Kavala is like a finely chiseled face with a crooked nose or a chipped tooth or maybe a misshapen beauty mark. There’s a lot to love here. The trick is to separate those things that will make the casual peruser swoon from those only a mother could love. Though the…
Lunch specials starting at $5.29 Small margarita: 99 cents Monday-Friday Free chips and salsa count: 1 Hairy eyeball count from the hostess: 3 “Do you want some more water?” count: 22 I was driving around Oak Cliff looking for a place to eat for cheap (I know Oak Cliff is…
I admit it. For approximately one month, every time I have driven by the new Dallas Saltwater Willy’s Seafood & Steakhouse location I’ve laughed…for two reasons. For one, it’s the name. Another, I like to imagine Willie Nelson replacing the “shotgun” of his iconic “Shotgun Willie” with “saltwater.” This was…
There’s something about good ol’ American traditions like co-ed sporting leagues and state fairs that lend themselves naturally to ingesting copious amounts of the grilled, griddled and fried. We here in the land of grand portions enjoy our concessions, our tailgating and our comfort food. Like a good neighbor, Tilley’s…
Vern’s Place looks exactly like the kind of place my mom doesn’t want me to visit. So, I went. Well, I drove past it for a week and then I went. With some friends. For some reason, the barred windows made it seem a little unwelcoming. But the sign on…
To fully plumb the pleasures of tapas, it is essential to begin with a small cylindrical glass of fino, just a couple of ounces. Fino sherry (Domecq La Ina, $3.95) is a liquid throb that inflames and focuses the taste buds. Sherry sipping is a neglected gustatory ritual. This is…
I’ve been eyeing the Mr. BBQ bus in the convenience store parking lot at Maple and Wycliff avenues for a while. With its American flag and “2 for $2 sides” signs painted all over it, it’s pretty awesome-looking. And cheap-sounding. As I walked up, I noticed pretty quickly that nobody…
“Strip mall” used to mean a massive parking lot, a grocery store, a nail place (with some obvious name like “Nails Here”), a wacky wing place and a Blockbuster Video. Then there might be some labor-of-love restaurant that went under in three months, unless it was a buffet, and then…
There’s a certain lethargy to Stone Horse Bistro, a stiffness. It doesn’t completely unravel the place, but frays are visible through its gaunt earnestness. It appears on the appetizer menu, on the right side, under the heading “charcoal skewers.” Note four selections: lamb, sweetbreads, chicken gizzard and beef tongue. Enticing?…
To understand The Porch, you need to understand the legend of Steve Stodghill. Stodghill is the humble Batman fanboy turned top fuel litigator who got rich investing in Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com. He rubs elbows with George Clooney, Jerry Hall and Elizabeth Hurley. Stodghill is the superconducting super-collider of the Dallas…
Sandra Lee was the oldest of five siblings and, according to her Web site, helped fashion quality meals for her family on their welfare budget. Thus began her Semi-Homemade empire of cookbooks, life and style guides, Food Network show Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee and various other projects that laud her…
Make your way to SushiSamba, even if it’s just for one thing and one thing only. If you can stand the thick swatches of bright pink, saturated red, pureed mango and searing green that merge and flood until diners are capped in bordello halos, if you can raise your threshold…
Maybe you’re a mutant. Maybe you’re the kind of bloke who wants to waddle down to Victory Park—noting the cognitive dissonance of the Blade Runner-esque Victory Plaza big-screen flicker dry-humping the art-deco American Airlines Center—and enjoy a relaxing nosh in a neatly trimmed banquette. Maybe you’re so creepy you even…
If you bring it to a vigorous boil, steaming off the wine lists, the flatware and the dainty flourishes with raw fish and Kobe beef, Victory Park dining can be reduced to two elements: noise and loud, color-shifting light. All the big names have it, from Nove’s wine room glittering…
If only The Cape Grill were situated where ideally it should be. That is, a half-mile or less from a pounding blue surf, a stretch of white beach and a friendly boardwalk. Instead, this sunny indoor-outdoor seafood place sits smack dab in an ocean of concrete near the Quadrangle, where…
You’d think we’d get more Mexican than we do. The real stuff, the kind that grips you with such intensity you want to light a candle to the Virgin for dessert. We don’t light many candles, though. La Joya means “the jewel,” or some such. So right off the bat…
You can go to Nove Italiano and surrender your body and your mind to the overloaded sensory broadsides from the lights, the plasma screens and the speaker cabinets bolted to the ceiling and aimed to saturate every corner of the room with ruthless efficiency. You can gulp in the musky…
If this is the year of anything in Chinese zodiac parlance, it is the year of the disruptive tech rat, the upheaving cyber-pig, the transfiguring digital serpent commanding banks of fire-breathing servers. IPods and illicit file-sharing are pulverizing the recording industry. Google wire feeds and digital headline bundlers have transformed…
At one particular Thai restaurant in my neighborhood, I have endeavored for close to a decade to earn the approval of the hostess/waitress. The food is stellar and the seating cozy, but the lady (I’ll call her Thai Waitress) has officially written me off as a medium-spice wimp. Doesn’t help…
Dinner jazz. Tasty thought. Yet it never seems to take hold. Sure, there are the pianos in the steakhouses, the crooners in the bars gone smokeless, the odd guy on Wednesdays with the keyboard and the microchip section that spools out drum and bass emulations like so much warm Velveeta…
Don Ho is dead. He was laid low in mid-April by heart failure. He was 76. He was called Hawaii’s best ambassador. He was a Waikiki showroom headliner for 43 years. He hosted The Don Ho Show on ABC for two seasons. He sang “Tiny Bubbles.” Does Don Imus dare…
“Frisco’s first 4-star restaurant with a 3-star rating.” Chris Gangi says that’s a jab at The Dallas Morning News and its new restaurant rating system, which recently dispensed with awarding restaurants fractions of stars in favor of whole stars. The line appears on his Web site. Gangi thinks more of…
