You have to admit it. Owner Hamid Moallem did a hell of a job retrofitting his new restaurant into Soho Food, Drinks and Jazz. I remember when it was Okeanos, featuring seafood by famed Dallas chef Avner Samuel. The institutional terra-cotta tile floors and baby-blue walls with yellow trim the…
Bistro bluster Ouch. Last week’s review of The Bistro singed some nerves, and it wasn’t my impressions of the food or service that inflamed temperaments, either. It was naming the names of those responsible for The Bistro’s largely marginal fare. A March 15 Bistro press release ballyhoos the restaurant’s new…
Soul food We’ve all heard that chefs are a little crazy. We’ve also heard that crazy people sometimes make drastic moves at the behest of ghosts. Help the president run the country for instance. But open a restaurant? That’s what former Sipango chef/partner Matthew Antonovich confesses. He says his recent…
That little restaurant space with the burgundy awning near Lovers and Inwood has gone through some modest mutations over the years. In 1992, it was Le Caviste, a French wine bistro. Then in 1993, Guy and Martine Calluaud appropriated the space and created Calluaud’s restaurant, a more informal version of…
“A 1967 Raquel Welch romp,” cookbook author and TV cooking-show host Nathalie Dupree says as I take a seat at Joshele, the new upscale dining and jazz spot in Plano. “Space, A, space, H, O, M, Do you know it?” she asks. “Wait a minute–I don’t think you’re old enough.”…
Dragonfly flutters A Dallas County district judge slapped longtime Dallas nightclub operator Steve Kahn with a temporary injunction late last week, essentially removing him as head of the Dragonfly Bar & Restaurant on Lower Greenville Avenue. The ruling follows months of legal wrangling between Kahn and Dragonfly’s limited partners, led…
“This is a German restaurant. You will have fun if you just follow orders.” The guy who said this was on stage, dressed in lederhosen (leather shorts with suspenders). With a squeezebox in his hands, he unsuccessfully prodded diners to rise from their seats, stand up by their tables, and…
Load of bull Sometimes a probe into the obtuse puzzle surrounding Dale Wamstad’s III Forks steakhouse can get you more than you bargained for. Wamstad and III Forks ran full-page ads late last week in the front section of The Dallas Morning News. Baffling things, these ads. “Before Dallas was…
Restaurant press kits can sometimes make for raucously good reading. Writing is crisp. Cliches are punchy. Quotes are pithy and ripe with unaffected wisdom. Skimming through press releases often reveals precious little nuggets from chefs. Phil Butler, former executive chef of Chicago’s acclaimed Havana Cafe Cubano and current chief chef…
Freeze! Drop that Cabernet Assault with bodily injury. Burglary of a motor vehicle. Criminal trespass. Shipping a bottle of wine to a Texas resident. Such activities may soon be on the same criminal footing. Legislation recently introduced by state Sen. David Sibley (R-Waco) would stiffen penalties for producers and out-of-state…
“I say it looks like Sputnik,” says one of my dining companions, sloshing a Modelo Especial in one of Taco Diner’s stubby square tumblers. “No, no,” says someone else. “A moored sea mine.” I thought it looked like the head of a mace, the spiked battle club used in medieval…
Midnight snack “Mico” Rodriguez of the M Crowd Restaurant Group, operators of Mi Cocina, Taco Diner, The Mercury, and Mainstream Fish House, says the defunct Mainstream Fish House outlet on Oak Lawn Avenue will open as Citizen in June. Citizen will feature a lounge aura with diffused lighting filled with…
Rodizio means “rotation” in Portuguese. This definition, stated in a press release headlined “Totally Unique Grill to locate in the heart of Arlington,” proved significant after two visits to Rodizio Grill, a continuous-service Brazilian churrascarias, or grill house, because the quality seemed to spiral downward from markedly flawed to barely…
La Mirabelle woos suitors Chef-owner Francois Fotre is trolling for bidders on his upscale North Dallas French bistro La Mirabelle. No, business isn’t sluggish. Fotre insists he has built a devoted following. “My February is going to beat the pants off last year’s February,” he brags. Rather, Fotre wants to…
Years back, I was in a country western/rock band that toured the nation’s mid-section. This momentous opportunity came after long months in a dark, leaky basement attempting to replicate the lush orchestrations of Frank Zappa’s “Easy Meat” with a power trio, filling any melodic, contrapuntal deficiencies with generous helpings of…
Simon does Brash 25-year-old deal wizard Tristan Simon has been busy since he cashed out his managing partner position in Cool River Cafe, the successful Los Colinas hot spot created by Stephen Hartnett (Fox & Hound English Pub) and Gene Street. Still a limited partner in Cool River, Simon is…
Deli swap Asher Deli, the “New York-style delicatessen” that opened in Snider Plaza last fall, has been sold to the owners of Marrakesh, the Moroccan restaurant on West Lovers Lane. Sources say sluggish business prompted the move. The delicatessen was launched by Asher Investments, the partnership behind Bistro A that…
On my first visit to the Chaparral Club, I brought Peter, one of my wife’s business associates. During the trip up to the 38th floor of the skyscraping Adam’s Mark tower, I mentioned that the structure used to be the Southland building, and that the Adam’s Mark spent $150 million…
I read a blurb recently in a Windy City magazine about actor Scott Jaeck. He was lovingly described as “movie star handsome” and “as wonderful [kind, sensitive, intelligent] as he looks.” Jaeck is poised to assume the role of Peck, the male lead in Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play How…
Pomodoro/Arcodoro move? Rumors swirl that the owners of Pomodoro/ Arcodoro on Cedar Springs Road are attempting to work a deal to purchase a defunct Cedar Street bar location (at Stephan Pyles’ former Baby Routh) to house the pair of restaurants, which would move upscale after the location change. But Francesco…
Jensen goes barley Mark Jensen–onetime chef of the Thomas Avenue Beverage Company and the Green Elephant, and chef-owner of the now defunct Mark’s on Henderson–has a new Dallas gig. He’s the new chef of The Barley House on Henderson, and he’s methodically tweaking its pubby fodder. “I don’t come in…
Perusing all the splashy newspaper pix and verbiage gushing over the lineup at the 1999 Detroit Auto Show has been weird. It is, of course, an insufferable cliche to say “everything old is new again.” And “retro” is a term horribly worn and carelessly used. But there they were, all…
