Everywhere there are the fakes, the counterfeits, the phonies. They make their way to our wrists (my Rolex impersonation suffered band failure, fell to the pavement and was crushed by a real Toyota Corolla), our wallets (keep an eye on those new Andrew Jacksons) and our lips (please don’t bite…
Many things float: dead fish, wine corks, Ivory soap, Enron limited partnerships. Sometimes restaurants float, too–in Texas, no less. That’s the fascinating thing about The Wharf @ Bayview Marina, a bobbing house of “North Florida” cuisine on Lake Ray Hubbard. “We’re actually floating on the water,” says manager Gary Weaver…
Why is Continental cuisine so hard to kill off? Like badly cropped sideburns, it’s ugly. It tastes like an overachieving Swanson TV dinner might if it had loads of self-esteem. And it generally comes with music delivered by people who didn’t get over purple velour the first time around. Loosely…
Perhaps Lola owner Van Roberts operates on a different plane, maybe the kind derived from a salad where the porcinis are subbed with magic buttons. Whatever you make of his latest culinary plunge, The Tasting Room, his balance-sheet projections seem to emanate from a different dimension than those generated by…
One of the inverted glass bowl chandeliers hanging from the ceiling is busted. Not blemished like a chipped tooth, but damaged like a hockey player’s smile. It’s a natural, accidental impairment in a dining room packed with faux threadbare touches. The creamy walls are blotched with a crackle finish–fraudulent architectural…
Comic Jackie Mason once asked: “Jewish civilization is 6,000 years old, and Chinese civilization is 4,000 years old. So where did Jews eat on Sunday night for 2,000 years?” It’s a strange crossover, this Jewish love of Chinese cuisine. Does it stem from shared tastes for chicken soup, tea and…
There’s a virus infecting Deep Ellum. Not the mosquito-borne kind–this is a restaurant virus, one of temperance, sobriety and restraint. Symptoms range, but they all generate the same basic characteristics: dull names; utilitarian menus; simple furnishings; lousy ambience; street fronts inhospitable to lines of cars from Stuttgart and Bavaria; resourceful…
Saffron is the Bentley of the spice rack. The golden, rich and pungent powder rendered from the threadlike stigmas of the flowering crocus is the most expensive spice in the world. At various periods in history, this bouillabaisse staple has been worth much more than its weight in gold. This…
Like chardonnay, merlot is a wine that is simultaneously subjected to derision and gushing plaudits. While the masses lap it up, those with discriminating noses and fat wallets sneer at the stuff, even as they shell out thousands of dollars to prominently stuff examples from Pomerol or Saint-Emilion into their…
My first taste of North Texas was a nibble of Arlington. I was staying in a tract home in a neighborhood with far too many tricycles and souped-up Hyundais. I’m not sure if this was the cause, but I soon developed a potent thirst for wine. In Arlington, I soon…
When Citizen opened roughly four years ago, its mix of neo-Asian fusion with a traditional sushi bar threw off so much heat that it was nearly impossible to get near it on a weekend night. The bar area, with banks of white televisions (now converted to plasma screens) bolted onto…
There’s no sushi bar here. (But there is sushi.) There’s counter seating equipped with an expansive view of the square open kitchen. It’s like watching ballet, the daredevil kind with knives and flames. Orders come in, and chef-owner Seiji Wakabayashi ladles orange fluid into a saucepan. Another pan gets a…
Great things can disappear in an instant as some momentous burp rattles mankind and alters the face of history. Pompeii, a town southeast of Naples, Italy, built on a spur of prehistoric lava, is just one example. In A.D. 79, it was destroyed in a flash by a hard-driving, molten…
Royal Tokyo is a piece of history, forged on griddles and refined over seaweed strips, that reaches its crowning summit on a slab of creamy beef. This curious route began three decades ago. It was elaborate, fabricated by Japanese master carpenters and draped in garden architecture with bonsai trees, waterfalls…
Tracy Miller and Alice Cottrell believe their restaurant is haunted. They’ve heard stories from construction workers, toiling well into the wee hours, telling of eerie sounds humming through the spaces in the historic Boyd Hotel where their restaurant took shape after the pair operated a catering company for six years…
Some of us have peculiar habits. Some of us suffer under peculiar rules. Abstaining from wine with dinner is a peculiar habit. Dry is a peculiar rule. This was brought home to me on a recent visit to Coppell when I stepped into Siam Thai Cuisine, a tiny strip mall…
It covers some 22,745 acres, but its maximum depth is just 40 feet. Normal water clarity is murky, even turbid. Yet Lake Ray Hubbard is regarded as a swell recreational depot with lots of good fishing (bass, catfish, crappie) and sailing, though there are no camping areas, beaches or swimming…
Joseph Gutierriz’s inauguration into the kitchen was spiritual. And short. At age 5, he was shipped off to seminary where he learned to cook for monks. “In Spain, in Catholic families, when you have a son that is a priest, you have a safe gate to heaven,” he says. In…
It’s always an iffy proposition to wander into a dining room as desolate as a godforsaken rock formation. Sure, it could be an undiscovered sliver of raw sublimity, a hidden bit of dazzle. But it could also be a puff of culinary stench of such potency that it keeps diners…
Our range guide was a veteran of the first Gulf War, so it wasn’t hard to steer the conversation to the lingering mysteries of the sequel. Saddam? “Dead,” he said tersely. WMD’s? “Buried deep in the desert,” came his reply. The paltry resistance of the vaunted Republican Guard? Only a…
At the heart of Smith & Wollensky is this slogan: “A steak house to end all arguments.” This comes clipped from a headline over a 1997 New York Times S&W steak house review by critic Ruth Reichl. The piece centered on an annual argument in her family over three New…
Right now, it’s a ghost town. Not one born of death and abandonment, but of birth and anticipated growth. There are a few things: a children’s store, an Asian fusion restaurant called Café Beignet and a toy store. But more is on the way. Much more. Above the storefronts rest…
