Names of dishes roll off the tongue with touches of lyricism: gumbo, jambalaya, muffuletta, po-boy, étouffée, red beans and rice. The syllables are priceless–spoken fragments that could easily give birth to endless haiku. Po-boy drowned in a Jambalaya gumbo gloat Teething étouffée Or not. But what if you toss DaZa…

Last time we sampled chef Bruno Mella’s craft, it was at Mel’s on Main, a short-lived Deep Ellum restaurant and bar featuring a mounted and framed butcher knife along with dinner plates autographed by Julia Child and Emeril Lagasse on the walls. There we sampled spongy swordfish with an ammonia…

From the outside, it isn’t much. It’s easy to miss: a double-decker strip mall stretch done in drab concrete gray with charcoal awnings. But the Nakhon Thai restaurant strip nook grabs you anyway because the word Thai is done up in bright red. Must stand out like a swank Manhattan…

Basketball announcer Marv Albert’s brief conversation with Marco Polo’s ghost: Marv: You’ve had a hell of a career. The silk road. Working the zone for head Mongol Kublai Khan. Playing some devastating offense at Hsiang-yang during the siege by the Mongol hordes. And then you did some time in prison…

MapQuest can’t digest Southlake Town Square. Punch in one of its Plaza Place addresses, and it strings you across the Mid-Cities, threads you through Fort Worth and dead-ends you in a residential area near a place called Lake Worth. Or at least it did on my first aborted visit to…

Tryst (the word) arouses with lascivious implications. A flood of them. The head swims in the salacious stew. Say the word. Tryst. Notice how sticky it is. Bound tightly between a pair of identical rigid consonants, tryst promises furtive sensuality. Tryst Restaurant & Bar draws on this promise, flaunts it…

Enter Cryovac. Invented years ago by a company called Sealed Air, which distributes everything from bubble wraps to extruded plank foams, Cryovac vacuum shrink bags revolutionized food packaging by injecting a burst of freshness into fish, meats and poultry sent through the distribution chain to the table. So it was…

Pinned to the server’s starched white jacket lapel is a long narrow ruby bar trimmed in gold–a ruby sliver really. Guest: Tell me about your red bar. Waiter: This is the red “i” in Bice. Guest: Say it again. Bee-shay? Waiter: Bice. Guest: Bee-say? Bee-jay? Bee-shay? Waiter: It’s like Beach,…

The European twists are there, to be sure: truffles, snails, pâté and Parma prosciutto. There’s a sort of winsome arrogance to the BLT, which is composed of brie, lettuce and tomato. In a sign of still more haute haughtiness, you can order the BLT with bacon–for an extra buck. But…

Steak–damn straight–is the mother’s milk of Dallas dining. When imagination fails you, when the prospect of culinary risk numbs the cojones, when the anxiety of outfitting a restaurant without mahogany, polished brass and frosted glass tulip blooms over chandelier bulbs paralyzes you, it’s best to load up on 1,800-degree broilers,…

Let’s put aside pup tents for a moment. The American cowboy is an icon of rugged individualism coupled with stalwart determination, plus a little recklessness thrown in. The cowboy myth is embodied in the stoic, emotionally distant adventurer. You feel it at Cattleman’s Steakhouse. The moniker on the canopy over…

It’s easy to get a sense of where the cash registers rang up cups of coffee and pouches of teriyaki jerky. You can tell by the cameras fastened to the ceiling tiles. Four of them are visible, and their site lines converge on an area near the four banquettes lined…