Salad bar that must get passed up for fried goodies at least 1,000 times a day count: 1 Tie count: 4 Flip-flop count: 12 Seems like every restaurant has a mascot these days. Applebee’s has that ridiculously annoying talking apple (Wanda—please stop being an apple and go back to being…
Blue Canyon Kitchen is one great wail of kitschy vigor, so loud your ears ring. Aspen logs, fully barked, hang from the ceiling. Tables are ringed with chairs made from pruned sticks and branches and are upholstered in fake fur. Hollowed-out aspen stumps hold arrangements of pussy willows. Prime steaks…
Embedded in the ceiling, high above the dining room, is a series of lighted, saucer-like depressions. Huge silvery propellers are fixed within, but they don’t spin like ceiling fans. They rotate in short, precise increments. To spin would invite bedlam. Servers would stumble with vertigo. “It’s very disruptive to the…
Chicks slicing meat when I walked in the door count: 2 People in line count: 452 If there’s one thing I like to eat, it’s meat. (No matter how I rewrite that sentence it keeps coming out sounding gross, so you’re just gonna have to get your mind out of…
It’s all about being green. Oprah gives tips on going green. TIME.com has a weekly green column. NBC has hosted a green week. Continental Airlines. Honda. Everyone…well, not everyone, but Bush still has some time in office. Green was on the top of my mind for my latest dining mission:…
Giant American flag count: 1 Tiny Greek flag count: 50 Gyro (pronounced yeero and not jyro or guyro) is Greek for half-moon, soft taco-looking thing filled with yummy lamb. And when you’ve got a hankerin’ to eat lots of stuff you’re uncomfortable pronouncing aloud, Anton Café downtown delivers. I ordered…
Aft the Cliff Café’s gravel parking lot is a brick house—an ancestral McMansion with subtle ornate strokes that predate soaring chateau turrets and vaulted front stoop eaves. It’s perched on a patch of brown grass and spindly brush on an expansive lot. There is wood trim and mottled brick. The…
Flat screen TV count: 1 Friendly behind-the-counter lady: 1 So, I was at the Dallas Central Library, totally engrossed in Jewel’s A Night Without Armor (an oldie, but a goodie) when I smelled the smell of fried wonderfulness for less than 10 bucks. It was grease without that nasty whiff…
There’s magic to the kebab, properly prepped, fired with finesse over glowing coals. There’s a hairsplitting technique to properly trimming and cubing meats before stabbing and bunching them on a skewer. There’s a deep secret truth to the marinating and the seasoning and the splashing with onion juice. There’s a…
Doors held open for me count: 2 Temperature of restaurant: 30 below zero with a slight chance of “holy crap my nose just froze off of my face” So, yesterday my stomach and I were having a debate about what I was going to eat for lunch. My stomach was…
Takes some nerve to open a restaurant in the westernmost flatlands of Frisco and call it BayGrill. It doesn’t even have a bay window, this bistro, much less proximity to a body of water. It is a pretty little place, however, sitting on the edge of oblivion at Legacy Drive…
Chinese cuisine, with rare exceptions, is a mongrel of conformity in these parts: a risk-averse version of the intensely risky food. It’s transmogrified, morphed, tamed and sanitized, made pliant and meek. Sometimes you can barely recognize the stuff. Oh, there are the disheveled spaces here and there, hollowed out of…
People sitting in truck beds: 18 Motorcycles: 2 Times I wondered if someone would come to my car to take my trash or if I should just drive off with a tray attached to my car: 5 Have you ever seen the blinking lights of Keller’s Drive-In as you cruise…
You can see the curving steel beams rise like a bump in the distance, cranes hovering over them like mantises, the spine arching out of a wave. Olenjack’s Grille rests in the thick of it, or what is likely to be the thick, standing ready to exploit intermittent captive audiences…
There are plenty of ways to get a good cheap lunch in Dallas. You can use the old, “I paid last time.” You can sign yourself up for a homemade cold-cut guiltwich at Mom’s. You can yoink somebody else’s lunch out of the work fridge—there are countless options. But, I…
The Fish can be summed up in two words: sex and death. Not dead fish and bootylicious servers, but fish of death and high-backed banquettes done up in bordello-red suede with square portholes to draw out the sweaty voyeur in all of us. The Fish was founded in Houston. Its…
Lunch specials: too many to mention When you mosey into Woodway’s Café, your attention is immediately focused on the 50 million menus up on the wall. There’s the giant menu, there are letter-sized paper menus that hang from above the register listing specials and then there’s a white board with…
If there’s one slap-in-the-face quality to Bob’s Steak & Chop House in Grapevine, it’s unabashed masculinity—even more so than at the cozier, well-worn 15-year-old original Dallas location. From décor to dishes, it’s a man’s world. Or at least, it tries to be, with high-backed booths and wood details, old photos…
Lunch special: Small cheesesteak combo with fries and a drink for $5.99, or Buffalo cheesesteak, fries and a drink for $7.50 Q: What does one do when faced with the choice between Buffalo wings and a cheesesteak? A: Buffalo cheesesteak, bitches. Why? Because instead of making difficult choices, I say…
Zen has something in it which makes it stand aloof from the scene of worldly sordidness and restlessness.” —D.T. Suzuki, May 1953 What strikes you immediately is its rigorous simplicity. Zen Sushi isn’t simmering a scene or riding a trend. It has clean, near-barren walls and stark wood tables and…
Other places with the word Joe’s in their name near Joe’s Burgers count: 3 Watery ketchup packets received with my order count: 15 Sonic claims to be your “Ultimate Drink Stop,” and I do appreciate their ridiculous syrup selection and the fact that they have Sprite Zero—but where’s the beer?…
James Rowland is a turnaround artist. He has taken rusted junkers, loosened stuck bolts, tightened loose nuts and finessed it all with a little salt and pepper. He’s turned greasy, grimy watering holes into coifed and tucked spots with manicured menus. Rowland breathes life into culinary afterthoughts, or more accurately,…
