Though it may be sheepish wishful thinking to suggest it, the Dallas restaurant market appears to be locked in the straining grunts of a rebound. I say this because the city’s most hexed strip of asphalt (and paving bricks), McKinney Avenue, is making recovery noises. Sources say the space that…
Fondue is dangerous. The special forks are long and sharp with rippled tips that function almost like fishhook barbs, though not as effectively. After piercing cubes of beef or chicken or shrimp, the forks are plunged into hot oil or boiling broth, the moisture from the food exploding in a…
Daddy Jack Chaplin, the Dallas restaurateur who turned his back on Texas citizenship and hightailed it for Connecticut, just struck a deal with Tim Dorsey of Fairmount capital to bring more Daddy Jacks restaurants to the Dallas area. The deal, which calls for one Daddy Jacks restaurant each year over…
A couple of weeks ago, the Burning Question crew chanced to sit at a bar next to Ron Dawson, a pleasant 63-year-old gentleman…well, his head still whips around violently at the sight of an appealing pair of breasts, but otherwise he seemed proper enough. “The problem I’m beginning to realize,”…
In many ways, Perry’s is just another steakhouse. The steakhouse formula has been perfected for so long in the Dallas restaurant crucible that it seems any competent restaurateur can sleepwalk through the execution. Perry’s dubs itself a classic Dallas dinner house, which could mean several things, from Black-eyed Pea to…
Thirty or 50 or 100 years ago, Dallas resembled every other American city. Hotter, perhaps, overrun by Baptists and maybe a bit chagrined over that assassination thing, but otherwise pretty much the same: dining on standard Euro-American fare, with a few exotic dishes tossed in. Then Chinese foods hit the…
The temperance movement reappears in odd ways sometimes. Just ask Barry Adler and his business partner, Phillipe Naovri. In December, the pair opened Buddha Bar in the space near Lovers Lane and Inwood Road that once housed Marrakesh, Dallas’ only Moroccan grub-shoveler. But a couple of weeks ago, Adler and…
Scented Geranium suffers from an affliction that strikes restaurateuring neophytes and veterans alike: culinary inconsistency. Granted, getting what are often complicated dishes singing on the same note time and time again without fail is a tough thing to accomplish, especially on days when the kitchen staff hasn’t shown up or…
More than one person has tried to make a local wine and food journal fly in Dallas. There are even some bodies to testify to this. Remember the Dallas Food & Wine Journal launched in 1995? That big-format magazine lasted only two issues. But Mike Whitaker, who publishes The Link,…
Ed Bamberger, the one-time IBM public relations professional who transmogrified into a Dallas food writer pumping out prose for Dallas Home Design magazine, America Online/Digital City DFW and Where Dallas magazine, has traded his pen for a Cupid barb. Bamberger purchased the Dallas-Fort Worth rights to Single Gourmet (www.singlegourmetdfw.com), a…
Way back in grad school, the Burning Question crew devised a cunning plan to wrest free beer from our favorite nightspot. Our scheme involved weekly visits to the bar, befriending the owner and dating the waitresses–and it worked well. Indeed, even now, when we revisit our past, the DJ plays…
Norman Abdallah says it’s narcotic. He says it more than once during a short conversation, so it must be something he really believes. He has another restaurant concept with Fired Up Inc., the company he founded with fellow Brinker International alumnus Creed Ford, and he doesn’t say this about its…
It might seem that Tristan Simon, founder of Cuba Libre and Consilient Restaurants company, is getting a little megalomaniacal on his Henderson Street turf. First there’s Sense, the upscale bar he’s opening across from Cuba Libre in March with Bob’s Steak & Chop House founder Bob Sambol. Then a few…
Steve Kelly describes 2001 as a series of irresistible shocks smashing against a once-solid food-service industry. “We went like gangbusters last year,” recalls Salve’s executive chef. “Then this year the convention-center remodeling drove convention business away, then September 11, and then down, down, down.” It’s no wonder Kelly feels as…
Left in the hands of suit types, cuisine often fuses, blurs and finally melts into a stain on a spreadsheet, homogenized beyond recognition. At least that’s how it tastes sometimes, after some “hot” cuisine trend has been mainstreamed and sanded into milquetoast. It might not be fair to characterize Z’Tejas’…
If there was ever a year that bulged with ups and downs, ebb and flow, mood swings and yin-yang fluxes, 2001 is that year. Only instead of a series of peaks and valleys, 2001 was more like a time line of troughs with the summits sheared off, leaving depressions that…
Just as bachelor cooking makes liberal use of ketchup and fire, Irish cooking makes liberal use of beer. Certain foods are simmered or soaked in Guinness or ale to add interest to everything else, which is boiled. Trinity Hall, the Irish pub in Mockingbird Station, is no exception to this…
Movies are for popcorn, lots of yellow-oiled, oversalted puffed kernels in a bucket the size of a Freightliner with a side tank of Coke. And some Twizzlers and Goobers to chew on as the credits roll by while you try and figure out what the hell David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive…
Not long ago, chef Dominic Shipp and his wife, Stephanie Shipp, opened the Red Onion Bistro in Denton. It was an effort to bring sophisticated fare to that northern suburb, and it was mostly successful in its quest. But then the Shipps decided to move from their strip mall location…
The French always complicate things. From brandy to sparkling white wine to butter, everything they produce succumbs to regional designations. While Land O’ Lakes tastes the same whether dolloped on bread at the French Room or melted over Eggo waffles in the Burning Question crew test kitchen, France labels butters…
It’s been said that if you took all the broiled steaks served in Dallas restaurants on any given day and laid them end to end, you would have enough meat to pave all of Santiago Calatrava’s new Trinity River bridge designs and still have enough petite fillets to patch the…
If anyone has earned the right to label his craft “all peoples’ cuisine” (a proletarian twist on the tired “global fusion”), it is Avner Samuel. This culinary wizard has cooked his way around the globe with stops in Jerusalem, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Dallas and Boca Raton, Florida. As a…
