It’s like an Indo-Chinese revolving door, that space. Back in 1996 it was Saigon Savor. Then it was Saigon Bistro. As Saigon Bistro is how I remember the space. It seemed more elegant back then. That’s because it was. Carpet — or maybe it was big throw rugs — hugged…
The slapping pitter-patter thump of the tabla is contemplative. It’s soothing and eerie. And this is what they pipe through the sound system at Udipi Café, a restaurant in Richardson serving South Indian vegetarian cuisine. The tabla is coupled with flutes that rise and fall with the intensity of the…
Santiago Peña is back to cutting up and bending metal for restaurants. The sculptor and construction contractor, who made his mark on Dallas dining by welding thematically relevant forms for Star Canyon and AquaKnox, recently finished work on a new restaurant, Thai Tango in Flower Mound. Peña says he studied…
It’s Saturday night, and Shelly Dowdy is gliding across the floor of her restaurant in a tight-fitting gown that envelops her Rubenesque form like an iguana skin. An animal-print wrap is slung around her waist. She looks scared. Venus Steakhouse & Supper Club is packed, and the American Cancer Society…
Jeroboam flight Bam. Anile’s gone. That fast. With the opening of Jeroboam–the brasserie set to crystallize in the Kirby building downtown–just a couple of weeks away, Jim Anile, the former Melrose Hotel executive chef who was set to commandeer the menu, has flown west to work at a new hotel…
EuroTex Café is a racquetball court of a restaurant that echoes with Elgar instead of slaps of spherical rubber. Trickles of sound bounce off the walls too, from a fountain with four frogs leaking water from various orifices. EuroTex Café is a clean, fresh downtown lunch and breakfast spot serving…
Run Daddy DMC Some have an uncanny ability to hitch on to listing ships and then bail before the water warps their loafers. But since Michael Costa (FoodStar Restaurant Group) and Dean McSherry (Sfuzzi) launched their consulting firm DMC Hospitality, they’ve affiliated mostly with floaters, Ketama Tapas Restaurant and Guitar…
It’s a hard thing, dining in an Ethiopian restaurant while armed only with cocktail napkins, because no matter how hard you try, sauce drippings and food tailings always manage to smudge your palms and clog the spaces between your fingers. Ethiopian food isn’t eaten with utensils. It’s pinched with torn…
La Valentina was by far the best eating experience we’d had in Cancun, though you might be thinking that isn’t saying much, as pirate ships are rarely repositories of culinary excellence.
Poop friction Sadly, Tarantino’s is gone, flushed down the sewer. Literally. “I’m getting out,” says Peter Tarantino who opened the Italian-Mediterranean tapas restaurant across from Fair Park in September 1997 with his brothers Patrick and Matthew. “There’s a bad taste in my mouth.” It’s a taste no doubt fomented by…
It’s hard to gauge what kind of a mind would turn a restaurant rooftop into a forest. But Carrabba’s Italian Grill has done it, transforming the roofs on 16 of its restaurants into sloped gardens. Engineers brace the roof with steel beams and concrete slabs, dump roughly 90 tons of…
Steel feel As a vicarious Porsche aficionado who’s driven one only once (a 1973 urine-hued Targa with a cantankerous second gear), I’ve always appreciated the tight link between fine German gearing and refined gluttony. First there’s Voltaire moneybag Scott Ginsburg, who opened what is allegedly the nation’s largest Porsche dealership…
If there’s anything that can be said about Addison Circle, that fabricated suburban urban village that sprang up like a tax shelter around a huge blue metal sculpture composed of supine spindles, it’s that it breeds restaurants with a gerbil-like prolificacy. There’s Antonio Ristorante, Kampai Sushi & Grill, Avanti Euro…
There’s a banner outside of Red Onion Bistro in Denton making note of its “adventurous wine and beer list.” This is like pulling up to a men’s boutique and seeing an unfurled banner that says “adventurous leisure suits.” If you have to call out your daring sensibilities, you ain’t got…
Cork screw It seems Julie Stevens and Clancy Martin (the latter of whom is part owner of Martin’s Custom Jewelers in Arlington) have pulled out of Cork, the wine and cheese bar they opened on McKinney Avenue in the spring of last year. Only they did more than that: They…
You see the red horse everywhere, and not only on gas pumps. It’s on buildings. In parks. In shopping malls. And now it’s become a restaurant: one each in Dallas and Fort Worth. Folks rattle on with painful seriousness about this bit of iconography, about how it symbolizes Dallas and…
Excellent Seafood & Grill is an exercise in suburban utility. It’s Spartan, efficient, and loaded with functionality, the primary example being the $5.49 lunch specials. For a fin and four bits you can get blackened snapper with baked potato, teriyaki chicken on rice, or fried clam strips with French fries…
Bastille blip It would have been fitting. But Whit Meyers of the Entertainment Collaborative (Green Room, Gypsy Tea Room) says the hoped-for opening of their brasserie Jeroboam on Bastille Day (July 14) most likely won’t roll. The sticky wicket appears to be a small piece of air-conditioning equipment that has…
After tasting Pyramid Grill’s steak tartare, a huge mound of milky pink pulp shaped like a loaf of rye bread, I began to wonder: Why does so much of the tartare served in Dallas, no matter what its species, taste like something plumbed from a bedeviled little Underwood can? So…
Village strokes The great thing about Dallas is the seeming ease with which people morph into independent restaurateurs. Consider former country club chefs Claude Judd and Curtis Higgins. They’ve abandoned slinging silage for the fairway set and set their sights on feeding those of us who wouldn’t know the difference…
Avanti Euro Bistro owner Jack Ekhtiar describes his new restaurant in Addison Circle in a way that is wholly at odds with its appearance. He says he wanted to create a restaurant and bar that was causally elegant, a place where people could be comfortable and enjoy quiet conversation without…
Fish fissure Bill Baine, who along with Randy DeWitt co-founded Rockfish Seafood Grill parent See-Worthy Restaurants (which either means restaurants with good eye-chart test scores or watertight restaurants with poor spelling test scores), recently chucked his 49.9 percent interest in the company for a price that included Half Shells Oyster…
