It’s always an iffy proposition to wander into a dining room as desolate as a godforsaken rock formation. Sure, it could be an undiscovered sliver of raw sublimity, a hidden bit of dazzle. But it could also be a puff of culinary stench of such potency that it keeps diners…
Our range guide was a veteran of the first Gulf War, so it wasn’t hard to steer the conversation to the lingering mysteries of the sequel. Saddam? “Dead,” he said tersely. WMD’s? “Buried deep in the desert,” came his reply. The paltry resistance of the vaunted Republican Guard? Only a…
At the heart of Smith & Wollensky is this slogan: “A steak house to end all arguments.” This comes clipped from a headline over a 1997 New York Times S&W steak house review by critic Ruth Reichl. The piece centered on an annual argument in her family over three New…
Right now, it’s a ghost town. Not one born of death and abandonment, but of birth and anticipated growth. There are a few things: a children’s store, an Asian fusion restaurant called Café Beignet and a toy store. But more is on the way. Much more. Above the storefronts rest…
He pulls it out from a manila folder stuffed with other old photographs. “This is me,” says sushi evangelist Scott Melton, pointing to one of three boys in short-sleeved white shirts with slivers of black ties slicing across their surfaces. “It’s kind of Lee Harvey Oswaldish, isn’t it?” It was…
There are three of them in Dallas. Thai is one. Indian is another. And Italian. OK, there’s Chinese, but that’s an easy one to decipher: no Chinatown. The former are three types of cuisine that, with rare exceptions, stumble in Dallas. No matter who inspires the food or where they’re…
The first set arrived at our table riddled with little pockets of grease. Pools, really, shimmering gold, some shallow, some preposterously deep. Pappadam is like horribly scarred skin with creases and sharp ripples and craggy divots carved from an adolescent scourge. These flat, fried lentil flour discs from Southern India…
It’s rare that you see buffet spreads this enormous outside of places where slot bells provide the background music. But Osaka Steak & Grill’s all-you-can-eat Japanese terminal is big–aircraft carrier big. Get in there early before the dinner rush reaches its fever point, and you’ll discover a din of world…
Wine bars and Dallas don’t mix well, at least not as seamlessly as silicone and trial lawyers. A sweep through Dallas’ wine-bar experiments–Tony’s, Cork, Cru, the flight deck near the vestibule in Nick & Sam’s–reveals half-hearted execution or an emphasis on wine as fashion accessory. Maybe that’s why Mercy is…
Southlake is one of those formerly odd communities that had restrictive liquor laws. Now that they’ve been relaxed, some entrepreneurs are taking advantage in the new Town Square development in the heart of the town, a kind of shake-and-bake downtown for the bedroom community. Into the Glass is one of…
At first, veteran restaurateur Charlie Venis says Opa! is the Greek equivalent expression of hee-haw. “Well,” he corrects, “what it really means is ‘let’s enjoy life.’ Get excited.” The latter is what we did when our server shouted “Opa!” as he flicked his Bic above the saganaki, setting it ablaze…
Eat at Café Danielle and you’re forced to shop, or at least urged to browse. The space is divided into settings that come across like tradeshow booths. One nook is a hovel of Buddhas: heads, lotus seatings, fat jolly postures. There’s a case with Faberge egg replicas and a couple…
Authenticity is hard to acquire. The acquisition is especially difficult when the object of desire is a series of lush tropical volcanic bumps and coral atolls pimpling the South Pacific and you’re landlocked on a stretch of concrete and bricks near an overpass on the North Texas prairie. But never…
Ernie’s is a trip. But to where? Is it a trip back to a Dean Martin-Charo roast skit where the main attractions bob like anchovy-stuffed buoys in a gin lagoon? Or is it a timeless Vegas burp, skillfully outfitted with a Liberace henchwoman tinkling spent pop syrup on a stunted…
Restaurant concept development is difficult for diners to comprehend. People like Phil Romano appear to function solely from gut instinct followed by blunt execution. Then there’s Henderson Avenue czar Tristan Simon, who seems to germinate his concepts on a bed of meticulously plowed spreadsheets fertilized by heaps of financial and…
Orson Welles has managed to resuscitate his badly decomposed reputation and promise from the grave. Since etching himself in our collective memory as the butt of fat jokes and the intoner of the unforgettable line “we will serve no wine before its time” in television commercials for jug wines by…
Ernest Hemingway cut his adventurer’s teeth as a teen-age Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. The cut went deep. Just six days before his 19th birthday on July 8, 1918, Hemingway was hit by Austrian artillery fire, sustaining injuries to his knee and foot that led…
Restaurants burst from lots of divergent structures: old houses, offices, warehouses, dry cleaners, even factories. Sometimes the theme of the restaurant takes cues from its environment. The Old Mill Inn in Fair Park–built for the 1936 Texas Centennial and World’s Fair as an example of a modern flour mill–comes to…
Myths and legends are scattered with hybrids. They’re designed to frighten, fill with awe and serve as jobs programs for cinematic special effects artists. Freakish, these beasts. There’s the centaur, with the lower body of a horse and torso of a man. The Minotaur, the bastard child of King Minos…
It’s hard to arouse taste buds in a restaurant named after a bug, especially a large prehistoric specimen that incessantly engorges itself with mosquitoes that may or may not be swollen with human blood. Yet somehow this swift, darting fly fascinates. Is it its elegance, the deft darts it employs…
It’s hard to believe this downtown street-level dining room was once a seafood restaurant hailed by Esquire magazine as one of the nation’s best. This ringing praise occurred at a time when most Dallasites thought “Downtown” was the song that made Mrs. Miller famous. (No, not that Mrs. Miller; we…
Red glamour is baffling. The restaurant Citizen sports a portrait of Chairman Mao, that lovable Chinese leader whose four-year orgy of state-sponsored terror, rape, cannibalism, torture and starvation, known as the “Great Leap Forward,” left untold millions dead. How is it that a Warhol portrait of Mao is considered cutting-edge…
