If you want to give a restaurant a stress test in basics, go to dinner with a bunch of computer geeks, ones drooling with fickleness. That’s what I did, a trio of them, with clearly expressed systems specializations: hardware, software, and training. Never before did I realize that hoisting digits…
Got beef? Lena Rumore, ex-wife of Dallas steakhouse mogul Dale Wamstad (III Forks, Del Frisco’s), will get a shot at the skillful restaurateur’s beefy wallet. On May 26, the Louisiana Supreme Court denied Wamstad’s attempt to derail his ex-wife’s damage suit seeking a portion of the $22.7 million doled out…
Elementary Watson Edgar Watson has had little Dallas restaurant fits and starts for years. In 1983 he launched Adriano’s in the Quadrangle (where Dream Café is now), a restaurant he calls “the original yuppie Italian spot in Dallas” (where have all the yuppie Italians gone?). Adriano’s was also hailed as…
Among the few things that are striking about The Old Warsaw, that stalwart fine-dining venue founded in 1949 by Polish diplomat Stanley Slawik, is the Café Pierre ($9.50). It’s hard to get a grip on the exact formula and the preparation from a distance; it’s blended on a cart in…
Venus fling trap Venus Steakhouse & Supper Club, the new “cheek-to-cheek” dining and dancing lounge spawned by Shelly Dowdy, formerly of the FoodStar Restaurant Group, will open June 6 in the TGI Friday’s space on Lemmon Avenue at Douglas. And it looks like Dowdy has squirreled away some FoodStar refugees…
, 3309 Dallas Parkway, Suite 401, Plano 75093 (972) 608-1883. Open 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 11 a.m.- 11 p.m. Friday; 2-11 p.m. Saturday; 2-10 p.m. Sunday $$-$$$
Many things have been crafted from old gas stations: coffee bars, topiary shops, car bra boutiques, bootleg 8-track dealers, galleries with fuzzy black light paintings. But a tapas bar has to be among the most original. Yet this is exactly what Ildefonso Jimenez–a key player in the founding of Café…
Tuscan lurch It’s hard to tell how the once-trendy Tuscan glamour hut known as Toscana, shuttered since mid-February, will be resuscitated. One rumor, at least, seems to have legs, and that is that ex-Sfuzzi pros Michael Costa and Dean McSherry, creators of the consulting firm DMC Hospitality, will attempt to…
Honchos at the Stoneleigh Hotel, onetime home of the classic continental room Ewald’s and purveyor of some of the best sushi in Dallas, have decided to sharpen the culinary edges in this circa-1923 hotel. So they shuttered Ewald’s, the dining room launched by longtime Dallas chef Ewald Scholz, hung a…
Naming a restaurant after a breed of cattle might seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in Texas, the No. 1 state in cattle production. But when you look at the Charolais, a breed of cattle originally from France (and named for a district in that country), you have…
UnShared Vision Looks like chef Robert Auston’s laudable quest for the crapless 12-ounce steak has been thwarted. Last week I reported that Auston, founder of Ianos Trattoria and partner with Tim Hager in Shared Vision, the company that owns Mediterraneo and the shuttered Toscana, was on the verge of transforming…
Bizú (which means little kiss in French) kissed off, and it’s not hard to see why. Though the transformed McKinney Avenue space that was once the home of Sfuzzi and Coco Pazzo was sexy and smart in all its mirrored, votive-candled, organza-draped glory, the food was iffy, especially for the…
One of my dining companions called Ciao Marco Italian “fast supper,” a word play on fast food. Which is odd, because though the service is pleasant here, it isn’t necessarily fast. And though the prices are reasonable, it isn’t necessarily a value. In reality, Marco is “easy supper” — easy…
Beer bust I’ve always liked cheap beer, a taste I acquired in college that to this day is sustained by my brother-in-law, who frequently lugs 12-packs of Keystone Light over for dinner and then forgets where in the refrigerator he left them (behind the leftover herb-crusted Spam loaf). So imagine…
Much as I try, I can’t seem to find a common thread between Volvos and haute cuisine. Volvos are austerely functional vehicles, hauling child protective seats with the resolve of a D-6 dozer. They’re the automotive equivalent of granola with a side of stewed prunes, which, along with boutique lefty…
No Fork over III Forks Steak House owner Dale Wamstad (a.k.a. Del Frisco) has taken his long-running community property battle with his ex-wife Lena Rumore to the Louisiana Supreme Court. Rumore has been fighting since late 1995 to get a piece of the $22.7 million that Wichita, Kansas-based Lone Star…
Dear Mr. O’Dowd: Right off the top I’ll admit I don’t know much about Irish food (is there a lot to know?). I’m German. And there’s not a whole lot to know about German food either, at least not in a haute sense. Assembling cool kitchen appliances, we’ve got that…
There was me — that is, the Kraut — and my zheena, and we sat in the Milkbar making up our rassoodocks about what pischcha to nibble on for the evening. This devotchka, all dressed in a malenky white vinyl skirt with these flip horrorshow go-go boots high up her…
Haines hikes to Henderson Remember when everyone was saddling Dallas chef Avner Samuel with the word “peripatetic”? Well, maybe not everyone. Just a few writers with a thesaurus fetish. And I’d be the last person to call chef Marc Haines peripatetic. But consider his journey over the past five months,…
There’s a guy in San Francisco named John Cunin who was the longtime maître d’ at a place called Masa’s before he decided to open his own place in 1990 called the Cypress Club. The Cypress Club was (and still is, I suppose) one of those see-and-be-seen places. People like…
Rope twister Reata owner Mike Evans says he knew things were getting weird when he saw a large patio umbrella swirling outside the much-lauded restaurant’s 35th-floor window in the Bank One Tower in downtown Fort Worth. So he directed Reata’s staff to evacuate some 100 guests into the building’s center…
Deli madness Maybe the next market segment ripe for plucking by the World Wrestling Federation is New York-style delis, at least in Dallas. In early January, Alan Gilbert of Gilbert’s Deli filed a lawsuit against Dallas doctor Gary Morchower, his wife Elizabeth, and one of their progeny who has the…
