Make no mistake. A captivating veranda is a big deal in Dallas, not something to be sniffed at or choked on in the wake of Mercedes Benz exhaust. When you think about it, Dallas is perhaps the most unfriendly patio town in the world, outside of Grozny in Chechnya, or…
It’s hard not to like Z Café. Then again, like the sleepy forward coast of a comfortable marriage, it’s hard to like it without working at it. But you will put forth the effort, because Z, with its sloppily stained black tables, azure trim, black Zs plastered on the walls,…
Guts from the old sod Though Tipperary Inn general manager Mark Daniel swears he isn’t simply duplicating O’Dowd’s Little Dublin on McKinney Avenue (which had its Irish-pub innards wrought in Ireland and shipped to Dallas for assembly), Tipperary Inn will shut down for 10 weeks just after St. Patrick’s Day…
Every now and then life hands you a perfect moment, one of those spaces of time when everything stops, turns beautifully epiphanic, and suddenly you find yourself babbling the goofy prose found in that Shirley MacLaine tree-climbing book. I have had a few perfect moments: watching the sun set in…
In the corner pocket C.J. Wiley scanned the landscape, saw the roaring success of joints such as Cool River Café and Fox & Hound, and decided he needed to get in on the action. And who is C.J. Wiley? He’s the former ESPN world-champion pool player who owns C.J.’s Billiard…
Avner’s labor pains Unlike Bibendum the 100-year-old Michelin Man, Bibendum the tapas bar went flat after just three months. Sources say legendary bad-boy chef Avner Samuel (Bistro A), who launched the global tapas bar in the McKinney Avenue space that housed his restaurant “Avner’s” years ago, admitted he had miscalculated…
Thai food in Dallas is typically lumbering and uninteresting. The sauces are flabby, the textures tired, the flavors muddled. In this city, Thai cuisine lacks searingly distinct flavors or exotic subtlety. Tucked amid Addison’s swath of strip malls, Thai Orchid is one of the precious few Thai restaurants that skirts…
It’s hard to know what to make of Via Real, a restaurant that’s been around for roughly 15 years, including 10 years in Las Colinas. But it sure makes a lot of its “Mexican cuisine with Santa Fe style.” Santa Fe is known for its fiery food, torched with lots…
It’s hard to pinpoint the birth of the first chain theme or “eatertainment” restaurant. Was it Chuck E. Cheese or T.G.I. Friday’s? Maybe it was Bennigan’s. But this would only be possible if ferns and old signs could be considered objects of compelling amusement. No, it was Hard Rock Café,…
FoodStar shamble As of yet, no buyers have surfaced to take a chance on Mediterraneo and Toscana, the beleaguered restaurants of the bankrupt FoodStar Restaurant Group. The value of the restaurants is less than the debt load it’s dragging — at least that’s how trustee Rob Milbank put it in…
Voltaire is verbose — not the witty 18th-century writer and philosopher who penned Candide, but the restaurant dreamed up by radio mogul Scott Ginsburg after his original plans to build a hamburger joint for his kids were derailed. The servers like to talk. “Your chef tonight is a gentleman by…
Where’s PoPoLos? One of the first things that was supposed to re-emerge from the FoodStar Restaurant Group’s ashes was PoPoLos. Original owner Maury Jaffer, who had sold the restaurant to the group in late 1997 for $1.1 million, got it back last fall on undisclosed terms. He made plans to…
I’m swearing off restaurant prognostication. Other than accurately predicting that Chuck Norris’ stogie lounge, Lone Wolf, symbolized the death knell of the cigar craze, every other prediction has been a bust. Last year, I confidently predicted (though, of course, not on the record) that the restaurant business in Dallas would…
Maybe it’s not surprising that gifted chef Avner Samuel, the man who single-handedly turned the word “peripatetic” into a cliché in Dallas, adopted the name he did for his global tapas restaurant. For Samuel, a compact and volatile Israeli, had the habit of never staying in one place for more…
Chicken booger boo Dallas restaurateur Gene Street sounds exhausted after letting one wiggle out of his crosshairs only to have it bagged by one of the big boys. “We worked on it for a long time,” Street sighs. “We were real close.” The “it” to which Street refers is bankrupt…
What makes Thai cuisine such a tongue festival is the electrical intensity of the flavors, the stark textural contrasts, and the laser-like leanness of the ingredients. Sadly, far too few Thai or Thai-influenced restaurants pull this off. Most metroplex Thai excursions descend into plodding, viscous potpourris with only the occasional…
If you do one thing at Mel’s on Main, go to the restroom. Not that you may have a choice in the matter, especially after plunging headfirst into the horrid menu of “continental cuisine with an American flair.” Even if you don’t need to “go,” visit the john anyway, just…
Zagat 2000 Nobody needs to tell Texans we eat out more than everybody else. But a couple of New Yorkers went ahead and did it anyway. The millennium edition of the Zagat Survey of America’s Top Restaurants (a book that Andrew Lloyd Weber says obliterates the need for any other…
Sipango boingo Sipango has a new chef: Cole Kelley, former Breadwinners night chef who has also had stints at The Mansion, Dakota’s, Atlantic Cafe Too!, and Yegua Creek Brewery. Kelley replaces chef Marc Haines, who left the restaurant last month to lay the groundwork for an Internet enterprise dubbed Net*Chef,…
Back in the early ’90s, Buick began a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to lure younger motorists into its fold of stodgy sedans. The bait was the newly revamped Skylark. One television ad featured California artist Ed Lister, who composed an abstract painting before the camera, inspired by the car’s odd sloping…
There were no sushi rolls on our table, and this drew attention. Well, maybe there was one: an untouched California roll stiffening on a small dish. It was ordered for the 4-year-old at our table, but she was more interested in the tuna sashimi, plucking thick strips from a bowl…
Exposure to a horny toad must make you garrulous. How else can you explain the incessant chatter of the servers at Horny Toad’s Cantina? They want to know what you think of the menu, how your food looks, how it tastes, if it’s still good after 30 minutes, whether you’re…
