L’Ancestral is an icon, a dignified one. It’s among the first slices of French to braise its way onto the Dallas landscape without the excessive continental puffery. An elderly man sits alone at one table, his back against the wall. He wears a coat and tie. His shirt is tucked…
Maybe the prognosticators were right, those who said the next great wave in restaurant trends is Indian fast food. This is counterintuitive on its face. Indian cuisine is by nature complex, a jet stream of reverent aromas that blast the mind into reflection in a way a sub with provolone…
Paradise means different things to different people. To some, it might mean grains of white sand speckling the lime slices in your umbrella beverage. To others, it might be a 38D casting shadows over your Bud Light. To a select few, it might mean drinking expensive gin from a Ferrari…
Think of Little Katana as the Dallas version of a city hot-dog cart. You’ve seen them in some urban locales: steam tables on wheels with potato chip sacks clipped to a riser; beverage bottles displayed in a row just above the bin where franks and sausages swelter in caged clouds…
Figaro Café was Le Paris Bistrot for several years. It tanked. Owner Jean Michel Sakouhi blames it on the freedom fries syndrome: the point in time after the start of the Iraq war when the French were getting drunk on anti-American condescension and Americans were pouring Bordeaux down the bidet…
Water. Maybe it’s a myth that the secret to great pizza is water. Dallas has notoriously bad water. It’s so hard you could break your nose splashing handfuls of it into your face in the morning, which means it’s better at waking you up than making your pizza rock. There…
William Guthrie is a collector: books, utensils, antiques, family photographs. Much of his trove peppers his restaurant, Guthrie’s. Guthrie says he has more than 1,500 hardback cookbooks, a collection of tomes that dates all the way to 1796 and one from which he pulls recipes. He also keeps old recipes…
What’s astounding about the Gaylord Texan Resort is this: no bugs. Not a single gnat, fly, ant, earwig or pill bug milling about the stone terraces or burrowing in the dirt. And there is plenty of dirt. The center node of the Gaylord is one gigantic terrarium with uncountable varieties…
Saffron Room is soaked in amber. This is not surprising, given the luxuriously ruddy-yellow spice from which it takes its name. What is surprising is that this restaurant holds a mere 30 seats. This intimacy is exploited in the usual ways, with votive candles, sheers fencing the tables and pillows…
A Savory warning was delivered not long ago. The warning was this: Savory’s menu will change shortly, and when that happens you won’t be able to get the chilled Moroccan tomato soup. Time it right, because missing the soup would be a blunder. Forewarned, we slipped into Savory on time…
Stolik means “little table” in Czech. The name is brilliantly captured on the menu: a tiny, crude, hand-stamped ink impression of a table, precisely pressed in the center of the creamy cover stock (a tiny barstool illustrates the bar menu). This expresses much: space, honesty, simplicity, warmth, timelessness. On this…
Old Hickory sommelier Darryl Beeson, a pro who has carved an impressive vine furrow through greater Dallas with stops at The French Room, The Mansion, Voltaire and Steel, says that 60 percent of the checks winding through the steak house’s coffers spring from locals. Given that Old Hickory is embedded…
Employing Buddha to drive nightclub adrenaline is odd when you think about it. There are bars named after this enlightened fellow (here there was Buddha Bar before it went Bali Bar before it went bust), and Buddha busts and figures inexplicably fill nightclub alcoves, dugouts and pedestals. At Sambuca Uptown,…
Iron Cactus is the kind of place you reflexively rally around if you have even the tiniest traces of civic pride in your veins. Iron Cactus is just the sort of temple to healthy urban eating that Dallas needs in its endlessly fussed-over downtown: a sleek monument of brash architecture…
G.F. Prime Steakhouse is excited about prime. A quick perusal of the menu confirms this. G.F. Prime has prime starters. G.F. Prime has prime salads. G.F. Prime has prime soups and sandwiches. G.F. Prime has prime entrées, prime “additions” and “The Prime Finish.” Are you primed yet? G.F. Prime is…
The aroma of wood burning grills. The light bouncing from brightly colored glass. An atmosphere that’s both warm and sleek. A memorable experience, from A to Z. Zolon. This is the promo prose about Zolon, “an everyday bistro,” posted on the restaurant’s Web site. The words are crisp and snappy,…
Not far from the bass-boat-riven waters of Lake Ray Hubbard is Heath. Heath is a town of roads that curl and hog-leg through a sprawl of open grasses and sod fields buckled together by occasional subdivisions of homes bearing monstrous footprints and modest circa 1950s and ’60s ranch houses on…
Il Mulino is the General George S. Patton of restaurants. Not because it is violently audacious or prances through Palermo and Messina–although it does flaunt langoustines from Sardinia–but because it is rife with a paradoxical snarl of highly calculated mannerisms and crudely whittled elegance bordering on caricature. Patton could be…
This is what former New York Times food editor Raymond Sokolov has to say about meat loaf: Meat loaf…is a kind of joke. In fact, I can think of two funny things about meat loaf right off the top of my head. One is an off-color parting wish you have…
It used to be the Lighthouse Supper Club. The Lighthouse was a restaurant and bar on the shores of Lake Ray Hubbard. It aspired to be an old San Francisco-style dinner house. To that end, the restaurant included a lounge called “Club She.” Our Club She adventure included black hot…
Southlake has a big sky. There doesn’t seem to be much of a lake if you don’t count the water hazards at Timarron Country Club. And it isn’t really all that much south, at least from Dallas vantage points. But it does have a big sky. It also has intriguing…
Fusion, whether it’s in musical, culinary or thermonuclear idioms, is a tedious term. It’s a sigh stimulant, a drowse inducer, a word that was forged in a quest for succinctness but instead plopped us into the middle of a muddy mealy mouth. Think of how many menus, in one way…
