At this point on the dining timeline, Avanti Ristorante is perhaps better known for its longevity than its food. After all, more than a handful of restaurants execute its brand of Nor-Ital Mediterranean fare, often with better results. But Avanti has been doing it for 14 years; that’s a near…
Poor Caesar Barber. For the past 27 years, the cumbersome maintenance worker from New York tried only to meander harmlessly through life. But a gang of marketing toughs from McDonald’s and Burger King and other fast-food chains pummeled him daily with slogans. Teen-age hoodlums threatened to “super size” his orders…
Not long ago, Mud Bugs Cajun Café was known as the House of Voodoo, but the name was jettisoned swiftly, not long after it opened. You could see the scraps of plywood stacked in the rear from which the Mud Bugs signs were cut, painted orange and posted on the…
Venezia is a slice of institutional cafeteria ambiance done up in Italian red and green, with a heavy emphasis on the green. It has a counter up front and a dining room with tables covered in green and white checked tablecloths. An awning hangs over the semi-open kitchen with Christmas…
National prune breakfast month was in January. National egg salad week was April 12-16. National roast suckling pig day is December 18. Every scrap of kitchen fodder has a day or month devoted to it, from bicarbonate of soda (December 30) to cheese balls (April 17). So why shouldn’t Texas…
A tornado abruptly changed the course for Reata, the popular Fort Worth “cowboy cuisine” restaurant. In March 2000, the furious whirl ripped through Fort Worth, popping the windows out of the restaurant perched on the 35th floor of the Bank One Tower and flinging its furniture more than a mile…
A recent article on the Web titled “Pro Fishing is a Cash Cow” by James Swan, a media columnist for North American Hunter magazine, points out that there are more than 35 million sport fishermen (and fisherwomen?) in the United States, a number that trumps the golfer and tennis racketeer…
Most of us understand the concept of evil. We know from repeated prompting, for example, that a man who controls a nuclear arsenal, backs out of international accords, achieves power through dubious means and threatens other nations represents evil without question. Yet more than half of the voting population approves…
The noodle house was supposed to conquer the Dallas restaurant front, dotting it with shanties of twisting and slurping instead of fortresses of carving and chewing. Food pundits pointed to London and New York and Los Angeles, where noodle houses proliferate, and pronounced Dallas fit to breach this clique of…
Sometimes a good idea can smart right in the fly buttons. Just ask Sipango founder Ron Corcoran and his partner Eric Kimmel, founder of The Joint restaurant, publisher of the defunct Ouch magazine and international used rag hawker extraordinaire. Last spring, Corcoran and Kimmel had planned to open a hybrid…
Jeffrey Yarbrough (founder of Club Clearview and the new Deep Ellum club Open), the visionary entrepreneur who was first to tease Dallas with the noodle-house trend that never got traction, is set to open a bigger Dallas copy of Liberty Noodles, the pan-Asian noodle residence he opened in late 1997…
From the outset, this week’s Burning Question disturbed us. In days of yore, adventurers survived perilous tests of will and strength before reaching their destinations. Consider the travails of Xenophon and his 10,000, Beowulf, Ahab, Odysseus or George Clooney–invariably, members of such expeditions suffer some ill, whether brutally slaughtered by…
It’s hard to know when exactly you’ve come upon “a.” The sign says Abbotsford Court, a special-events facility, an indication that you’re about to enter a banquet space of some 15,000 square feet tucked behind Ferrari’s and Morton’s off Midway Road on a sea of Addison asphalt. But nothing denotes…
The Eskimo Cookbook has the following instructions for boiled owl: Take the feathers off. Clean owl and put in cooking pot with lots of water. Add salt to taste. The instructions for cooking a loon are even more succinct: Never cook a loon. Do not make loon soup. The book…
Here’s an idea for a great new “reality” program: Take a group of malleable–in other words, trendy–people and tell them to find an upscale restaurant in Dallas that shuns crème brûlée. Survivors will next scour Oak Lawn, Knox-Henderson and West Village in search of a place without a martini menu…
There aren’t many places around Dallas where you can eat a sea cucumber family-style. Heck, there probably aren’t many places outside of municipalities with China Town tracts that serve the wormlike sea creature. But the cucumbers are here at Chef Hsu, in various culinary treatments: braised, stir-fried and fried, and…
Waterfalls are mostly good things: They beautify yards and public spaces; they create white noise that can cause blissful drowsiness; and they make swell vertical thoroughfares to traverse in a barrel. But sometimes waterfalls kind of suck, especially if they invade your space when you already have one installed. Just…
It’s easy to imagine The Metropolitan on any corner in downtown Boston or Chicago. Unlike most Dallas restaurants parked in strip malls, high-rises or on thoroughfare frontage roads, The Metropolitan is in a structure older than your average Weezer fan. Lots older. The Metropolitan is part of the Stone Street…
Mark Maguire, founder of Maguire’s Regional Cuisine in North Dallas, is dressing down. Not changing from button-downs to Kid Rock pop-top tank tops, but from North Dallas to Uptown. Maguire calls his shift Maguire’s “M” Grill & Tap, a casual departure set to open in early November in the space…
Imagine, for a moment, a world without bartenders. A city of sober club hoppers, their vision unimpaired, would doom the latex industry–and that’s just one scenario. Envision Deep Ellum lined with antique shops, NASCAR fans sitting up suddenly and blurting, “Hey, them cars is just going around in circles,” literature…
If Alberto Lombardi possesses one quality, it’s persistence, gobs of it. He took a huge gamble on McKinney Avenue, installing Bizú, that natty slinger of mediocre Franco-American grub, in the former Sfuzzi space, which also served as a crypt for Coco Pazzo. When Bizú bit it, Lombardi slipped in Mangia…
For once I wish someone in Dallas would create a wine bar that follows the syntax of the billing and puts the “wine” before the “bar.” More often than not, the wine-bar designation is a shallow ruse used to draw denizens hoping to lap the drippings of sophistication into what…
