This may be the age of Deans. One Dean beat the odds and bolted to the top by out-sneering a pack of Democratic dwarfs with an Oval Office jones. Another Dean is mining millions from a restaurant industry sweating through the post-tech-bubble-9-11 malaise. Only this Dean puts his Dean up…
Royal Tokyo is a piece of history, forged on griddles and refined over seaweed strips, that reaches its crowning summit on a slab of creamy beef. This curious route began three decades ago. It was elaborate, fabricated by Japanese master carpenters and draped in garden architecture with bonsai trees, waterfalls…
It’s not only freedom fries and a plunge in American tourism and wine sales the French have had to contend with. Now they have to cope with the marginalization of their grub. Although Whit Meyers, who oversees food and beverage for the Entertainment Collaborative, insists Francophobia isn’t the reason the…
Cuisine emerges from a culture and its environment. Or so we’re told, anyway. Self-styled “foodies,” members of the slow food movement and agitators who decry globalization tend to be rather scathing in their opinion of processed meals, super-sized orders and other aspects of mainstream American cuisine. They somehow forget that…
Tracy Miller and Alice Cottrell believe their restaurant is haunted. They’ve heard stories from construction workers, toiling well into the wee hours, telling of eerie sounds humming through the spaces in the historic Boyd Hotel where their restaurant took shape after the pair operated a catering company for six years…
Dallas restaurant legend Gene Street, chairman of Consolidated Restaurant Operations, confirms he’s set to gobble the servings of another Dallas magnate: Scott Ginsburg. According to Street, Consolidated is close to sewing up a deal to pick up Ginsburg’s recently shuttered Bamboo Bamboo on the corner of Keller Springs and the…
Let us admit something right off: As kids, we hated equations of any kind. We barely passed “math for athletes” in high school and found a loophole in college that allowed us to slide through four years…well, technically six…with nary a course involving numbers. At least our school featured a…
Some of us have peculiar habits. Some of us suffer under peculiar rules. Abstaining from wine with dinner is a peculiar habit. Dry is a peculiar rule. This was brought home to me on a recent visit to Coppell when I stepped into Siam Thai Cuisine, a tiny strip mall…
A facile reading of the Dallas bar scene might draw upon the primeval hunt as an appropriate metaphor. After all, the urge to pursue and capture is evident throughout American culture, from literature to cartoons to homeland security. Be the prey road runner, white whale, red baron or sloshed babe,…
It covers some 22,745 acres, but its maximum depth is just 40 feet. Normal water clarity is murky, even turbid. Yet Lake Ray Hubbard is regarded as a swell recreational depot with lots of good fishing (bass, catfish, crappie) and sailing, though there are no camping areas, beaches or swimming…
Joseph Gutierriz’s inauguration into the kitchen was spiritual. And short. At age 5, he was shipped off to seminary where he learned to cook for monks. “In Spain, in Catholic families, when you have a son that is a priest, you have a safe gate to heaven,” he says. In…
Perhaps the greatest piece of wisdom Voltaire never said was uttered by Confucius: “I have never seen one who loves virtue as much as he loves sex.” Which has absolutely nothing to do with restaurateuring unless you sub virtue with great food and sex with money. Bamboo Bamboo, a casual…
Sociologists who from time to time peer into the American psyche invariably describe a selfish, avaricious people. Yet clearly they’ve failed to probe far enough, for tactless one-upmanship is only the most visible layer of our culture. Deep down, we’re a people more inclined to self-immolation than self-love. Who among…
It’s always an iffy proposition to wander into a dining room as desolate as a godforsaken rock formation. Sure, it could be an undiscovered sliver of raw sublimity, a hidden bit of dazzle. But it could also be a puff of culinary stench of such potency that it keeps diners…
Our range guide was a veteran of the first Gulf War, so it wasn’t hard to steer the conversation to the lingering mysteries of the sequel. Saddam? “Dead,” he said tersely. WMD’s? “Buried deep in the desert,” came his reply. The paltry resistance of the vaunted Republican Guard? Only a…
Monica’s Aca Y Alla can be called a lot of things. But hell? Yet that’s how owner Monica Greene describes it, as she attempts to compare the new soundproof room she plans to open in August in a former furniture store next to the restaurant. She calls the room Raziel,…
A few millennia ago, the Spartans settled a dispute by sending a single warrior to face the enemy’s fiercest man in what ancient texts called “the battle of the champions.” To the victor went control of the Peloponnisos. We devised a similar test in response to this week’s Burning Question:…
At the heart of Smith & Wollensky is this slogan: “A steak house to end all arguments.” This comes clipped from a headline over a 1997 New York Times S&W steak house review by critic Ruth Reichl. The piece centered on an annual argument in her family over three New…
Right now, it’s a ghost town. Not one born of death and abandonment, but of birth and anticipated growth. There are a few things: a children’s store, an Asian fusion restaurant called Café Beignet and a toy store. But more is on the way. Much more. Above the storefronts rest…
Imagine a film set in the badlands of Japanese cattle country. Our movie follows a bunch of tough hombres–John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott–fending off Mothra and the occasional kamikaze, massaging the herd after a few beers and gathering around the campfire to sing karaoke while “Cookie” whittles up a…
It wasn’t long ago that chef Tim Byres was tugged from New York City into Dallas to fiddle with noodles at Tom Tom Noodle House, the casual West Village Asian restaurant developed by Triple R Group. But Byres, who also crafted the menu for Triple R’s Nikita, wasn’t able to…
He pulls it out from a manila folder stuffed with other old photographs. “This is me,” says sushi evangelist Scott Melton, pointing to one of three boys in short-sleeved white shirts with slivers of black ties slicing across their surfaces. “It’s kind of Lee Harvey Oswaldish, isn’t it?” It was…
