Young restaurant veteran Marie Grove opened Stolik Restaurant Lounge (which means little table in Czech) one year ago with all of the relish and bravado that often blurs twenty-something vision. She abandoned a scholarship to attend Southern Methodist University to take the Dallas landscape by storm, promising to exploit what…
When asked to evaluate the art of bartending, few people mention the drink itself. “It’s not the drink, but your actions behind the bar that matter,” claims Manny Murillo of the Library Bar. By that he means a combination of attitude, customer service and attention to waitstaff. “You can get…
Saffron Room is soaked in amber. This is not surprising, given the luxuriously ruddy-yellow spice from which it takes its name. What is surprising is that this restaurant holds a mere 30 seats. This intimacy is exploited in the usual ways, with votive candles, sheers fencing the tables and pillows…
Now comes a lawyer who says I blew it. Roy Morris, an attorney representing former high-tech mogul Mark Floyd, says that statements published in the July 1 Hash Over column referring to Floyd as an investor in the defunct restaurant Vino & Basso are false. In that column, I referenced…
A Savory warning was delivered not long ago. The warning was this: Savory’s menu will change shortly, and when that happens you won’t be able to get the chilled Moroccan tomato soup. Time it right, because missing the soup would be a blunder. Forewarned, we slipped into Savory on time…
Europeans often complain that Americans lack sophistication, particularly when it comes to matters of leisure. Our faults are many: We refuse to stuff ourselves into Speedos; we regulate our lives with air conditioning and fail to keel over by the thousands when temps top the 90 mark…make that the 30…
Believe us, we’ve been involved in some pretty despicable acts. There was the night we convinced a noted chef to chug wine straight from the bottle. The day we filled our editor’s vial of miracle hair-restorer with Nair. The time we slipped several $18 hamburgers onto a friend’s bar tab…
Stolik means “little table” in Czech. The name is brilliantly captured on the menu: a tiny, crude, hand-stamped ink impression of a table, precisely pressed in the center of the creamy cover stock (a tiny barstool illustrates the bar menu). This expresses much: space, honesty, simplicity, warmth, timelessness. On this…
Old Hickory sommelier Darryl Beeson, a pro who has carved an impressive vine furrow through greater Dallas with stops at The French Room, The Mansion, Voltaire and Steel, says that 60 percent of the checks winding through the steak house’s coffers spring from locals. Given that Old Hickory is embedded…
The defining moment came on a Tuesday night at The Quarter. Clusters of men and women milled about and intermingled casually, but the night was young. A stunning, raven-haired woman named Jill explained that she and her friends hang out in bars “to get out of the house, regroup, find…
Employing Buddha to drive nightclub adrenaline is odd when you think about it. There are bars named after this enlightened fellow (here there was Buddha Bar before it went Bali Bar before it went bust), and Buddha busts and figures inexplicably fill nightclub alcoves, dugouts and pedestals. At Sambuca Uptown,…
Iron Cactus is the kind of place you reflexively rally around if you have even the tiniest traces of civic pride in your veins. Iron Cactus is just the sort of temple to healthy urban eating that Dallas needs in its endlessly fussed-over downtown: a sleek monument of brash architecture…
Remember the ’90s? Most of the world loved us, everybody had money to spend, we could kick back at Dallas restaurants and whip out a cigar…which reminds us: good thing we put an end to all that hanky-panky in the White House. Feel a lot better off now, we do…
G.F. Prime Steakhouse is excited about prime. A quick perusal of the menu confirms this. G.F. Prime has prime starters. G.F. Prime has prime salads. G.F. Prime has prime soups and sandwiches. G.F. Prime has prime entrées, prime “additions” and “The Prime Finish.” Are you primed yet? G.F. Prime is…
Weird how an entertainment complex centered on the afterlife is having such a hard time with the birthing part of the life cycle. But the on-again, delayed-again (mostly because of electrical transformer glitches) Purgatory on Main Street near Interstate 45 is cocked to shoot from the chute in the August/September…
Yeah, we downed dozens upon dozens of oysters while researching this week’s topic. Now we’re certain to die–this being a month with no r–and horny as hell. And yeah, we know those are just myths. No scientific evidence exists tying shellfish consumption to increased libido. Perhaps the story earned credibility…
The aroma of wood burning grills. The light bouncing from brightly colored glass. An atmosphere that’s both warm and sleek. A memorable experience, from A to Z. Zolon. This is the promo prose about Zolon, “an everyday bistro,” posted on the restaurant’s Web site. The words are crisp and snappy,…
All that’s left is the fat lady’s aria. Word has been pinballing around town and cyberspace for months that restaurateur Nobu Matsuhisa, who operates Matsuhisa in Los Angeles and Nobu in New York as well as restaurants in London, Tokyo, Aspen, Las Vegas and Malibu, is close to slipping a…
Not far from the bass-boat-riven waters of Lake Ray Hubbard is Heath. Heath is a town of roads that curl and hog-leg through a sprawl of open grasses and sod fields buckled together by occasional subdivisions of homes bearing monstrous footprints and modest circa 1950s and ’60s ranch houses on…
Funny how what is gritty urban charm for some is a fly in the foie gras for others. Just take Deep Ellum’s critically acclaimed Standard 2706 restaurant on Elm Street, which chef/owner Tim Byres shut down on Father’s Day. “We always tried to give our customers exactly what they wanted,”…
We confess: This week’s Burning Question reached us about, oh, eight months ago. Good idea, we thought at the time–but then we deleted it from our in-box by mistake. Fortunately, our editor kept a backup copy. Too bad he sent it the day our laptop fell from a second-story window,…
Il Mulino is the General George S. Patton of restaurants. Not because it is violently audacious or prances through Palermo and Messina–although it does flaunt langoustines from Sardinia–but because it is rife with a paradoxical snarl of highly calculated mannerisms and crudely whittled elegance bordering on caricature. Patton could be…
