Sapristi! is Italian slang for surprise, or something like that. But what surprised me at this bistro and wine bar were the posters hanging on the wall. “They’re lithographs of the originals,” a manager said. And they don’t have much to do with bistro culture, at least not as far…
City Café is one of those Dallas institutions that is perpetually in danger of laurel-resting, of desperately clinging to the vigor for which it was known in an earlier time. Back then, its reputation was established simply by serving up new American cuisine with the edges tweaked just a bit,…
Puffs of acrid smoke plume from Teppo’s yakatori grill, a narrow metal cookery box covered with a bent and loose mesh grate. If you’re seated at the sushi bar near the grill, you get to watch the chef brush a diverse assortment of skewered animal parts with sauce and turn…
It isn’t hard to see why Tom Ruggeri sought to move his 15-year-old restaurant from the nook on Routh Street and Cedar Springs to across the street in the Quadrangle. After all, now he has a circular drive for Mercedes Benzes, BMWs and Cadillacs to be parked in perpetuity. Under…
Somewhere in the dark corridors, behind the wood paneling, beyond the rows of mirrors framed in wood or brass, Bob’s Steak and Chop House must have hidden a couple of barrels of dining room testosterone. You can see the effects of hormonal excess everywhere. Bob’s reeks of culinary rutting gone…
It looks like a stage-prop fish market instead of something designed to dress up a restaurant. One whole corner of the bar at Sea Grill is a sloping bin filled with crushed ice. Imbedded in the ice is an assortment of sea life. Paving one slope is a batch of…
Steel is the super-hard result of a hellish fusion of iron with carbon. It’s a curious name for a restaurant that seeks to stand out from the crowd of “Asian fusion” offerings popping up like Rogaine fuzz across the Dallas area. But then again, the name wasn’t selected to serve…
The word that invades the mind after visiting The Silver Room is disparity–or maybe it’s dissonance. This dynamic starts with the room itself, which started out as the defunct 8.0 in the Quadrangle and ended up as 8.0 bereft of charm, or maybe interior decorating. The Silver Room simultaneously flirts…
Somehow, it’s incongruous to call a place serving American bulk cuisine levitated with Southwestern brushes The Abbey Texas Café. After all, abbeys were monasteries, and monasticism entails asceticism, or the practice of disciplined self-denial. This torment may include silence, a prohibition against private property, an embracing of bodily discomfort, poverty,…
If there is one thing Suze is about, it’s romance. Not the frilly, why-does- everything-smell- like-a- lady’s-underwear- drawer kind of romance, but the quaint, cozy, Bob Villa rusticity kind. Suze is a quietly austere, softly lit, thoughtful sort of love story, the kind that lets you fill in the blanks…
Carson’s Palace is literally a megaplex: a huge adult entertainment game room with enough television screens (between 28 and 32, depending on which part of the press kit you read) to mush the brains of the entire population of Flower Mound. Carson’s not only sports a coat of arms with…
You gotta love a dish that includes wet naps as dessert. Ribs are that kind of food, one that permits decent, churchgoing folks such as ourselves to behave like uncouth culinary heretics; a food that permits polite people to converse with brown rings around their mouths while spluttering chaw-hued spittle…
Perhaps the best thing to do when visiting Gershwin’s is have a drink. Actually, this is the best thing to do when visiting any restaurant, but it is particularly important at Gershwin’s because the bar is spacious, warm, and well-stocked. Plus, it has a big fish tank with fish that…
You must admit, it’s an odd name for a steakhouse. Steakhouses are more apt to tout their hangar-sized wine cellars and rosters of fine red wines. But Keg Steakhouse & Bar is more than just a place to let red-meat juice moisten your chin while dribbles of Cabernet ruin your…
Over the last few years, millions have been marching to Washington and other places for a variety of reasons, swarming the Mall and pestering the media for attention. Let’s see, there’s been the Million Man March, the Million Woman March, the Million Family March, and the Million Mom March. But…
One of the cool elements of the Paul Draper design in Lombardi Mare, besides the ice blues, the etched glass, and the swordfish heads jutting out of the wall above the semi-open kitchen, is the goldfish bowls strung up above the bar. Only they really need to give those fish…
Eating at a churrascaria is eating by wandering around. Or at least having many people wander around and pester you with weapons while you try to eat. Because it often seems there isn’t much eating at all to go with all of that wandering around. Once you flip the coaster…
The front door of Samui Thai Cuisine is a fascinating contraption. This is a good sign for a restaurant, because if the front door is compelling enough to stop you and invite you to fiddle with it, think of what the food must be like. The huge 500-pound red oak…
Ajiya manager and sushi chef Ray Lin stands behind the sushi bar and slaps a flounder down onto the cutting board. It’s an ugly fish, like a mutant beetle that impels itself via belly flops, the kind of insect you might find under a rock or a pile of rotten…
Mignon postures as a Yankee’s notion of Paris during the ’60s: Audrey Hepburn, Catherine Deneuve, hip American jazz, and pill-bug Citrons that would look way cool in 21st-century Plano if they didn’t have the reliability and durability of communist-bloc concrete. Just portside of the hostess stand, above a cabinet that…
The best thing about India Palace, aside from some of the food, is that the press kit contains a sheet of “frequently asked questions,” or FAQs in contemporary parlance. No fooling. There’s this question about owner Pardeep Sharma: Q: Is Mr. Sharma from India? A: Mr. Pardeep Sharma is an…
Maybe I’m dim, but I recently found myself doing endless Central Expressway service-road laps–not to outrun the white Ford pickup I cut off exiting onto Campbell, but to find Rasoi, an Indian restaurant hugging Central Expressway. It’s not that the preparations weren’t in place. I had the address. I had…
