immersed in other things…

Maybe grazing is best left to zebras or buffalo or $32 filets that were once West Texas cud chewers. I don’t know. But I remember in the mid-’80s when grazing became the hip way for the young and trendy to eat as well as label themselves gastronomically eclectic. And labeling…

California cuisine was first out of the chute. Then came New Orleans, Southwestern, and Florida. Florida? Yes. The Sunshine State, noted nationally for its European tourist eradication program, has entered the regional cuisine big leagues. Actually, it’s been there since the early ’90s, when it burst onto the scene with…

“Why not?” he fires back. Why not indeed? When you think about it, this response makes a lot of sense. But a lot of us still want to know why Avner Samuel moves around so doggone much. I mean, is he an insufferable prima donna who packs his sauce pans…

Value. It’s become a buzzword–True Value, Value Pac, value-added, Valujet, family values. What the heck does it mean, anyway? Going to a warehouse grocer and buying a pallet of off-brand “Cheerios?” Hocking your diamond navel ring to get a Lexus instead of a Chevy Cavalier? Does it mean cheap, good,…

“I like this place,” said a dining companion on one of my visits to Jungle Red. “It looks like, at the end of the day, you could just hose everything off and let it dry overnight. Don’t you wish you could do that in your house?” I’ve never actually thought…