At one particular Thai restaurant in my neighborhood, I have endeavored for close to a decade to earn the approval of the hostess/waitress. The food is stellar and the seating cozy, but the lady (I’ll call her Thai Waitress) has officially written me off as a medium-spice wimp. Doesn’t help…
Dinner jazz. Tasty thought. Yet it never seems to take hold. Sure, there are the pianos in the steakhouses, the crooners in the bars gone smokeless, the odd guy on Wednesdays with the keyboard and the microchip section that spools out drum and bass emulations like so much warm Velveeta…
It’s a breeding pen, this North Texas prairie. Even the locals are doing it. The Porch for instance, Tristan Simon’s new casual American concept that stumbled mightily on construction delays rehabbing the old Barley House: It should be open by the time you put this under the parakeet. New York-based…
Greenville Avenue Seafood & Jazz actually opened December 7, but the official grand opening was just this week. Why the delay? Pipes. Wires. Fixtures. And too few nickels. “This is my first restaurant venture,” says Jason McCoy, 29, a Southern Methodist University MBA grad and former software consultant. And GA…
Don Ho is dead. He was laid low in mid-April by heart failure. He was 76. He was called Hawaii’s best ambassador. He was a Waikiki showroom headliner for 43 years. He hosted The Don Ho Show on ABC for two seasons. He sang “Tiny Bubbles.” Does Don Imus dare…
“Frisco’s first 4-star restaurant with a 3-star rating.” Chris Gangi says that’s a jab at The Dallas Morning News and its new restaurant rating system, which recently dispensed with awarding restaurants fractions of stars in favor of whole stars. The line appears on his Web site. Gangi thinks more of…
Jacket required. Tie recommended. No jeans. No shorts. No tennis shoes. The Mansion is not casual, not even the smart kind. But what’s this? “Y’all look at these at y’all’s convenience. Is this y’all’s first debut with our new chef?” The waiter is passing out menus. There’s been lots of…
When you stop by McCarty’s in Richardson—and you should—ask one of the regulars at the bar about the time a guy tried to make off with the stuffed and mounted wild boar’s head. There are two of the heads hung high in the back room of this wood-paneled Irish-themed restaurant/pub…
I would like to introduce you to a very special lady… What you’ll notice first—besides the menacing rebar in a support post near the man slicing grooves into a concrete slab with a huge saw outside Isabella’s French doors—is that the waiters don’t pretend to know more than they do…
Everyone says it’s the beef. It’s the cut. It’s the animal. It’s the grade. Sometimes it’s the broiler: all 1,800 degrees worth. At N9NE Steak House, the broiler is 1,200 degrees: “1200öF: We proudly serve prime aged steaks and chops,” reads the menu. From there the choices unravel: filet mignon…
Vue restaurant and its sidekick lounge Nine 7 Two seem gripped by blunders. First, it had to change its name from Veuve (French for widow) to Vue (French for view) after Veuve Cliquot Champagne parent Louis Vuitton Mot Hennessy’s legal team threatened to bludgeon it with “trademark dilution” lawsuits. Then…
Seafood is brain food” says the motto on the menu at Fish Express. Given the name of the place, an expectation of good fish served quickly would seem to be a no-brainer. Here, however, they have adopted the Amtrak model of “express.” Place an order at the walk-up counter on…
Grace Jones’ voice spills from the lounge and hovers over the table. These are the hazards of placing a loft lounge over your dining room. The rhythms of one hijack the cadence of the other, stirring up discordant stew. On another occasion it was even more explicit. Thumps from the…
In retrospect it seems Luqa director of operations Kyle Kepner was a commander not so much of a layered urban restaurant-lounge but of construction delays and indigested ambitions. Luqa and Petrus Lounge (originally conceived as Cascades) went through years of false starts, missed deadlines and millions in design and construction…
What about the dinosaurs? This is often the question posed when science wrestles with God, when empirical evidence scrums with Scripture. The big bones are clearly in the ground, but Tyrannosaurus Rex is absent from the Bible—a huge reptilian omission for a book with a reptile clearly playing a starring…
Beau’s is like a temporarily rearranged living room, the kind you’d disassemble and neatly refit to absorb extras guests. Sure, its setting in a quarter of the Crescent Court lobby is elegant. The glass tables are thick, with an opaque appliqué on the bottom giving them a sandblasted look. There’s…
This week Trader Vic’s, the classic repository of tiki culture and gaudy cocktails, reopens to apparent anxious expectancy stoked by nostalgia. “There’s a multitude of people coming by,” says Rusty Fenton, a principal in Realty America Hospitality, which is reanimating Trader Vic’s. “It’s like a Mecca. Our PR is almost…
To say the service and pacing of courses at Le Rendezvous is leisurely is to make them sound too rushed. This newly reopened French place on the southwest corner of Royal Lane at Preston Road adheres to the classic continental style, meaning continents could shift a smidge in the time…
What’s most amazing about Little Katana, the Travis Street edition, isn’t the food, though some of it is astounding. The Asian bouillabaisse for instance, is as orange as a road hazard cone and hot enough to jiggle tonsils (more on this later). No, what’s most amazing is the Little Katana…
N9NE, Park Cities Prime, BLT. Steakhouses are the kudzu of the Dallas dining industry. Sure, there’s a culling every now and again: Smith & Wollensky, GF Prime, Fleming’s, Ruth’s Chris, etc. But they come back thicker and pricier, wearing more feminized plumage. Can our gullets and bill clips sustain them?…
Indian cuisine is an unruly knot of temperaments. It’s not easy to tame. It’s even harder to unravel and understand once it is tamed. Take curry. It’s a simple word that has multiple meanings. It’s a fragrant leafy herb. It’s a paste composed of clarified butter and powerful spices. It’s…
This trip is strange. After messing around in mountainous Breckenridge, Colorado—not skiing, but snowshoeing, camping and dropping bobbers in lakes—chef Kevin Ascolese is back in flattened Dallas. Ascolese, you’ll recall, etched his résumé in some of Dallas’ finest stabs at fine Italian—Sfuzzi, Mi Piaci, Salve! Ristorante and Ferré. Now he’ll…
