“Hole in the wall” is a sort of dining Holy Grail; the object of a fervent quest for hidden culinary riches dressed up like a Hee Haw extra. Like Rousseau’s noble savage, the true hole in the wall glimmers with irresistible romance and beats with the myth of primeval superiority…
“Miss America ate here.” This is a swell publicity claim for any restaurant, especially one planted among the sticks in a tiny town named for an itty-bitty tree with a fungus problem. Miss America combines all the things that make for good promo sizzle: beauty, talent and sex–or the lack…
At this point on the dining timeline, Avanti Ristorante is perhaps better known for its longevity than its food. After all, more than a handful of restaurants execute its brand of Nor-Ital Mediterranean fare, often with better results. But Avanti has been doing it for 14 years; that’s a near…
Not long ago, Mud Bugs Cajun Café was known as the House of Voodoo, but the name was jettisoned swiftly, not long after it opened. You could see the scraps of plywood stacked in the rear from which the Mud Bugs signs were cut, painted orange and posted on the…
Venezia is a slice of institutional cafeteria ambiance done up in Italian red and green, with a heavy emphasis on the green. It has a counter up front and a dining room with tables covered in green and white checked tablecloths. An awning hangs over the semi-open kitchen with Christmas…
A tornado abruptly changed the course for Reata, the popular Fort Worth “cowboy cuisine” restaurant. In March 2000, the furious whirl ripped through Fort Worth, popping the windows out of the restaurant perched on the 35th floor of the Bank One Tower and flinging its furniture more than a mile…
The noodle house was supposed to conquer the Dallas restaurant front, dotting it with shanties of twisting and slurping instead of fortresses of carving and chewing. Food pundits pointed to London and New York and Los Angeles, where noodle houses proliferate, and pronounced Dallas fit to breach this clique of…
It’s hard to know when exactly you’ve come upon “a.” The sign says Abbotsford Court, a special-events facility, an indication that you’re about to enter a banquet space of some 15,000 square feet tucked behind Ferrari’s and Morton’s off Midway Road on a sea of Addison asphalt. But nothing denotes…
The Eskimo Cookbook has the following instructions for boiled owl: Take the feathers off. Clean owl and put in cooking pot with lots of water. Add salt to taste. The instructions for cooking a loon are even more succinct: Never cook a loon. Do not make loon soup. The book…
There aren’t many places around Dallas where you can eat a sea cucumber family-style. Heck, there probably aren’t many places outside of municipalities with China Town tracts that serve the wormlike sea creature. But the cucumbers are here at Chef Hsu, in various culinary treatments: braised, stir-fried and fried, and…
It’s easy to imagine The Metropolitan on any corner in downtown Boston or Chicago. Unlike most Dallas restaurants parked in strip malls, high-rises or on thoroughfare frontage roads, The Metropolitan is in a structure older than your average Weezer fan. Lots older. The Metropolitan is part of the Stone Street…
If Alberto Lombardi possesses one quality, it’s persistence, gobs of it. He took a huge gamble on McKinney Avenue, installing Bizú, that natty slinger of mediocre Franco-American grub, in the former Sfuzzi space, which also served as a crypt for Coco Pazzo. When Bizú bit it, Lombardi slipped in Mangia…
For once I wish someone in Dallas would create a wine bar that follows the syntax of the billing and puts the “wine” before the “bar.” More often than not, the wine-bar designation is a shallow ruse used to draw denizens hoping to lap the drippings of sophistication into what…
Even in Plano, everything about Bob’s is exaggerated, from the endless mahogany wood paneling to the near-golf-ball-sized jelly beans kept in a large bowl near the entrance. That goes for the drinks, too, especially the martinis. In truth, the martini is an appalling beverage to belt anytime before or during…
It’s pointless to point out how sushi restaurants have proliferated in the Dallas area over the past few years. It’s not a trend anymore. It’s a near onslaught. It’s easier to get strips of white tuna on a rice bumper than it is to get white shirts starched and on…
Tanked fish are often a default dining room décor item in the restaurant biz; a living bauble with a maintenance contract that fills the void left by enervated imaginations. You see them everywhere, mostly in salty water, flaunting their Day-Glo color schemes through a maze of rocks, vegetation and sometimes…
Caviar is the lusty ghost hovering around Marty’s Bistro, the full-service restaurant that grew out of the 59-year-old wine and gourmet food shop. And a rare ghost it must be. The left flap of the menu is riddled with explicit, blown-up color glossies of the stuff: a piece of toast…
Italian cuisine has had a rough row to hoe in Dallas. Either it’s mostly mediocre, or it’s so expensive that it’s hard to digest more than on a monthly basis without rupturing something valuable. That means there’s a culinary niche for the daring to exploit, a ripe market for someone…
Beau Nash is a Crescent Court bauble, a patinated little room enclosed in glass and attached to a stylish bar planked with marble and squirted with brass. Tightly arranged works of art embroider the walls. Requisite white cloths hang from the tables. The main dining room, walled on one side…
For a while, it was kingfish. The Dallas Morning News drooled. D magazine ogled. Esquire magazine named it the best seafood restaurant in the country in 1997. When chef Chris Svalesen and businessman Steven Upright opened Fish (tagged “an upscale seafood restaurant”) in the Paramount Hotel in late 1996, they…
Geode is a restaurant I wanted to like. It’s got guts and lineage, after all. The interior is clean and crisp, with modifications that only slightly deviate from the innards it inherited from Bistral, the casual American bistro that was installed in this McKinney Avenue space by Dallas-based Richmont Corp…
There’s a sight at Lobster Ranch I can’t seem to get out of my head. It’s in the lobster tank, which is behind a display case where other live lobsters crawl tentatively around crushed ice like Raid-misted mantises and huge North Atlantic salmon–silvery with tails that curl like scissors-scraped ribbon–are…
