There has never been a more cumbersome union than the matrimony between municipalities and sushi rolls. Yet the latter spread with bunny-like vigor, despite the mismatches. Sushi Boom in San Francisco has its San Francisco roll (spicy tuna and avocado). SuShi Ya in Chicago has its Chicago roll (shrimp tempura,…
“Are you a G.I.?” asks the woman behind the counter after an order is put in for Rhine River’s currywurst. Currywurst is knackwurst with a mild curry-ketchup sauce slobbered over it. It’s impossible to take this description too literally. After depositing a knackwurst on the plate dusted with dried parsley,…
Here’s an experience worth its weight in foie gras: gnawing on bloody-as-hell steak in a garishly masculine steak house and not hearing a single note sung by Frank Sinatra. Or Tony Bennett. Or Nat King Cole. Skip Harry Connick Jr., too. Delete any croons from other packed rats as well,…
There are two ways to digest Django on the Parkway: with music or without music. Django must be consumed this way because Django entwines two personalities that come into relief only when the music is sifted out. This Addison venue, now thoroughly washed in burnt brick-red stucco substance on the…
Convenience is the crack of modern culture. It’s why the remote is the power metaphor of the tract castle and the mobile phone has displaced indoor plumbing as the critical necessity of existence. It’s why cash flows through the air (billions, watch your head) instead of going postal. It’s why…
New York magazine proclaimed it the new hanger. Is this a compliment? Hard to tell, especially when you consider ancestry. The hanger steak, a grainy beef cut that a flock of clever chefs nudged into tender meat with intense flavor, quickly landed on bistro menus. But its pedigree is not…
In the auto industry, dipping into the past for design cues has become a mania. Examples form a long string of oval headlights and fenders rounded into ripe hips or etched with sharp creases lifted from bygone eras: PT Cruiser, Ford GT, Mustang GT, Thunderbird, Chevy SSR, MINI Cooper. But…
Cars and dining go together like Botox and TV news anchors. Whole restaurant segments and a rash of clever inventions have been spawned from the marriage of food and motoring: diners, drive-ins, cup lids, drive-up windows, talking Jack heads, cup holders, probably even disposable diaper wipes (keep a tub in…
In a February article in the online magazine Slate, Columbia University Professor Duncan Watts exhumed the work of the late Princeton social psychologist Solomon Asch to explain what Watts called the Kerry cascade. The phenomenon, Watts says, is the strange dynamic by which Massachusetts Senator John Kerry rapidly swept to…
Forty-nine hundred McKinney Avenue has always had an identity problem. Does it really want to be Italian? Or more accurately, will we let it be Italian if it really is? Or is this spot next to a dry cleaner really never meant to be more than a hoagie deli with…
Spike is a dwelling of odd contrasts, ones so striking that it’s a good bet they were unintentional, which makes them all the more delicious. On the surface, Spike is another in the long line of Dallas’ shallow nightclubs with pulsing music, lighting that requires bat sonar and shopworn chic…
The main concern was bones. Carp bones. Scrolling down the prolific menu at Shanghai Restaurant (brief menus and fortune cookies never appear at the same restaurant), I became curious about the red-cooked buffalo carp tail. A few menus here feature things like flounder cheeks. Monkfish liver is a popular entrant…
It’s hard to dine in a blur. Eating in a buzz is easy, and it’s not impossible to feed in a fluster. Chewing in a din can be annoying. But dining in a blur is a trudge. Dining in a blur is different from eating in the dark, where you…
Ten years ago Mediterraneo slipped into the ground level of a bank building in the farthest northern reaches of Dallas. My first visit was in 1996. It was for the birds. I gnawed on a dry-cured duck breast and avocado salad with mixed greens, shaved parmesan and Provençal vinaigrette. That…
Erraticism is underrated. Pathological restlessness isn’t a character flaw; it’s a gift, maybe even a mark of genius. Take the late Seymour Cray, the legendary supercomputer architect. Cray devoted his life to spinning miracles. Though his canvas was silicon and his medium sheer number-crunching fury, his supercomputers were nonetheless sculpted…
On the second visit we ended up next to the same car we slipped alongside on the first trip: a red Plymouth Sundance with Tweety Bird slip covers over the front buckets. This was weird: two Warner Bros. canaries leering out at me from a cheap MOPAR on two separate…
No municipality on earth is a better locale for a restaurant pushing backyard cuisine than Plano, bedroom community to the world. But what exactly is gourmet backyard cuisine? If my memory still serves correctly after years of alleged cabernet abuse, backyard cuisine once consisted mostly of Oscar Mayer tubes, Durkee…
It was the year of smoke. So many Dallas restaurant landmarks went up in the stuff in 2003, and so many Pall Malls and Partagas Churchills didn’t, at least not within restaurant walls. And walls will be the most crucial culinary consideration in Dallas from now on, thanks to the…
What is hip? Like a cube of lime Jell-O, hipness is hard to grasp without making a mess. Yet everybody craves this elusiveness, so much so they want to eat it, thinking it will impart some sort of penetrating insights. We all know where to get it, too: New York,…
It sounds easy, but operating a successful neighborhood restaurant is tough: ingratiating yourself with a cadre of regulars, serving decent food, enticing nomads from foreign neighborhoods and protecting the comfort zone you’ve created (never invite assassination attempts by pulling a menu staple after it’s become an icon). To understand the…
Flowing water is said to provoke soothing meditation, especially among those with feng shui (the art of furnishing a room to harmonize with its spiritual forces) on their dumbwaiters and incense residue on their lapels. Moving water has an almost-primordial appeal–aesthetic, psychological, physiological–perhaps hearkening back to the days before we…
McCormick & Schmick’s used to be a toy store: FAO Schwarz, that ages-old chain purveyor of toddler titillation. FAO was bled into anemia by Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us and is now suffering just as the season of shopping psychosis intrudes. This is the sort of pressure that popped FAO…
