The numbers are startling, but maybe it’s only because of where we live. Judging by our contemporary fetishes of steak palaces, prime beef, Kobe beef burgers (who will be the first restaurateur to introduce a dry-aged prime sloppy joe?), pork chops that could fill a men’s club cleavage and rib…
In August, Voltaire closed. And that pretty much sums up the Dallas restaurant complexion for 2002. Voltaire’s death rattle served as a worn metaphor, a symbol of what was expected to happen but didn’t–the big bang that rattled the windows and agitated the lava lamp but left the infrastructure unfazed…
Why do the munchies that are served with belts of booze have to possess culinary panache? They don’t, or maybe shouldn’t. After all, such craft is ultimately pulverized into an alimentary ooze mere moments after creation and hustled through yards of plumbing. Sure, the same thing happens during a fine…
There’s a lot of indignant rant in the culture these days over the knee-jerk, Glock-click tendency of many of us to associate anything Italian with mobster chic–and maybe baked ziti. In April 2001, the American Italian Defense Association filed a lawsuit against the producers of the popular HBO series The…
Like the burger and onion ring, Tex-Mex has become a tavern staple, and it’s no surprise why. It’s salty, which generates the thirst that generates the cash from drink sales. This cuisine is highly absorptive, which means it serves as a stomach-lining hurdle: a bean-cheese-tortilla-salsa speed bump that keeps your…
Like most contemporary Asian outlets, Green Pepper is replete with high-tech touches, subtle though they are. Plastic chairs in black and yellow surround dark tables. Walls washed in subdued yellow hover over dark wallpaper wainscoting imbedded with Chinese characters. And Green Pepper has a motto: “We are a BYOB restaurant…and…
Hibachi Rock’s vestibule is crammed with Japanese dolls, and Polaroids paper the wall. A manager says these photos were shot some three years ago when this Allen restaurant opened. There was a steady racket rumbling just beyond the dolls and snapshots. As we moved toward the glass inner door, it…
When Voltaire opened in 1999, it was billed as one of the most expensive restaurants ever devised in the city of Dallas. Owner Scott Ginsburg never disclosed the total cost, but it most certainly ran into the several millions considering the chandelier by famed lighting designer Ingo Maurer valued at…
Not everything Phil Romano touches turns to gold. We Oui slipped off the landscape on a trail of French kitsch greased with red lipstick. Lobster Ranch got caught in a chowder undertow. Eatzi’s nearly succumbed to a vicious bite by the Big Apple. But gold isn’t what’s important. What’s important…
The name Noodles Kitchen is a jarring composite of a plural and singular noun. It sounds more like a culinary lair for a Dick Tracy nemesis than a peddler of doughy strands. The décor takes that tiny jar and amplifies it: art deco new age Asian contemporary with a huge…
It’s no surprise that a North Texas bedroom community would turn a California fascination into a viable business. After all, California is the American birthplace of dreams, fantasy and personal computer wizardry. Everyone wants to touch its gloss, to be a part of its vanguard, to have a grab at…
Pub is a word derived from the term “public house,” which is “an establishment licensed to sell alcoholic drinks for consumption on the premises and often serving meals as well,” according to Webster’s. It’s touching to consider that proprietors who make their living with liquor licenses are so concerned about…
Shannon Wynne, reformed night crawler extraordinaire and founder of such long-gone nightclubs as Fast and Cool and the “o” haunts (Nostromo, Rocko, Tango and Mexico), once had an uncanny touch for detecting the faint pulse in Dallas’ mediocre nightlife. But who would have thought Wynne also possessed an uncanny prescience…
There’s a prominent sign on the wall in the rest room foyer at Duke’s Original Road House. “Coming soon,” it reads, “brand new, bigger, better restrooms just for you.” Now it may seem strange to generate excitement by pre-announcing an impending john remodel, as you might an upcoming Rolling Stones…
According to the cafe’s menu, a Zaguán “is the elaborate entry-passage in the grand old colonial homes of Venezuela, Spain and Colombia.” This entryway is carefully carpeted with a pebble-stone mosaic, it adds. Indeed, the motto for this cafe is “a mosaic of tastes.” And Zaguán is that, as varied…
“Hole in the wall” is a sort of dining Holy Grail; the object of a fervent quest for hidden culinary riches dressed up like a Hee Haw extra. Like Rousseau’s noble savage, the true hole in the wall glimmers with irresistible romance and beats with the myth of primeval superiority…
“Miss America ate here.” This is a swell publicity claim for any restaurant, especially one planted among the sticks in a tiny town named for an itty-bitty tree with a fungus problem. Miss America combines all the things that make for good promo sizzle: beauty, talent and sex–or the lack…
At this point on the dining timeline, Avanti Ristorante is perhaps better known for its longevity than its food. After all, more than a handful of restaurants execute its brand of Nor-Ital Mediterranean fare, often with better results. But Avanti has been doing it for 14 years; that’s a near…
Not long ago, Mud Bugs Cajun Café was known as the House of Voodoo, but the name was jettisoned swiftly, not long after it opened. You could see the scraps of plywood stacked in the rear from which the Mud Bugs signs were cut, painted orange and posted on the…
Venezia is a slice of institutional cafeteria ambiance done up in Italian red and green, with a heavy emphasis on the green. It has a counter up front and a dining room with tables covered in green and white checked tablecloths. An awning hangs over the semi-open kitchen with Christmas…
A tornado abruptly changed the course for Reata, the popular Fort Worth “cowboy cuisine” restaurant. In March 2000, the furious whirl ripped through Fort Worth, popping the windows out of the restaurant perched on the 35th floor of the Bank One Tower and flinging its furniture more than a mile…
The noodle house was supposed to conquer the Dallas restaurant front, dotting it with shanties of twisting and slurping instead of fortresses of carving and chewing. Food pundits pointed to London and New York and Los Angeles, where noodle houses proliferate, and pronounced Dallas fit to breach this clique of…
