Vern’s Place looks exactly like the kind of place my mom doesn’t want me to visit. So, I went. Well, I drove past it for a week and then I went. With some friends. For some reason, the barred windows made it seem a little unwelcoming. But the sign on…
To fully plumb the pleasures of tapas, it is essential to begin with a small cylindrical glass of fino, just a couple of ounces. Fino sherry (Domecq La Ina, $3.95) is a liquid throb that inflames and focuses the taste buds. Sherry sipping is a neglected gustatory ritual. This is…
I’ve been eyeing the Mr. BBQ bus in the convenience store parking lot at Maple and Wycliff avenues for a while. With its American flag and “2 for $2 sides” signs painted all over it, it’s pretty awesome-looking. And cheap-sounding. As I walked up, I noticed pretty quickly that nobody…
Like many from Dallas’ wine royalty—Van Roberts (Lola), Drew Hendricks (upcoming Charlie Palmer restaurant) and Kyle Kepner (once of Luqa, once of Kenichi, now representing Republic National Distributing Co.)—Paul Pinnell has a fruit fly up his Bouchard Chassagne-Montrachet over Dallas wine list prices. “The prices are obscene,” he says. “Our…
“Strip mall” used to mean a massive parking lot, a grocery store, a nail place (with some obvious name like “Nails Here”), a wacky wing place and a Blockbuster Video. Then there might be some labor-of-love restaurant that went under in three months, unless it was a buffet, and then…
There’s a certain lethargy to Stone Horse Bistro, a stiffness. It doesn’t completely unravel the place, but frays are visible through its gaunt earnestness. It appears on the appetizer menu, on the right side, under the heading “charcoal skewers.” Note four selections: lamb, sweetbreads, chicken gizzard and beef tongue. Enticing?…
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…
Former club owner Brad Priebe, who once owned Suede Bar & Grill down on Greenville Avenue and had his fingers in the Dragonfly Bar & Restaurant before it went through its many incarnations (Milkbar, Syn Bar) and burned down and is now a nursery or some such, has joined hands…
Sandra Lee was the oldest of five siblings and, according to her Web site, helped fashion quality meals for her family on their welfare budget. Thus began her Semi-Homemade empire of cookbooks, life and style guides, Food Network show Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee and various other projects that laud her…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
If only The Cape Grill were situated where ideally it should be. That is, a half-mile or less from a pounding blue surf, a stretch of white beach and a friendly boardwalk. Instead, this sunny indoor-outdoor seafood place sits smack dab in an ocean of concrete near the Quadrangle, where…
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…
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 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…
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…
Enjoy the wonder of the great outdoors in Dallas this summer on a restaurant patio. It’s like camping, but with real restrooms and deodorant, and there’s a place for whatever you’re in the mood for. For Carnivores and Veggiewhores I really like eating lots and lots of meat. Which means…
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…
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…
