Gone Fishing

The tragically defunct (er, bankrupted) Jeroboam Urban Brasserie will soon have its Kirby Building corpse reanimated to swim with the fishes. Mike Hogue, founder of American Limos & Transportation and Go Fish Restaurant & Lounge in Addison, plans to transform it into Dallas Fish Market, an upscale fishmonger serving fresh…

Speed Stix

Use of the “royal” in Asian restaurant titles is rampant: Royal China Restaurant, Royal Chinese Restaurant and Royal Thai in Dallas, plus Royal East Asian Cuisine in Denton. Add to that list Royal Chopstix, five of them (a sixth on Parker Road in Plano was cut down earlier this year)…

Nip and Duck

If there’s one thing Lee Foster Fuqua won’t get caught doing, it’s making Texas plonk. (We call bad wine shee-yit, not plonk, a Texas wine cynic might correct.) But we’re not cynical. We have faith that Dallas can be home to wines that won’t make the French scream “Disney!” Fuqua,…

Blow Out

In the thick of country pitch-black, it’s hard to perceive the grandeur of Four Winds Steakhouse scenery. The night constricts everything to the narrow cone of headlights. The long, twisty pavement ribbon off of FM 47, wood fencing on its flanks, unravels just a few feet at a time. A…

Stirred, Not Shaken

He knew he was too old for nightclubs when they suddenly became an annoyance—strange for a guy who’s reaped millions from clubs such as Marquee and Light in New York and Light Bellagio, Caramel and Mist in Las Vegas, the latter three sold to MGM-Mirage in 2003. But it’s why…

Holy Buzz

Meditate. Live purely. Be quiet. Do your work, with mastery. Buddha said that. Shinsei borrowed it. This isn’t surprising. All manner of restaurants and nightclubs have borrowed Buddhist trappings to dropkick hipness into the vibe, which there isn’t very much of in Buddhism save for silence and the occasional “om.”…

Settling In

Luqa restaurant along with Petrus Lounge and Dallas Roof Gardens will open downtown on Main Street next Tuesday after a string of missed opening dates spanning the last year and a half. The opening spur? The nearly $6 million, 400-seat complex risked losing its eligibility for a tax subsidy if…

Alley Fat

Grill on the Alley is a New American sucker punch; a dining blitzkrieg, albeit one leavened with polished elegance if you don’t count the cheeseburger. And even that is shaped from certified Angus beef and has earned a “classic” designation. The Grill is a New American temple outfitted in an…

Who’s That Girl?

When Kenyon Price rhapsodizes about Isabella’s, his new Italian restaurant set to spring from Stonebriar Commons in Frisco, he speaks as though it were an actual lady. “She’s well-traveled. Her homes are in Lombardy, Veneto and Tuscany. She’s a very forward-thinking Italian,” he says of the restaurant allegedly conceived in…

Seriously Speaking

Yutaka is nothing if not a hole in the wall—a postmodern orifice at that. Bored out of a strip mall just north of the Hard Rock Café on McKinney Avenue, Yutaka has massive floor-to-ceiling pipes with huge bolts secured to fittings with large nuts. The pipes crowd out the cash…

Eat Your Spoon

Last time chef Tony Gardizi’s name was linked to a startup menu he was grinding Parmesan at Vino & Basso, the Italian restaurant and wine bar in the former Toscana space that collapsed under the withering fusillade of legal briefs and changed locks. Sometime after that he showed up at…

No Masterpiece

In Grotto there is a painting of a nude woman painting a cityscape. This is important. Because nothing encapsulates the complete Grotto experience like this image, tucked into one of the cartoonish murals smeared across the walls. “On the walls, our Felliniesque murals reflect the festive traditions of Italy,” reads…

Corndoggle

Bob Josserand is bullish on bullshit. It’s sexy, he says. As mayor of Hereford, Josserand should know. He lords over a town of some 16,000 people and more than 1 million cattle. Three and a half million chew their cuds within a 100-mile radius of his Panhandle home. “A million…

Vic’s Fix

Double Wide founder Jim Siebert, who left the Deep Ellum bar earlier this year, is no longer involved a bid to resuscitate the legendary Trader Vic’s restaurant once tucked in the circa 1967 Dallas Hilton Inn on Mockingbird Lane and set to reopen in the Hotel Palomar slowly coalescing in…

Hold ‘n’ Fold

Merkow’s steak is an ace of spades and a seven of hearts. Those are the cards Merkow’s Seafood & Steak owner Gregg Merkow was dealt when he pocketed $561,195 last year in a poker tournament at the Grand Casino Tunica in Mississippi. He used this win to capitalize his restaurant,…

Med Head

As of this writing, the spinach tragedy seems to be abating. Despite The Wall Street Journal’s headline “Spinach’s pain is arugula’s gain,” a New York Times dispatch revealed several East Coast grocery stores began restocking the iron-rich foliage as federal officials continued to reassure the public that the stuff was…

Nonsense

Sense, the groundbreaking private nightclub for well-heeled quasi-middle-agers, is no more, though it will live on to host private parties until the end of the year when its lease expires. Tristan Simon, creator of Sense and its sibling Candle Room, geared to aspirational 20- and early 30-somethings, blames Sense’s demise…

Dough Mine

The number of times Dallas has attempted to coach pizza to at least mediocrity seems uncountable. Of course, it’s possible we never really tried to perfect pizza. It’s possible we just put enough effort into these pies to differentiate them from cardboard. They still sell like hotcakes, after all. Some…

Blondie

So Consolidated Restaurant Operations Chairman Gene Street, who has confessed to a fetish for what he calls the Dallas blond mystique, has inked a deal to fill the former Star Canyon space in the Centrum with a Silver Fox Steakhouse in January. Or rather, operations partner Mark Loebs has. Loebs,…

Lucky 13

It’s hard to get used to the 4513 Travis St. address in this guise. Its predecessor Sipango was a temple of boho chic, a hall of used brick and mortar grit softened by dense nicotine cumulus roiling in the bar. The Cal-Ital cuisine, dispensed from a semi-open kitchen with a…

Birding Barcelona

After taking a dive as a headliner when Boston Market flipped pages to Chapter 11 some years ago, rotisserie chicken is staging a comeback. There’s Jack Ekhtiar’s Marco Pollo, which he hopes to expand. Now there’s Chic From Barcelona, which opened in late August in a former vacuum cleaner shop…

Scantily Clad

Craft is brevity. Look at the menu. It’s little more than a series of columns with headings such as “meat” and “pasta, grains & beans” and subheads such as “raw” and “gratin.” And it’s terse. Foie gras, for instance, is slipped–unadorned–under the “meat” and “roasted” headings. There is no prose…