Tramontana is the kind of new restaurant I love to find. The owner used to work at The Mansion, and though you have to be crazy to open a restaurant in the first place, he is wise enough (and experienced enough) to start small, with a limited menu, and to…
“The Legend Begins,” says the sign over Stone Trail. Well, it can’t begin if you can’t find it. It wasn’t just me. The guest who was supposed to meet us at Stone Trail (“at the southwest corner of Midway and Belt Line,” as I’d been instructed, with no mention of…
You’ll have to regard this as a sneak preview–a look at an unfinished artwork. The soup kitchen at the Dallas Museum of Art is completely gone, but the old Gallery restaurant is still in the awkward middle of its metamorphosis from ugly duckling to what will certainly be a swan…
Every so often a car pulls into the parking lot at the northeast corner of Park Lane and Greenville Avenue, stops, and then slowly leaves. An animator would draw those cars bewildered and dejected, with down-turned front grilles and hunched fenders. The people in those cars are bewildered and dejected…
The decor at Bombay Cricket Club seems slightly stark and cold–bare wood floors, flounces over bare windows the only softening touch (big Indian rugs would make it cozier), but the service is so helpful and the food gives such a glow that the whole place seems comfy by meal’s end…
Face it–not all your meals this holiday season will be eaten in the cloying company of seldom-seen family and office friends. Often, gladly or grudgingly, you’ll be eating on your own. Here are some suggestions for a single, serviceable meal: a gorditas plate at Cenaduria on Greenville–$1.95 for a stuffed…
Ordering from a menu can be a real art. Not the way you do it, but what you order. There are people who can compose the perfect meal from a restaurant menu, each dish progressing perfectly into the next, each dish the pinnacle of what the kitchen can produce, so…
I try to keep my spirit lively, my mind open and I truly mean to muster anticipation for every new restaurant. But my mouth has a mind of its own: “Oh God, another Mexican restaurant,” it sighs. Every one that opens promises it will be different, but after all, how…
Antoine’s offers the perfect student lunch: a pre-wrapped po’ boy sandwich (“original,” turkey, roast beef, tuna or minced ham), a big grab of chips and a Coke for under $4. Take it to-go and eat it outside since evidently winter’s never coming, or always going, this year. Or, if it…
We needed a quick bite on a Monday evening. No restaurant is crowded on Mondays, except maybe Star Canyon. So we didn’t think twice about dropping in without a reservation at Amore, a little place in Snider Plaza where I heard the food had improved. It has. And the place…
It’s a season of expectation, of secrets and the wonderful romance of a well-wrapped package. But when you tear through the tinseled wrapping and find the same old necktie, it’s always disappointing. That’s the way La Petite Maison set us up. This is a restaurant with all the right ideas…
It was scary to hear that Parigi had been sold. It’s one of the last remnants of the first wave of the Dallas dining renaissance, and it’s been a refuge–a mainstay for sophisticated, unpretentious food since it opened. I originally scheduled this revisit because, for the first time in years,…
The most graceful surrender award goes to Michele’s. Giving in to the inevitable, the coffee-themed restaurant has changed its mind and its name. A caffeine pioneer, this funky, personable little coffee bar found the niche before behemoth Starbucks and wannabe Coffee Haus came to the ‘hood. So, drop a syllable,…
“Pacific Rim” is a geographical term only in the restaurant trend-watcher’s lexicon. For my own elucidation, I turned on the light-up globe left over from my son’s pre-adolescent Age of Reason–the time when they want to know where everything is and how everything works–and let my fingers do the walking…
British food is the butt of every food joke, told even by those who’ve never eaten British food. But Jenni Messina, formerly British, holds steadfastly to the British theme at Jennivine, and nobody’s laughing. Inside, there’s a London phone booth, pictures of the Royal family, British flags, and bottle-glass windows;…
Potato chips are indisputable junk food. But the ones Two Sisters cooks up you could legitimately count as a vegetable–the thin gold curls, barely dusted with salt, actually taste like potatoes. There’s only one sister at Two Sisters now; Connie Mansfield’s sister has left the business, but Connie still caters…
Joey Vallone and his self-named Dallas restaurant have been the darling of the society columns ever since the restaurant, Joey’s, was but a gleam in young Joey’s eye. We’ve read all about the Signing of the Lease, the Pre-Opening Party (with accompanying Wet Concrete and Martini Incidents), the Convenience Store…
Think about it: the crust is what really separates the men from the boys. Or the girls from the women, for that matter. Kids hate bread crust; they eat the whole squishy white middle of the sandwich and frustrate their moms by leaving a perfect frame of brown crusts. But…
Just what you’ve been waiting for–the first combination dry cleaner, coffeehouse, and flower shop, recently opened at the corner of Preston and Frankford in Far North Dallas. According to the owners of Saint James Cleaners, the “wave of the future” is combining several retail concepts into one–that’s how pitifully busy…
A tale of two pizzas: I said it was the best of pizzas, and though no one said it was the worst, there were a lot of people who claimed the superlative for their favorite pizza place, not mine. In the weeks following the Observer’s September 28 “Best of Dallas”…
There aren’t any human cultures that haven’t made a ritual out of dining, and there aren’t any that don’t dine on some things that are totally repulsive to other cultures. So the French eat snails and frogs, the Koreans eat dogs, the Chinese eat shark fins and swallows’ nests made…
Over the years, I’ve reviewed various Momo restaurants a number of times for one publication or another (since the publishing business is nearly as risky as the restaurant business, there have been many publications), and the summing-up has always been the same: great food, lousy service. Sometimes slow, sometimes inept,…
