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…
Tryst (the word) arouses with lascivious implications. A flood of them. The head swims in the salacious stew. Say the word. Tryst. Notice how sticky it is. Bound tightly between a pair of identical rigid consonants, tryst promises furtive sensuality. Tryst Restaurant & Bar draws on this promise, flaunts it…
Cajun used to mean exotic. Twenty-five years ago, before Chef Paul Prudhomme foisted his blackened redfish on gustatory history–giving lesser cooks license to char stuff to an ebony crisp and call it Southern cuisine–we could find really fine Cajun cooking, and its New Orleans cousin, Creole, only down in the…
Enter Cryovac. Invented years ago by a company called Sealed Air, which distributes everything from bubble wraps to extruded plank foams, Cryovac vacuum shrink bags revolutionized food packaging by injecting a burst of freshness into fish, meats and poultry sent through the distribution chain to the table. So it was…
It used to be a Dairy Queen, which helps explain the Sunday-Monday-Happy-Days feeling inside Starfish Seafood Diner. Walk up to the counter to scan the menu board and you’ll see a smiling guy in a white paper hat. A paper hat! That’s Tom McCoy, co-owner with partner Hank Branstetter of…
Pinned to the server’s starched white jacket lapel is a long narrow ruby bar trimmed in gold–a ruby sliver really. Guest: Tell me about your red bar. Waiter: This is the red “i” in Bice. Guest: Say it again. Bee-shay? Waiter: Bice. Guest: Bee-say? Bee-jay? Bee-shay? Waiter: It’s like Beach,…
