It feels like an old neighborhood nightclub in an aging industrial city or maybe New York, one hollowed out of the ground like a gopher den. The ceilings are low. The light is scant. And while it doesn’t have much in the way of coffin-nail clouds on account of political…
9 Fish is difficult. Not because the food isn’t good–it’s great–but because this esoteric restaurant is so infuriatingly remote, hidden deep in the monotonous bedroom community wilderness. Shoved way up in Frisco, on the leading edge of North Texas’ metastasizing strip-mall incursion, 9 Fish demands you traverse Dallas’ most notoriously…
The brothel burgundy that drenched everything–including the sagging velvet curtains–has been stripped away. The acoustical ceiling has been blown out and replaced by a glossy surface, recessed lighting and crystal chandeliers. Plus, there’s more window real estate now, so you can actually see the Dallas skyline instead of just a…
Chef Joseph Maher insists the color that drenches his North Dallas restaurant is not orange. “Actually, it’s papaya,” he corrects. “Papaya is my favorite fruit.” Whatever the hue, the textured color soaks Mirabelle’s walls, trim and, clumsily, the ceiling acoustical tiles. There’s a novel relationship between color and fruit swirling…
It’s difficult to approach a restaurant transplant like Roy’s with a whole lot of hope and without a whole lot of suspicion. From the press kit, Roy’s kind of seems like a Hawaiian vacation exhibit in the Palace of Wax, one with a toque-wearing Roy Yamaguchi facsimile tossing leis around…
The interior of The Old Monk is outfitted in woods of varying degrees of wear and significance. Tables come in diverse shapes: from rectangular to square to circular, most of them deeply scuffed. Wooden stools hug little table rims wrapped around building posts and hugging exposed brick walls. Other barstools…
What’s not to like about Ethiopian cuisine? It takes on different attractive personas, registering searing intensity (with jalapeño peppers and mitmita, a hot Ethiopian chili powder), manliness (lots of beef and lamb chunks) and familiarity (collard greens). But its most endearing quality is that it must be eaten with fingers…
Chef Jean La Font says he doesn’t fiddle much with the food at Le Rendezvous. He eschews twists and mergings. He shrugs off plate landscapes framed in sauce dribble and herb dustings. Everything is seeded from safe, comfortable classic structures. And from that track Le Rendezvous rarely stumbles. On those…
It’s futile eating spaghetti with chopsticks. The procedure might seem doable at first. After all, there are countless examples of Asian noodles that have a striking resemblance to spaghetti. Yet these Asian noodle specimens, often made from rice or egg, seem tackier, so they adhere to the sticks more readily…
Noodles Ave. has a slightly ratty feel to it. Not that this counter-order-deliver-by-number-table-service is actually a ragamuffin dressed up in colorful ethnic garb. It’s just that there are little things that lead to head-scratching. On one visit, a brood of Noodles Ave. counter workers and kitchen jockeys–presumably on a break…
Greenville Bar & Grill owner Terri Russo recoils when it’s suggested that her refurbished old bar (established in 1933) borders on upscale. Yet with its clean looks, white-tablecloth demeanor and 51-bottle wine list (called GBG Juice), it would be hard to call it anything else but a stab at a…
Margarita Ranch serves margaritas in more weird incarnations than congressmen come in. You can have them prepped with any tequila you want from a huge list, or you can try one of the Ranch’s special margaritas, which range from the cactus flower (tequila, lime and Tabasco) to the Cuba libre-impersonating…
It’s always risky hunting down Asian restaurants in strip malls. Either they’re bad, or more often, they’re so mind-numbingly inoffensive that you worry about falling asleep facedown in a puddle of panang curry. Much less often a killer Asian restaurant is discovered, in all of its searingly honest ethnicity, leaving…
Bistro Latino is a cave. The long narrow space is a hostel of darkness and a bungalow of noise. The dense carpet of diner gibberish and the impenetrable curtain of clangs and tinkles from flatware, glassware, dinnerware and tabletop spanks makes it impossible to tease out the background music in…
It’s hard to get a sense of what The Gulf Coast is trying to be. Maybe it’s a consignment store that serves free étouffée with the purchase of two pink flamingos. Or maybe it’s a fried seafood hutch that lets you leave behind all the stuff that was refused on…
Thai restaurants in Dallas generally fall into two categories: mediocre and great. There isn’t space between the two designations to accommodate gradients. Maybe it’s the water. Maybe it’s the obsession with steaks and frozen margaritas. For some reason Dallas has, with few exceptions, a hell of a time giving birth…
Pei Wei (pronounced pay way) Asian Diner is a restaurant based on a fictitious Chinese chef. The menu says the young Pei Wei used to go to bed thinking of recipes from China, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan while living in Taiwan. Indeed, Pei Wei the restaurant is a mix of…
More fascinating than the food and the thirst-quenching, electric-blue margaritas are the architecture and interior design at Blue Mesa. Both–at least at the Blue Mesa on Northwest Highway and the new Blue Mesa off the Dallas North Tollway in Plano–dazzle with unexpected little flourishes. The Northwest Highway installment has a…
It’s hard to figure out exactly what Stratos is. The word sounds Greek, but it isn’t a Greek restaurant. The menu is packed with sushi, but it isn’t a Japanese restaurant. There’s a dance floor, but it isn’t exactly a club. The three televisions in the bar broadcast sports, but…
It was originally dubbed Buddha Bar, and the name was intended to signify a sense of serenity, a mode of contemplation, an evocation of composure. It’s not clear what the enlightened one would have thought of this. Maybe he would have tossed it into the same category as sex, which…
“It’s better to look good than to feel good.” The adage works in most social settings and perhaps the occasional funeral. The inverse works for most sporting events held in a stadium. But no matter how you play with the words–reversing them, putting an umlaut over the vowels, converting a…
On the surface, the most compelling reason to dine at Tabouli’s, a restaurant serving Middle Eastern fare, is the tent room. And if you dig deeper, it turns out to be the only reason. Not that the food is necessarily bad outside the confines of the tent (though it is…
