It’s easy to take potshots at corporate restaurants, those cookie-cutter cafés, brasseries, and bistros with homogeneous faux European menus devised by pencil pushers who scoot around in leased BMWs. They’re slick, focus-group hatchlings with recipes and ingredients devised and taste-tested on spread sheets. “It’s the independents who pump the creative…
Popular Dallas chef Matthew Antonovich puts a peculiar spin on just about everything. In the midst of shuttering 5-week-old Antonovich’s Tuscan Steak House on Preston Road in Plano, a restaurant he says was inspired by telepathic directives from his dead grandmother, he characterized the move as shrewd business maneuvering, one…
Akins still achin’ Cooking stings. Just ask chef Los Akins. Akins has had it rough lately. “I’ve had a bad year. It couldn’t get worse,” he says. He left a steadily successful stint at PoPoLos more than a year ago to do the New Creole shtick at Moonshine Café, the…
Theater of the absurd? The Arcadia theater on Lower Greenville Avenue is closed. Or is under new management. And is reopening. Or something. “Reopen is even the wrong word,” says Bill Hutchinson, president of Dunhill Partners, the firm that owns the property on which the Arcadia sits. “It might not…
My most recent visit to the Green Room brought to mind an article I read in a restaurant magazine a couple of years ago about cheeks — and not the kind that make the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue shimmy off newsstands. “People have a hard time eating cheeks,” says Thomas…
It takes a lot of guts to take an Air Stream trailer, stuff it with taco fillings, and call it Vortex Mex, especially given the proximity of Dallas to Tornado Alley. Ask any meteorologist, and they will tell you the physical characteristics of trailers attract tornadoes with the same magnetic…
Dead dogs lie Former Sipango chef Matthew Antonovich opened his new restaurant, Antonovich’s Tuscan Steak House, after channeling advice from his dead grandmother. Now he’s shutting the thing down with thoughts of dead dogs in his head. “This restaurant cannot afford its debt,” he said just before he closed this…
Some restaurateurs must imagine the last thing the populace wants to do when it goes out to eat…is eat. Look at all of the counterfeit atmospheres that have been drafted in the name of recreational supping. Rain Forest Café. Wilderness Grill. Planet Hollywood. In these places, food is an adjunct…
When I first peeled back the paper and got a good look at a Sandella’s Café wrap, I thought it looked like one of those rolled sleeping mats you see strapped to campers’ backpacks. Yet it’s really a high-quality product targeting time-pressured customers in the sophisticated sandwich segment. At least…
There’s latent lust in Dallas for exotica. You can smell it. No, not the over-processed, ultra-premium Velveeta kind that results in slick forays such as Samba Room or the South American gauchos at Fogo de Chao and Texas de Brazil. Dallas yearns for the real deal, where the dining room…
Counting blessings Abacus. That’s the name Kent Rathbun plans to slap on his long-discussed restaurant going into the former Big Shots billiard hall on McKinney Avenue. Right now, though, the place looks a bit disheveled, as though maybe the CIA mixed up their city street atlases again and mistook the…
Tequila is jet fuel. One whiff of the stuff leaves little doubt. OK, carburetor cleaner. But this propellant-disguised-as-beverage sure acts like jet fuel. Your face gets hot. Your blood thins, rushes, and simmers. You feel invincible, as if you could scale a cliff or file your own income tax return…
Rerun undone It’s curtains for “the ultimate experience in fine dining and live jazz entertainment,” otherwise known as Joshelé. What’s up? “Just, some things,” deadpans Joseph Barbaria, president of Republic Natural Resources Inc., the Plano restaurant’s owner. Make that a few thousand things. A spokesman in Republic’s offices — Barbaria…
There was a fierce rainstorm, the kind that falls in relentless sheets. Only a handful of cars were in the Deep Ellum lot across the street–no flashlight-waving lot attendants. No one to pay. Perhaps the attendant was holed up in one of those cars. As I approached the entrance to…
Holben hops David Holben’s position at FoodStar Restaurant Group (Mediterraneo, PoPoLos, Toscana) and The Riviera seemed as sure and unflappable as a stubborn rodent on a listing freighter. Yet he’s jumping ship. His leap comes on the heels of exits from FoodStar by operations chief Michael Costa and chefs David…
My first trip to Nick & Sam’s, Phil Romano (Macaroni Grill, Eatzi’s) and Patrick Columbo’s (Sfuzzi’s) steak and seafood house on Maple, was impressive–so much so that I had to pinch myself after the appetizers. “If it stays this good through dessert,” I said to my companion, “this place will…
Akins aching Los Akins admits to a burning itch to own his own restaurant. The former PoPoLos and Moonshine Cafe chef is holed up at Antonovich’s in Plano, where he’s assisting chef-proprietor Matt Antonovich. Antonovich is the onetime Sipango chef-partner who got the urge to create his namesake in the…
Tin Star is bright and chic. Tin Star is simple. Tin Star has catchy theme: “salsa, smoke, and sizzle.” Tin Star is cheap. But Tin Star doesn’t sparkle, because the most important point in this twinkler–the food–is as dull as a butter knife. “There is no reason that great food…
Hot little beds What Dallas needs is little hotels. Cute hospitality fashion hunks with bellboys in eel-skin caps and desk girls with fishnets reaching up to mid-thigh taking hip guests to their little boutique sleep slots with dripping black candles burning on the nightstand. Maybe we’ll get some. Word is,…
Raw feelings Scott Melton thinks he got a raw deal. “It was kind of chicken shit,” he says. Melton, who recently opened Sushi Nights on Main Street in Deep Ellum, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April for Sushi Deep Ellum Inc., the general partnership he formed to operate Deep…
I’m not really sure what all the fuss was about. But it all started with a printing error. Last summer, The Dallas Morning News did an article on the Palm Restaurant’s upcoming renovation, one that would darken the restaurant and sequester its dining spaces. The modest upgrade included new floors,…
Raw fish. Raw fish eggs. Raw marine sex organs. Think about it. Putting these things in your mouth is extreme. Raw fish is scary. Well, it used to be, anyway. Now it’s so commonplace that it draws yawns. Sushi restaurants are popping up with the speed of facial zits before…
