Someone has to say it, and it might as well be me: Something fishy is going on. OK, when everyone from Stephan Pyles to Gene Street is opening a seafood restaurant, you’ve landed a whale-sized trend, and you can count on swallowing as many fish metaphors and salty cliches as…
“I just don’t get this cigar and cocktail trend–it’s so eighties,” a friend complained lately. It’s my theory that cigars and martinis are the cheaper, more benign version of the last decade’s vices, cocaine and champagne, but I don’t really get it, either. However, there is one restaurant that’s picked…
It’s definitely the ’90s–a computer-equipped cyber-cafe that sells gourmet coffee by the pound over the Internet (with some help from the guys in brown trucks). Diedrich Coffee, a California coffee bar concern that specializes in all the by-now familiar variations of varietal coffee drinks, opened its first Dallas coffee bar…
The big food news a few weeks ago was all about Harry’s Market getting in bed with Boston Chicken. If you’re holding your breath, waiting for a punch line, let it out. That’s it: Harry and the Chicken. In the restaurant world, the marriage of one of the most successful…
The service ranges from preoccupied to surly, the ambiance depends entirely on the light (it’s acceptable on a sunny day and drearily depressing at night, although that could change if they ever get around to replacing some light bulbs) and really, the place is utterly devoid of charm, but Ali…
“I just don’t get this cigar and cocktail trend–it’s so eighties,” a friend complained lately. It’s my theory that cigars and martinis are the cheaper, more benign version of the last decade’s vices, cocaine and champagne, but I don’t really get it, either. However, there is one restaurant that’s picked…
Modo Mio tags itself as “cucina rustica Italiana,” but we could tell by the voice on the phone that it didn’t entirely fit that description. And sure enough, when we arrived we were greeted at the door by the stylish blonde attached to that voice, fashionably dressed in an understated…
Lots of us lament the disappearance of regionalism in this country. The dominance of fast food, media, and the movies means that boundaries are blurring, that local differences in talk and taste are fading. It’s getting hard to tell, for instance, exactly where the North sinks into the south, or…
City Harvest is taking it slow, but every time you enter the little epicure shop that could, there’s something new. Their latest service is a month of take-out menus–a concept familiar to the regulars at Marty’s, whence most of the City Harvest staff came. Each week, the kitchen concocts a…
Tourist traps are supposed to be something you outgrow, like a passion for peanut butter and marshmallow creme sandwiches or a fascination with belching. Theoretically, anyone over the age of thirteen should be able to pass by a tourist trap souvenir palace like Shell City (yes, I was recently in…
“If you live to be 80 years old, you have 29,200 days to live.” That’s food for thought at the Dallas cafe that tries to combine both more often than almost anyone cares to. In addition to the blackboard menu of coffee and tea and the one listing daily specials,…
Evangelists proliferate here in the Bible belt, no matter what the precise nature of the good news they’re spreading. Perhaps that’s why the chain restaurant is the only aspect of dining we’re really notable for. I’d hesitate to insult a genuine barbecue purveyor by implying it was but a link,…
Once upon a time, there was a natural foods store called Harthomp & Moran on lower Greenville which grew and grew and grew until it blossomed into a natural supermarket called Bluebonnet and was eaten by a giant called Whole Foods. That’s no fairy tale, it’s real life in the…
Coffee bars, sports bars, home meal replacements, steak houses, bagel shops, and specialty theme restaurants–these were the hottest concepts in the food business in 1996, and it looks like 1997 will serve up some more of the same. Places like Planet Hollywood, Hard Rock Cafe, and Margaritaville (a parrothead’s paradise)…
Flan, like tiramisu, is one of the constants on the modern dessert menu. Usually it’s a bland option–turgid milk in a thin pseudo-caramelized syrup, faintly sweet, food suitable for convalescents. At its rare best, it’s a transcendent jelling of cream into a texture as luxurious as the taste of caviar…
The American Institute of Wine and Food, which loves to dine and dither about such things, focused on fusion food at its big deal Conference on Gastronomy last October in Seattle. Teapot tempests are nothing new to foodies, who characteristically delight in discussing the merits and demerits of what they’re…
Thank God the holidays are over and we can all recover, not just from overindulgence, cold-weather flus, colds, and the other deleterious effects of close contact with too much family, but from related holiday maladies like homesickness. Holidays hearken to home in the most primitive way, and even when we…
Ham I Am! is a little Dallas company which sells smoked hams, smoked peppered hams, smoked chickens, smoked brisket, smoked bacon, and, slightly incongruously, Brie. All these products are delicious and delivered to your door, but the product to put at the top of your list is the Ozark Trails…
“She was a good cook, as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went.” Occasionally a cliche loses all relevance–this line (supposedly of S. J. Perelman’s) makes absolutely no sense at all now that nobody has a personal cook and there’s only one place that even claims to want to…
When I was a student, to use the term loosely, at the University of Texas in Austin, the well-respected classics professor Dr. Douglass Parker taught a (very popular) course called “Parageography.” The point of the class was, believe it or not, to explore “the geography of imaginary countries.” That’s what…
Navigation may confound you at Tarazza, but at some places, you know exactly where you stand. Natalie’s, the little cafe with the heart-warming story behind it (it was started by a school principal and dietitian) has flourished by doing precisely what everyone would expect. Natalie’s is open for dinner, but…
Mandibles across Dallas should thank Natalie’s for their homemade cinnamon rolls, a welcome break from the bagel workout most of us call breakfast. Of course, they have more sugar and more fat than a bagel–they also have more flavor. Soft as a pillow, sweet as a dream, drizzled with sticky…
