Sometimes the Burning Question crew suspects that the editors wish us jail time, disfigurement, death or worse. It’s not that they necessarily hate us, mind you. They just have this thing about deadlines. More than once they’ve sent “goons” around to “teach us a lesson.” Fortunately, these goons are really…
It isn’t hard to see why Tom Ruggeri sought to move his 15-year-old restaurant from the nook on Routh Street and Cedar Springs to across the street in the Quadrangle. After all, now he has a circular drive for Mercedes Benzes, BMWs and Cadillacs to be parked in perpetuity. Under…
Fish restaurant, the nationally lauded downtown seafood spot that businessman Steven Upright and chef Chris Svalsen launched some four years ago in what was then the Paramount Hotel, is now a floater, done in by hot air. According to Upright, one of the three air conditioner compressors on the building’s…
In an old Warner Bros. cartoon, Daffy Duck ambles south of the border, knocks back a shot of tequila in a local saloon and stiffens suddenly, wide-eyed and pale–much like an unprepped George W. facing reporters without Daddy’s friends nearby. Tequila once served as a drink for the masses, powerful…
No one in the restaurant industry wears the “trendy” label without complaint. They scowl when they hear the term and quickly correct unwary types who direct the word at their establishments. Rock Gennaro, mâitre d’ at Samba Room, launched into a lengthy and impassioned denial when the Burning Question crew…
Somewhere in the dark corridors, behind the wood paneling, beyond the rows of mirrors framed in wood or brass, Bob’s Steak and Chop House must have hidden a couple of barrels of dining room testosterone. You can see the effects of hormonal excess everywhere. Bob’s reeks of culinary rutting gone…
Maybe he got tired of inhaling corks. Or maybe his liver joined a union and went on strike as he went from a sniff to a sip. At any rate, Dallas sommelier hotshot Daryl Beeson has cut back his involvement with Voltaire, a restaurant that has enough expensive wine to…
Dallas Texadelphia founder Tom Landis has a problem. It seems the original Texadelphia Philly cheese steak sandwich shop on Leonard Street is in the way of a boutique hotel that will allegedly go up on the property soon. “I think by summer there will be a 200-foot hole down there,”…
Every once in a while the Burning Question crew selects a topic so straightforward that we pursue a few minutes of effortless research and spend the rest of the weekend bowled over in a drunken stupor, participating in events we vaguely remember, thanking those responsible for Miranda rights. But we…
In a moment of clarity, the very late Frank Zappa pointed out that “you can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team or some nuclear weapons,” he continued, “but at the very least you…
It looks like a stage-prop fish market instead of something designed to dress up a restaurant. One whole corner of the bar at Sea Grill is a sloping bin filled with crushed ice. Imbedded in the ice is an assortment of sea life. Paving one slope is a batch of…
Joseph Tillotson, owner of the Barley House, Eastside Grill and Muddy Waters, has just signed a lease for space at 1525 Main Street, one of the oldest (circa 1890s) buildings in Dallas’ central business district. There Tillotson plans to launch The Metropolitan, a two-story, 5,000-square-foot restaurant and bar. “We’re going…
Other than a few odd moments of confrontation–Fred and Ginger bickering over pronunciation, Dan Quayle “correcting” a grade school kid’s spelling–the potato (sorry, Dan) enjoyed a relatively placid existence over the years. For example, through war and protest, boom and bust, the classic mashed potato recipe remained a dinner staple,…
Steel is the super-hard result of a hellish fusion of iron with carbon. It’s a curious name for a restaurant that seeks to stand out from the crowd of “Asian fusion” offerings popping up like Rogaine fuzz across the Dallas area. But then again, the name wasn’t selected to serve…
The word that invades the mind after visiting The Silver Room is disparity–or maybe it’s dissonance. This dynamic starts with the room itself, which started out as the defunct 8.0 in the Quadrangle and ended up as 8.0 bereft of charm, or maybe interior decorating. The Silver Room simultaneously flirts…
Denny’s hasn’t changed much, according to Bridgette Goode. Back in 1991, 18 members of a black youth group attending a civil-rights conference in San Jose, California, tried to enter a Denny’s restaurant. The staff asked them to pay in advance for food service and to pay a cover charge–must have…
Pet rocks died, as all pets eventually do–especially when they are just inanimate hunks of stone. Mood rings turned a permanent, dismal mauve. Leg warmers unraveled. The XFL, well, who really cares? All fads wind up their brief and pointless lives in landfills or antique malls or syndicated television. But…
Somehow, it’s incongruous to call a place serving American bulk cuisine levitated with Southwestern brushes The Abbey Texas Café. After all, abbeys were monasteries, and monasticism entails asceticism, or the practice of disciplined self-denial. This torment may include silence, a prohibition against private property, an embracing of bodily discomfort, poverty,…
Fishbowl, that hip “Sixties pan-Asian” noodle-wok-sushi works that subsumed the lounge once soldered to AquaKnox, the posh sea-flesh parlor created by chef Stephan Pyles and Michael Cox, has now swallowed AquaKnox itself. Whole. AquaKnox owner Carlson Restaurants Worldwide shuttered the restaurant earlier this month and is in the process of…
St. Patrick supposedly drove the snakes from Ireland many centuries ago. Naturally, Americans celebrate his feat by descending on bars and destroying brain cells en masse. It all makes sense, somehow. To do it up right, however, many celebrants spend part of the holiday in a pub. Of course, Dallas-area…
If there is one thing Suze is about, it’s romance. Not the frilly, why-does- everything-smell- like-a- lady’s-underwear- drawer kind of romance, but the quaint, cozy, Bob Villa rusticity kind. Suze is a quietly austere, softly lit, thoughtful sort of love story, the kind that lets you fill in the blanks…
After two years of serving pancakes, omelets, cheeseburgers, meat loaf, and liver and onions, Buttermilk Café, that old-style diner that steakhouse mogul Dale Wamstad launched with the III Forks Trading Post months after III Forks, has blown out its pilot light. “We don’t ever want to hear the word breakfast…
