It’s hard to gauge what kind of a mind would turn a restaurant rooftop into a forest. But Carrabba’s Italian Grill has done it, transforming the roofs on 16 of its restaurants into sloped gardens. Engineers brace the roof with steel beams and concrete slabs, dump roughly 90 tons of…
If there’s anything that can be said about Addison Circle, that fabricated suburban urban village that sprang up like a tax shelter around a huge blue metal sculpture composed of supine spindles, it’s that it breeds restaurants with a gerbil-like prolificacy. There’s Antonio Ristorante, Kampai Sushi & Grill, Avanti Euro…
There’s a banner outside of Red Onion Bistro in Denton making note of its “adventurous wine and beer list.” This is like pulling up to a men’s boutique and seeing an unfurled banner that says “adventurous leisure suits.” If you have to call out your daring sensibilities, you ain’t got…
You see the red horse everywhere, and not only on gas pumps. It’s on buildings. In parks. In shopping malls. And now it’s become a restaurant: one each in Dallas and Fort Worth. Folks rattle on with painful seriousness about this bit of iconography, about how it symbolizes Dallas and…
Excellent Seafood & Grill is an exercise in suburban utility. It’s Spartan, efficient, and loaded with functionality, the primary example being the $5.49 lunch specials. For a fin and four bits you can get blackened snapper with baked potato, teriyaki chicken on rice, or fried clam strips with French fries…
After tasting Pyramid Grill’s steak tartare, a huge mound of milky pink pulp shaped like a loaf of rye bread, I began to wonder: Why does so much of the tartare served in Dallas, no matter what its species, taste like something plumbed from a bedeviled little Underwood can? So…
Avanti Euro Bistro owner Jack Ekhtiar describes his new restaurant in Addison Circle in a way that is wholly at odds with its appearance. He says he wanted to create a restaurant and bar that was causally elegant, a place where people could be comfortable and enjoy quiet conversation without…
If you want to give a restaurant a stress test in basics, go to dinner with a bunch of computer geeks, ones drooling with fickleness. That’s what I did, a trio of them, with clearly expressed systems specializations: hardware, software, and training. Never before did I realize that hoisting digits…
Among the few things that are striking about The Old Warsaw, that stalwart fine-dining venue founded in 1949 by Polish diplomat Stanley Slawik, is the Café Pierre ($9.50). It’s hard to get a grip on the exact formula and the preparation from a distance; it’s blended on a cart in…
, 3309 Dallas Parkway, Suite 401, Plano 75093 (972) 608-1883. Open 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 11 a.m.- 11 p.m. Friday; 2-11 p.m. Saturday; 2-10 p.m. Sunday $$-$$$
Many things have been crafted from old gas stations: coffee bars, topiary shops, car bra boutiques, bootleg 8-track dealers, galleries with fuzzy black light paintings. But a tapas bar has to be among the most original. Yet this is exactly what Ildefonso Jimenez–a key player in the founding of Café…
Honchos at the Stoneleigh Hotel, onetime home of the classic continental room Ewald’s and purveyor of some of the best sushi in Dallas, have decided to sharpen the culinary edges in this circa-1923 hotel. So they shuttered Ewald’s, the dining room launched by longtime Dallas chef Ewald Scholz, hung a…
Naming a restaurant after a breed of cattle might seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in Texas, the No. 1 state in cattle production. But when you look at the Charolais, a breed of cattle originally from France (and named for a district in that country), you have…
Bizú (which means little kiss in French) kissed off, and it’s not hard to see why. Though the transformed McKinney Avenue space that was once the home of Sfuzzi and Coco Pazzo was sexy and smart in all its mirrored, votive-candled, organza-draped glory, the food was iffy, especially for the…
One of my dining companions called Ciao Marco Italian “fast supper,” a word play on fast food. Which is odd, because though the service is pleasant here, it isn’t necessarily fast. And though the prices are reasonable, it isn’t necessarily a value. In reality, Marco is “easy supper” — easy…
Much as I try, I can’t seem to find a common thread between Volvos and haute cuisine. Volvos are austerely functional vehicles, hauling child protective seats with the resolve of a D-6 dozer. They’re the automotive equivalent of granola with a side of stewed prunes, which, along with boutique lefty…
Dear Mr. O’Dowd: Right off the top I’ll admit I don’t know much about Irish food (is there a lot to know?). I’m German. And there’s not a whole lot to know about German food either, at least not in a haute sense. Assembling cool kitchen appliances, we’ve got that…
There was me — that is, the Kraut — and my zheena, and we sat in the Milkbar making up our rassoodocks about what pischcha to nibble on for the evening. This devotchka, all dressed in a malenky white vinyl skirt with these flip horrorshow go-go boots high up her…
There’s a guy in San Francisco named John Cunin who was the longtime maître d’ at a place called Masa’s before he decided to open his own place in 1990 called the Cypress Club. The Cypress Club was (and still is, I suppose) one of those see-and-be-seen places. People like…
Kampai Sushi & Grill is a new restaurant on Addison Circle next to Antonio Ristorante and across from the just-opened Avanti Euro Bistro. But this isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that Kampai faces “Blueprints at Addison Circle,” a structure that, according to the city of Addison, is…
Time was that the 99-cent threshold for pricing was the sole domain of the grocery store, or at least it seemed that way. It’s an old strategy. Knock a penny off a price and make it seem like the customer is saving a buck, while the cent saved ends up…
It’s not surprising that a venue like Ciudad D.F. surfaced like a bubble on Dallas asphalt. What’s surprising is that it has taken this long. Ciudad is Monica Greene’s (of Monica’s Aca y Alla in Deep Ellum) tribute to her hometown and a Dallas interpretation of the cuisine found in…
