What happened to Harper’s? When this Charlotte, North Carolina-based chain of six casual restaurants opened an outlet in North Dallas in January 1997, the crowds were so thick that getting through the door was almost impossible. By year’s end, it was closed. Clyde Gilfillan, Harper’s director of operations, says the…
Dining in the raw while landlocked can be a risky proposition, a deed best performed with a well-trained gag reflex and plenty of health insurance. Most of the time the raw sea flesh isn’t bad, just a little lame, blanched, or propped on little soggy wads of rice hemmed in…
The eruption of diner fascination with Cool River Cafe is one of those cultural tremors that I just don’t get. I don’t understand how this concept was made flesh–or at least river stone and kitschy cowboy mural–and how it got to be the size of the south flank of a…
There’s this odd little smell that thrives in cottages and cabins. It’s not a bad smell, really–although I’m sure that if we could figure out how to eradicate it easily, we’d send it packing with a cloying spritz of floral-scented Glade air freshener. The first time I was introduced to…
You don’t have to travel far to wallow in a good, thick sludging of theme restaurateuring. Downtown offers the always loudly entertaining Planet Hollywood in the West End, while Canyon Cafe covers the north with its slick Southwestern motif. And for a good choke on an exceptionally rich example of…
Procter & Gamble discovered long ago that you could breathe new life into a product, such as a box of Tide or a tube of Crest, by slapping the words “new” and “improved” on the package. The actual improvements may be little more than a sprinkling of little green “fresh…
A hole-in-the-wall can be dark, musty, grimy, and probably not the kind of place you’d go to impress someone on a first date, or to establish ties with a new boss or client. But if you rummage around those holes a little, minding where the corroded wiring and the rat…
Comfort food doesn’t exactly have positive connotations as far as I’m concerned. When I hear the words “comfort food,” I think of home-cooking. And when I think of home-cooking, childhood memories seep into my consciousness like a ladle full of lumpy powdered-cheesefood sauce. You see, the most rudimentary level of…
For the last few years, food-industry analysts have been babbling about a significant food-service trend emerging in response to consumer demands for freshly prepared packaged foods that can be reheated and eaten at home. The chatter has been on how this new trend is blurring the line between supermarket and…
“What the hell is this, and why does it cost so damn much money?” These are the only truly engaging questions that dining at Enigma provokes. Not that this place isn’t baffling on many levels. It’s just so strenuously contrived that instead of wondering what kind of eccentric mind is…
The cigar trend is dead. So it isn’t surprising that a spate of cigar bars are popping up in Dallas as fast as you can say Hoyo de Monterrey Super Hoyo–which might not be very fast. Last year a number of high-profile cigar salons hit Dallas: Avner’s at Preston Caviar…
I’m wondering how much more mileage will be drawn from the culinary fusion trends that have swept through the restaurant industry like Macarena-twitching through a political convention. Everywhere you look, someone is trying to fuse Asian ingredients with, say, the line of fine foods from Hormel, or fried bananas marinated…
Restaurateuring is a hard way to make a living, harder than any honest profession except perhaps those involving a set of erasable markers and an Amway starter kit. Running a restaurant is a risky endeavor fraught with start-up glitches, long hours, and little financial reward. But no matter how backbreaking…
What can you say about Watel’s? After 10 years in Dallas–defying the restaurant laws of the universe by getting better instead of lazier and crankier–the one thing above all others that you can say about Watel’s is that it’s a great place to eat an organ. In fact, in many…
Like the emissions-obsessed alarmists who just departed Kyoto in limousines and huge jet aircraft designed to carry a dozen people and a cocktail lounge, I’m concerned about an impending global crisis. Not the Al Gore kind of crisis where the planet warms and sea levels rise so that snorkeling skills…
The first thing that struck me about Palomino Euro Bistro is its name: Why would a place ostensibly patterned from a European cafe name itself after a horse popularized by Roy Rogers and his ride Trigger? General Manager George Korbel assured me there’s no special meaning associated with the name,…
There’s one thing that you can almost always count on in the restaurant business: A fairly decent, reasonably priced dining concept will inevitably evolve into a chain and go public, or its chef will become a licensed character and star in a Saturday-morning superhero cooking cartoon. This sort of evolutionary…
What I love most about Rainforest Cafe, that strenuously earth-conscious restaurant that looks like a foliage riot designed by Phillips Petroleum Co., is its seeming blindness to the juicy irony it serves up like a dribbling half-pound beef patty. This garish theme feedery and ecologically fortified gift shop was launched…
At first glance, the Yorkshire Club is a confusing venue. Situated on the 48th floor of the Republic Towers downtown, it’s spacious, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a long hallway decorated with original sketches leading to the dining room. Its whitewashed wood paneling and brick walls hold a few abstract paintings…
Over the last few years, regional cuisine has evolved beyond mere food. Today, the focus is less about what’s on the plate and more on “theme.” A cuisine is developed, primped, tweaked, tested, and cross-dressed with other regionally influenced grub until it becomes the basis for a restaurant concept. Then…
Dining at Hotel St. Germain is odd in a haunting, Ross Perot sort of way. While the space is rich and says all of the right things–historic elegance with an engaging personality derived from comfortable turn-of-the-century furnishings–little crazy-aunt-in-the-basement details and daughter’s-wedding-disrupted-by-Republican-operatives missteps crop up, making you wonder what the heck…
My first foray into Vietnamese cuisine was memorable not for the meal, but for the weather. The evening I visited a run-down storefront Vietnamese restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, it was 15 below zero, and sheets of ice covered the city with a hair-gel luster. And this restaurant’s idea of central…
