Over tens of thousands of years, human beings harnessed fire, created language and developed rudimentary tools as they slowly learned to tame the land. Either that, or God, after designing our flag and writing up a neat little pledge to go along with it, provided such things to humankind fairly…
It’s pointless to point out how sushi restaurants have proliferated in the Dallas area over the past few years. It’s not a trend anymore. It’s a near onslaught. It’s easier to get strips of white tuna on a rice bumper than it is to get white shirts starched and on…
Tanked fish are often a default dining room décor item in the restaurant biz; a living bauble with a maintenance contract that fills the void left by enervated imaginations. You see them everywhere, mostly in salty water, flaunting their Day-Glo color schemes through a maze of rocks, vegetation and sometimes…
The Burning Question crew gathered recently at Sevy’s Grill in the middle of a workday for a…um…dental appointment. During our sojourn, bartender James Pintello mentioned something about atmosphere affecting the taste of a drink. “I’d order cognac if I was sitting in a library, with a leather chair and a…
The Dallas Morning News reported earlier this month that Phil and Janet Cobb’s Salve! was choked off by lawsuits. (Apparently this admission was contained in a press release that a manager at the Cobbs’ Mi Piaci refused to provide to the Observer stating it was crafted exclusively for DMN critic…
At one point in the classic movie Battleground, a lieutenant inquires about the location of a strategic bridge. When a sentry stammers uncertainly, the officer snaps, “You ought to be sure of things, soldier,” before leading his squad into the darkness. The lieutenant and his squad are Germans, by the…
Caviar is the lusty ghost hovering around Marty’s Bistro, the full-service restaurant that grew out of the 59-year-old wine and gourmet food shop. And a rare ghost it must be. The left flap of the menu is riddled with explicit, blown-up color glossies of the stuff: a piece of toast…
If there’s one thing Café Izmir founder Ali Nazary is passionate about, it’s donar k-bobs, at least for now. Though it may sound like a fund-raiser for a thousand Roberts, donar k-bobs are actually the Greek treat known as gyros (not pronounced like the term used to denote a whirligig)…
Italian cuisine has had a rough row to hoe in Dallas. Either it’s mostly mediocre, or it’s so expensive that it’s hard to digest more than on a monthly basis without rupturing something valuable. That means there’s a culinary niche for the daring to exploit, a ripe market for someone…
Beau Nash is a Crescent Court bauble, a patinated little room enclosed in glass and attached to a stylish bar planked with marble and squirted with brass. Tightly arranged works of art embroider the walls. Requisite white cloths hang from the tables. The main dining room, walled on one side…
Mass-market restaurant chains often take extraordinary steps to stress their particular ethnic identity. Cracker Barrel, for example, oozes Southern charm–that is, the South of Moon Pies, RC Cola, lynchings, Bonnie and Clyde and rabid defiance of all things learned–from every crevice. At Bennigan’s, hostesses greet you with obscure Gaelic phrases,…
Salve Ristorante Italiano, the 9,000-square-foot, 170-seat restaurant launched by Mi Piaci founders Phil and Janet Cobb and Mi Piaci partner David Stubblefield, is closed. Opened in early 2000, the $3 million McKinney Avenue Milano-style restaurant has been the subject of death rumors for some nine months. Many restaurant-industry pundits predicted…
For a while, it was kingfish. The Dallas Morning News drooled. D magazine ogled. Esquire magazine named it the best seafood restaurant in the country in 1997. When chef Chris Svalesen and businessman Steven Upright opened Fish (tagged “an upscale seafood restaurant”) in the Paramount Hotel in late 1996, they…
Sometimes after searing acres of foie gras, you have to take a break and stuff a taco. Just ask George Papadopoulos. The much-lauded opening chef for millionaire Scott Ginsburg’s Voltaire restaurant has just landed back in Dallas after an eight-month sojourn in New York City and Philadelphia to ink a…
When the British created a sitcom based in a professional kitchen, they turned out a consistently funny and relatively accurate series called Chef. You can catch it on KERA during those occasional periods of regular programming in between pledge drives. The best that American networks could produce was a deservedly…
Geode is a restaurant I wanted to like. It’s got guts and lineage, after all. The interior is clean and crisp, with modifications that only slightly deviate from the innards it inherited from Bistral, the casual American bistro that was installed in this McKinney Avenue space by Dallas-based Richmont Corp…
There’s a sight at Lobster Ranch I can’t seem to get out of my head. It’s in the lobster tank, which is behind a display case where other live lobsters crawl tentatively around crushed ice like Raid-misted mantises and huge North Atlantic salmon–silvery with tails that curl like scissors-scraped ribbon–are…
You wonder how long it can last. It’s tempting to put bets on it. But Paris Vendôme is a scene–a scene in a way that only Dallas can precipitate, one swollen from steroids or at least creatine. Its West Village quarters are perpetually surrounded by Lexuses, Beemers, Mercedes, Porsches and…
Last week it was reported in this space that Avner Samuel’s fledgling Bistro K, a kosher restaurant in North Dallas, had surrendered to an entity called Bagel Cowboy. It turns out that’s not exactly true. While the parent company of the restaurant is called Bagel Cowboy Café, the name of…
If the Burning Question crew learned one thing during our interminable grad school years, it was that meaning exists in each action and every creation, that cultural identity emanates from the smallest bit of Depression glass to the largest concert. In every product, design or activity rests clues to our…
Bistro K, famed chef Avner Samuel’s stab at a kosher restaurant he sprung on North Dallas earlier this year, has suddenly shuttered. The only telling details of the demise in the kosher carcass are the disconnected phone and a sign taped in the window that mentions a soon-to-be-coming Bistro K…
This weekend, Hola intends to brazenly flout Dallas health codes. It’s a one-time deal for the Knox-Henderson-area establishment: break the law, do it quickly and get away scot-free. Their fiendish plot involves a happy hour for Dallas dog owners, a gathering of people and their pets on the restaurant’s patio…
