Back in the day, after restaurants were ravaged by bursting equity market bubbles and brutal terrorists kicking in New York City’s architectural teeth, wine drinkers went downscale. Go-go ’90s expense accounts were pinched. Travel slowed to the speed of Web conferencing. Wine lists sloughed off the perpetually allocated cult cabs…
The focal point in Salum is a circa 1940s buffet captured at auction in New York. It is both an obstacle and a hem loosely defining a spacious portal spilling into the kitchen. This is not an open kitchen in the ordinary sense, where chefs can only be observed from…
Culinary terminology has slipped through the looking glass into that ambiguous place where a word means just what someone intends it to mean. For instance, some restaurants advertise “new American” cuisine, an imprecise catchall phrase referring to menus featuring, oh, French, Italian, Southwestern and whatever else the chef wishes to…
The Bronx is divided into wings. Walk into the vestibule and notice the bistro-ish dining nook off to the left with simple chairs and wooden tables that look like they absconded from the flea market in Canton. To the right is the bar. This is where booth benches are fashioned…
Near the end of our second visit to Randy White’s Hall of Fame Barbeque a guest at our table asked a pointed question: Why would a local football legend lend his name to such a place, and shouldn’t every hall of fame across the country write a stern “cease and…
It’s early in The French Room. It’s filled not with diners but with music plucked and bowed from a string quartet. A harpsichord joins the jam. Later, “Musette” by J.S. Bach is played. On a harp. The music does much to craft the rarefied ambiance. The music sets the pace…
Don’t call Vickery Park. It’s just a neighborhood tavern tucked alongside dressier venues on Henderson Avenue, after all. No need for reservations and, besides, the phone’s hidden in some back office. Hmmm–if a phone rings in an empty room, does it make a sound? “We never hear it,” staff members…
Sushi is a commodity, one with a vigor that shows no signs of dissipating. It has conquered strip malls, fast food and grocery stores. Sushi has come a long way since the days when eating raw fish and crunching the glass bead roe of smelt and flying fish seemed the…
On an October evening, James Winkler works a crowd of some two dozen mostly young, attractive professionals. The group sits in rapt attention as he evangelizes for a substance that is as intimidating and inscrutable as it is coveted: wine. They laugh at his anecdotes, such as the one involving…
There’s a scene in the football-bashing film North Dallas Forty in which a doltish offensive lineman sets out to meet some investors who plan to use his name on a chain of restaurants. Before leaving the clubhouse, he’s confronted by the comparatively brainy Nick Nolte, who christens the place “Joe…
t’s Thursday, October 13. Thank God it’s not Friday, because as luck would have it, we find ourselves in the Richardson Hotel. Richardson has beached itself on hard luck–the victim of popping tech bubbles. Instead of buzz, the Telecom Corridor is a hall of echoes. But help is coming. Accounting…
Food is the new whatever used to occupy the portion of our minds devoted to culture. Unfortunately, that implies a certain amount of the old “wine snob” mentality. Diners flashing authority in culinary matters expect to learn arcane details when scanning menus, and woe to chefs who fail to identify…
Odd to open a restaurant named after a child’s card game. In the past, chef Chris Svalesen has been more succinct. “Fish” was the downtown restaurant that made him famous. He later went obscure, naming his next restaurant after a Fahrenheit measurement: Thirty-Six Degrees, the optimum temperature at which fresh…
It’s Saturday night in Eden, and the gods are angry. We’re sitting inside the small converted ranch house watching a restaurant in the midst of a serious meltdown. The air conditioning unit malfunctions. Butter melts on the plate, and our waitress, already frazzled, wipes damp wilting hair from her glistening…
Here’s a prediction: Fuse will last as long as a lit fuse. But it won’t go out with a megaton cherry-bomb pop. It will go out with a pfffft. A dud. Then someone will try to salvage it and change the name to Gasket, or some other thing that can…
Things aren’t always what they seem. Take, for example, Main Street Blues Room. At first glance it’s a rustic tin utility building more suited to storing old tractor parts than housing a restaurant. The name itself evokes lurid images of precarious dives, boozehounds slumped at the bar, sultry music and…
Just because you’re upscale doesn’t mean you can’t kitsch. Riccardi’s does it, with flair maybe, but it does it. Riccardi’s is tucked in the space that was once the elegantly flashy Mediterraneo, back in the day when the restaurant was going to be the Benz in the FoodStar restaurant group’s…
Buzz past Manny’s Uptown Tex-Mex Restaurante during prime time on a Saturday night, and you’ll likely glimpse a chaotic scene. Hungry would-be diners mob the entry waiting for a table. They loiter in clusters on the lawn, bump elbows at the bar and mill about the patio. Sometimes people wait…
Nobu has a sake called Devil Killer. Not sure why this brew is branded a demon slayer, but a large slanted bottle of the stuff is $20. Maybe Satan is cheap. Maybe the prices would sever his carotid artery. Maybe Nobu is Hades for the penny pincher, which in a…
Urban provincialism is an interesting thing. Over and over we hear people inside the loop dismiss anything north of LBJ or lodged in the mid-cities. Much more difficult, it seems, to navigate an unbending multi-lane highway than suffer the halting drive on Oak Lawn Avenue. So they miss out on…
One of the fascinating elements of Standard is roadkill. Not on the menu, mind you. Still, if an edible animal is killed by an all-season radial rather than a sharp neck twist, does it really matter? Ultimately, it doesn’t, because the roadkill is in the restaurant as a prop, glaring…
Envision standing beer in hand on a Saturday night, waiting for a table in a place overwhelmed by blubber-laden, hairy men in ball caps and T-shirts. Must’ve sauntered in from a nearby WWF match or truck race. At a dining table near the bar slumps a guy with bulldog jowls,…
