In the thick of country pitch-black, it’s hard to perceive the grandeur of Four Winds Steakhouse scenery. The night constricts everything to the narrow cone of headlights. The long, twisty pavement ribbon off of FM 47, wood fencing on its flanks, unravels just a few feet at a time. A…
First, a rat. Next, a load of bullshit. Can’t wait to see what McDonald’s serves up for Thanksgiving. See, Chrissy Haley isn’t suing the Southlake McDonald’s and its corporate parent for $1.7 million just because she and her nanny found a dead rat in her Bacon Ranch Salad last summer…
Meditate. Live purely. Be quiet. Do your work, with mastery. Buddha said that. Shinsei borrowed it. This isn’t surprising. All manner of restaurants and nightclubs have borrowed Buddhist trappings to dropkick hipness into the vibe, which there isn’t very much of in Buddhism save for silence and the occasional “om.”…
Grill on the Alley is a New American sucker punch; a dining blitzkrieg, albeit one leavened with polished elegance if you don’t count the cheeseburger. And even that is shaped from certified Angus beef and has earned a “classic” designation. The Grill is a New American temple outfitted in an…
Yutaka is nothing if not a hole in the wall—a postmodern orifice at that. Bored out of a strip mall just north of the Hard Rock Café on McKinney Avenue, Yutaka has massive floor-to-ceiling pipes with huge bolts secured to fittings with large nuts. The pipes crowd out the cash…
In Grotto there is a painting of a nude woman painting a cityscape. This is important. Because nothing encapsulates the complete Grotto experience like this image, tucked into one of the cartoonish murals smeared across the walls. “On the walls, our Felliniesque murals reflect the festive traditions of Italy,” reads…
California: ocean winds, sunny days, Hollywood glamour, cocktail-like fusions of culture, varied landscapes and traffic. California cuisine: fresh, light and healthy. When I heard the name Catalina Room and read talk of the Golden State on the restaurant’s Web site, I wondered if the Golden State could migrate successfully into…
Merkow’s steak is an ace of spades and a seven of hearts. Those are the cards Merkow’s Seafood & Steak owner Gregg Merkow was dealt when he pocketed $561,195 last year in a poker tournament at the Grand Casino Tunica in Mississippi. He used this win to capitalize his restaurant,…
As of this writing, the spinach tragedy seems to be abating. Despite The Wall Street Journal’s headline “Spinach’s pain is arugula’s gain,” a New York Times dispatch revealed several East Coast grocery stores began restocking the iron-rich foliage as federal officials continued to reassure the public that the stuff was…
The number of times Dallas has attempted to coach pizza to at least mediocrity seems uncountable. Of course, it’s possible we never really tried to perfect pizza. It’s possible we just put enough effort into these pies to differentiate them from cardboard. They still sell like hotcakes, after all. Some…
It is raining hard the second time I make it to Kona Grill. One of those bad boyfriend summer rains–the kind that shows up unexpectedly, sticks around long enough to dampen your hopes and then moves on. As the hostess shows me to a table near Kona’s front window, I…
It’s hard to get used to the 4513 Travis St. address in this guise. Its predecessor Sipango was a temple of boho chic, a hall of used brick and mortar grit softened by dense nicotine cumulus roiling in the bar. The Cal-Ital cuisine, dispensed from a semi-open kitchen with a…
Craft is brevity. Look at the menu. It’s little more than a series of columns with headings such as “meat” and “pasta, grains & beans” and subheads such as “raw” and “gratin.” And it’s terse. Foie gras, for instance, is slipped–unadorned–under the “meat” and “roasted” headings. There is no prose…
Names of dishes roll off the tongue with touches of lyricism: gumbo, jambalaya, muffuletta, po-boy, étouffée, red beans and rice. The syllables are priceless–spoken fragments that could easily give birth to endless haiku. Po-boy drowned in a Jambalaya gumbo gloat Teething étouffée Or not. But what if you toss DaZa…
What’s so wrong with bald? Bald (or a well-groomed balding, mind you) is sexy, cool, natural and, most important, tasteful. So why is it that the toupee is still in existence? I’ve seen lots of hair so bad it looks like a toupee, but never have I found a convincing…
Last time we sampled chef Bruno Mella’s craft, it was at Mel’s on Main, a short-lived Deep Ellum restaurant and bar featuring a mounted and framed butcher knife along with dinner plates autographed by Julia Child and Emeril Lagasse on the walls. There we sampled spongy swordfish with an ammonia…
Nothing says family dining like a tawdry tune about love at last call. Jimmy Buffett might agree with that, but Saltwater Willy’s Seafood and Steakhouse, well, not so much. Allow us to tell you a story: During a long-ish wait for a late-arriving friend, the wannabe pirate’s greatest hits played…
From the outside, it isn’t much. It’s easy to miss: a double-decker strip mall stretch done in drab concrete gray with charcoal awnings. But the Nakhon Thai restaurant strip nook grabs you anyway because the word Thai is done up in bright red. Must stand out like a swank Manhattan…
Basketball announcer Marv Albert’s brief conversation with Marco Polo’s ghost: Marv: You’ve had a hell of a career. The silk road. Working the zone for head Mongol Kublai Khan. Playing some devastating offense at Hsiang-yang during the siege by the Mongol hordes. And then you did some time in prison…
The thousands of miles separating Milan from Saigon are hardly felt just east of downtown Dallas. Natives call the neighborhood Old East Dallas or Little Asia, the developers building $350,000 townhouses a couple of blocks away call it the Upper East Side, but Italian restaurateur Alessio Franceschetti calls it his…
MapQuest can’t digest Southlake Town Square. Punch in one of its Plaza Place addresses, and it strings you across the Mid-Cities, threads you through Fort Worth and dead-ends you in a residential area near a place called Lake Worth. Or at least it did on my first aborted visit to…
It’s 100 degrees outside, and the air smells like a dirty diaper, but stinking compost aside, this small farm has an understated allure about it. The sheer gargantuan size of the beefsteak tomatoes and the way the shooting corn crops dance against the horizon make the place seem almost Disney-like…
