A seismic wiggler is rippling through Deep Ellum. Not enough to crack the streets, but maybe enough to rustle the nose jewelry. Over the summer, the space once home to Mel’s on Main reopened as Main St. Sports Bar, a haunt that serves wings and other things that go well…
Not long ago, an article in The Wall Street Journal pronounced the era of dressing down for work dead. Uptight-and-starched was slowly creeping its way back into boardrooms and cubicles, the article assured. And it had evidence: A large custom shirtmaker noted a 12 percent uptick in white-shirt orders; a…
Donald Eugene Lytle looked at Americans long and hard, then grappled with our very souls, extracting a truth both frightening and self-evident. We complain constantly about our government, our bosses, traffic cops, editors or anyone else in authority. We are, according to Lytle, a bunch of independent-minded bastards. Yet instead…
Despite what many of us may think, or suspect anyway, former Voltaire executive chef George Papadopoulos is not relieved to be free of his Big D ties. In fact, he gets wistful when you bring up Dallas. “I loved it over there,” he says from somewhere in New York. “It…
What the film Pulp Fiction is to tersely cogent dialogue, Big Night is to food. Big food. Great food. Food assembled with painstaking and uncompromising joy. Big Night is a film where food stars as lyrical verse, the kind that seduces, inspires and casts off potent metaphors as it warms…
After a long search that included vetting, getting and bloodletting, Voltaire finally has found a new chef. He is chef Joseph Gutierriz, otherwise known as Chef Joseph. Chef Joseph trained at La Gastronome in the Basque region of France and Spain, and he’s plied his trade at such places as…
One fine day in the Big Apple, a restaurateur recognized New York Times food critic Eric Asimov scanning a menu. It was, in food-service industry terms, the equivalent of the moment before the landing craft hits the beach at Normandy–a brief and terrifying span between innocence and the unknown. In…
One of the most fascinating bits of Venezuelan trivia floating in cyberspace concerns ice cream. It seems an ice cream parlor in Merida, a semitropical city wedged between the highest peaks in the Venezuelan Andes, holds the world record for offering the most ice cream flavors. The shop serves some…
Big Shucks is a shack of torture. Not only do they make you stand in line to order food and beverages at the counter, they force you to remember every single item, from the gumbo to the full pound of steamed snow crab legs to the number of wine margaritas…
Former Fish restaurant chef Chris Svalesen is trying everything–anything–to bring cash flow into his 36 Degrees seafood restaurant. He’s opened The Net Result, his fresh seafood market attached to the restaurant, and he’s been serving dinner and Sunday brunch for at least a month now. Svalesen launched lunch service last…
Perhaps the modern measure of a city’s evolution, its maturity, its spastic lunges into sophistication, is the distinctiveness of its shopping mall food courts. Perhaps the days of greasy hung chow, fried chicken parts and bulletproof pizzas served in plastic baskets are waning. At least they are waning here, if…
Pastry chef David Brawley has rolled and caromed like a food-service pinball of late. First he cut loose from Phil and Janet Cobb’s Salve!. Then he made his way far up north to The Mercury, Mico Rodriguez’s flashy new restaurant in the Shops at Willow Bend. But that gig quickly…
Often, but not always, Indian food assumes the shades of warning signs and traffic cones. At Sitar Indian Cuisine, it’s the tandoori dishes that come out this way. Lamb chunks and chicken parts are bright orange, as if spray painted by some graffiti vandal. The tandoori is an Indian oven…
Damn. It’s frustrating to discover a restaurant’s signature dish spelled out on the front of the menu after you’ve trolled through a half-dozen or so mediocre dishes. But there it is, right on the plastic menu cover: “Half Shells Seafood Grill, Home of the Oyster Nacho.” Not that I know…
Its beige brick façade is hardly flattered by the dim brown trim edging the roof. The sign above the front awning has the word “Buckner” hastily scrawled over the word “Barbecue,” done up in neat block letters. It seats roughly a dozen. “It’s kind of a small, intimate setting,” says…
Emeril Lagasse has a nightly show on the Food Network, a failed sitcom and a catchphrase. He is, in the currency of the times, an American icon. Clint Stoerner quarterbacks America’s team. He is merely a future trivia question. Strange, but true. Flipping through cable, browsing newspapers or magazines, even…
Nothing is the same anymore. Case in point: It’s been reported that at college career fairs, the longest lines are in front of the CIA recruitment tables. Another pointed case: Tom Landis, a co-founder of the Dallas Texadelphia Philly cheese steak restaurant chain, is running for Dallas mayor. He says…
Many, many years ago, a man named Peter Zenger defended the rights of a free press with such vehemence that the idea became sacrament. In the Gulf War–and today–the media chafed under censorship restrictions. Reporters protecting sources for a sensitive story occasionally end up in prison. But the Burning Question…
Pastazios bills itself as a parlor steeped in New York breeding. The menu boasts authentic Big Apple pies. The inside of the restaurant, dressed in diner-ish duds, doesn’t give anything away, but there are lots of New York profile photos, one of which prominently features the World Trade Center towers,…
It’s hard eating pasta with rippled Arnold’s thick Austrian accent warping “hasta la vista, baby” through your head. It’s hard to focus on the pasta, the crepes, the shrimp, the scaloppine, the one wall with wine bottles imbedded haphazardly into the plaster. It’s even hard to reconcile that wall with…
Mongo Man is a 9-foot “warrior mascot” who has the thankless job of traveling around to the various restaurants in the BD’s Mongolian Barbecue chain. That means Mongo Man has the unenviable task of frolicking around some 26 locations from Texas (Las Colinas, Plano) to Colorado, Illinois and Florida. Mongo…
Onetime Dallas wunderkind Doug Brown, who made his mark atop the Wyndham Anatole at Nana Grill before cutting bait for Palm Springs, has clawed his way back from California to the large D. It seems his stint at Murial’s Supper Club went sour after the venture’s main investor lost a…
