What does a daringly beautiful and sleek lounge do when it wants to evolve beyond watering-hole food? It sautés quail. We ordered Zúbar’s sautéed quail with new potatoes and asparagus, and we threw the kitchen off its footing. The chef made an emergency visit to our table and explained the…
It’s difficult to decide what to like best about Big Buck Brewery & Steakhouse. Is it the 360-degree jet-black audio speakers that look like charred beehives hanging from the ceiling? Or is it the Big Buck urinals? The latter, a steakhouse innovation soon to be copied in every segment of…
Ten minutes since arrival. Chips. We are swimming in chips. Two large baskets. And it’s taken 10 minutes to get these. They are crisp, well salted, and without that pubescent facial sheen that makes you feel as though you’re about to eat scraps of Southwestern-style no-wax flooring. Each basket is…
One good thing about The Ranch House is that if it weren’t for Interstate 30 just a few yards away and Lake Ray Hubbard (which is really just a gully with big hips) nearby, you’d think you really were on a ranch. And I’m not necessarily talking about the décor,…
Whit Meyers says the last thing he wanted was a shiny new penny, and he didn’t get it. Jeroboam, the new dining spot he and his partners in the Entertainment Collaborative developed in the Kirby Building, is a little clumsy, a bold portrayal of frays. Yet this is perhaps the…
It’s cold on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, but it’s sunny. It’s only a few days before the holiday season kicks in for real, before the busiest travel weekend chokes the freeways and confounds Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, before retailers grin and brace themselves for the certain onslaught of prosperity-induced holiday…
Frankie’s Sports Bar and Grill is a typical picture-tube-studded suds dispenser with a pool table, a smattering of video games, a few gruff bartenders, and a rec-room-like atmosphere with a sunken dining area. What isn’t so typical about this sports bar is that it has valet service (which is just…
I’m assuming the thing that is so thrilling about opening a Mongolian grill is that it’s dirt cheap to operate and has fat margins. There’s a specified roster of ingredients to stock and prep, labor is limited to drink-fetchers, a busboy, and a spatula swashbuckler who hovers over a griddle…
The interesting thing about Baja California Grill is that it was never meant to be named after that tendril of Mexican desert jutting out of the end of California. It was supposed to be called Hotel California Grill. But this got the panties of the band The Eagles in an…
What’s most surprising about Thai Tango is not the food, or the décor, or how snazzy the logo looks in lights illuminating its own little corner of a strip mall still under construction. It’s how far the place is from Dallas. Compost heaps and dung berms aside, when I think…
Sugarcane is rampant in Cuba. The primary agricultural commodity in that country has, over the years, pushed other vegetation out of existence. Land once covered with palm and banana trees is devoted to the succulent grass. Sugarcane is the basis of that most Caribbean of spirits, rum, which in turn…
A piece inserted into the trifold menu at The Prison in McKinney says that the circa-1880, three-story building was designed by architect F.E. Ruffini, crafter of numerous late 19th century public buildings in Texas. The blurb describes the Collin County prison as a “high Victorian Italianate structure with bracketed cornices…
Noodles are invading Dallas. Finally. Sort of. Since Liberty opened a couple of years ago, those in the know were expecting noodle houses–spots plying hybrid noodle dishes from all over Asia–to limply blanket the city with their tasty, cheap, and allegedly healthy culinary fibers. It didn’t happen. Perhaps it’s because…
t’s hard to know what to make of Jimmy Lu’s, so shrouded are its subtleties, so disguised are its flavors. Maybe disguised isn’t the right word, but I’m at a loss. I consulted the press kit, a stylish collection of tightly focused propaganda slipped into the sleeves of a glossy…
Thai Bistro’s maxim is “a true dining experience”; at least that’s what’s italicized on the front of the menu. I’m not sure what a true dining experience is, or even a false one. Perhaps the latter would include wax fruit, Velveeta, and veggie venison served in a karaoke bistro on…
It’s like a corral or a Ponderosa steakhouse. At Village Grill, you walk through the door and are immediately channeled down a walkway, like cattle, toward the ordering counter. Behind the counter is a large poster of the menu. There’s also a little decorative collage of wagon wheels and hay…
Tacky misses the point. The outside of the restaurant is painted red, the kind of crimson that occurs when you leave tomato sauce on top of a flame too long. Positioned at various points along the wall are Romanesque statues brushed with antiquing stain or maybe old clam sauce. Strings…
Maybe eating raw fish and raw sea-critter eggs is extreme, or at least it used to be in Dallas before sushi restaurants started popping up on the face of the metroplex like little red Clearasil targets. But what about fish? They have some pretty extreme dining habits too. Case in…
The warning sign came in the form of a beige Melmac plate with a floral design nuzzling the edge. It was hard to look at the faded hamachi (yellowtail), smoked salmon, and red maguro (tuna) stitched with milky strands of something and arranged over the plate, because it seemed so…
Spaghetti and meatballs. It’s the stereotypical Italian dish, and it’s ubiquitous. You can find it frozen, in cans made by chefs with names that sound like bathtub toys, or freeze-dried for hikers so that people who commune with horseflies, skip bathing for days on end, and dine in the dirt,…
Up north, where Coit performs thoroughfare intercourse with Arapaho, where dwarf trees are bred because shade trees would create a pool-clogging crisis, a huge banner flaps in the wind. It’s tethered to Ziziki’s, a little dining room with black and white ceramic floor tiles and teal awnings that look like…
There’s little that’s special or notable about PoPoLos Café. And that’s why it’s so special. The food isn’t particularly imaginative, but it’s mostly well prepared, and this is accomplished without pretension. The atmosphere is simple and clean without a hint of hauteur. That this restaurant could get back on its…
