When the man whom I usually refer to as “my dining companion” first started traveling to Japan on business 11 years ago, he stayed at the luxurious New Otani Hotel in Tokyo. He would come back two weeks later, his bags stuffed (no, not with towels) with presents for me…
Have a good time and do a good deed, all at once. Share Our Strength’s “Taste of the Nation” is the restaurant industry’s effort to stamp out hunger. Every year, in the same week, food and wine tastings take place in more than 100 cities nationwide, with the proceeds going…
Driving north on the Tollway last week once again, I made a vow: I won’t complain any more about going north. No more diatribes about cookie-cutter developments and Dallas clones, I promise. I’m sure you’re as sick of reading them as I am of writing them. I’ll just make the…
Okay, walk east on the sidewalk in front of San Remo (the one on Frankford Road) and you’ll come to the Rice Boxx. It’s just a Chinese take-out, but since I happened to know it was designed by some talent, and since I also knew it was owned by the…
Warnings are a big topic these days–when the world is such a hazardous place, and we can’t seem to be trusted to take care of ourselves anymore. I read in the paper a week or so ago that because of a tragedy involving children and balloons, a watchdog group is…
There’s one good thing about Tuesdays: hot duck fat. Le Char-donnay serves confit of duck every Tuesday, and if the week looks long, I suggest you stop in for lunch or dinner and take comfort in confit. To prepare confit, a country specialty of Burgundy, you cook the duck meat…
The whole population of this neat-as-a-bandbox (what is a bandbox?) little restaurant was facing the rear wall to watch a green parrot pivot on its perch to reach a morsel of food, reaching, reaching…till finally it overreached itself, capsized, and fell off its perch. Who ever saw a bird fall?…
Fried chicken was the favorite food of my childhood, probably because we hardly ever had it. We came home from church on Sunday not to chicken but to leg of lamb, a legacy of Anglophile grandparents. My mother didn’t like to fry chicken because it was “too messy,” which it…
On my restaurant critics’ top 10 list of most-often-asked questions–along with “What’s your favorite place to eat?” (home) and “Why aren’t you really fat?” (stress)–is, “What’s a good place to go for seafood?” Until now, I haven’t had a really good answer. Cafe Pacific is good, Newport’s is fine, there…
You may or may not remember that a few weeks ago I went off on a tangent about the State of the Cocktail. I received a little mail from that tirade, and I’ll be reporting on the results over the next few weeks–that is, at the slow pace of my…
The Metroplex is a myth. D-FW is actually and appropriately more like a big mall than a single metropolitan area, a messy conglomerate of distinct communities with two main “anchor stores,” linked only by geography and a highway. Everyone knows how different Fort Worth and Dallas are: Fort Worth is…
Five handwritten pages from a devoted diner–how could I ignore this request to check out her favorite pizza place? A transplanted New Yorker yearning for the pizza joint of her childhood, she discovered a menu attached to her doorknob one day which led to the pizza of dreams at a…
The restaurant with the romantic reputation has become even more so. St. Martins is one of the few late-night places that lets you meet the morning in sophisticated style. In addition to the selections from their regular menu available from 10 p.m. till 1:30 a.m., the kitchen is now offering…
This is Capriccio’s third move–it opened in the old house on Maple, then moved to the reconstructed San Simeon space on McKinney. In December, it moved again, into the old house once occupied by the ever-lamented Routh Street Cafe. Capriccio’s most recent space on McKinney had been completely redone, transformed…
Everyone loves to be the one “in the know,” the one in touch, the one who knows what’s hot and what’s not. Everyone loves a secret–if they’re in on it–and from the first day it opened, Gloria’s was everyone’s favorite secret. “Hey, I know this great little Salvadoran place.” (Salvadoran–what’s…
How sweet it is. Lakewood is one of the prettiest parts of Dallas, but it lacks certain urban quality-of-life requirements. You can’t get good groceries there, or go to a first-run movie. Good restaurants are scarce and–until recently–to get a good cup of espresso you had to drive across, or…
We live in scary times. And what’s the first thing to do when you get scared? Tell the truth: you turn around and run. Hide under the bed. Find your mommy. Eat something. That’s why, I theorize, comfort food has become the sure bet of the food business. It began…
Speaking of breakfast, there’s something about a particular shade of orange that I’ve seen only in vinyl, and it’s so evocative of a certain kind of breakfast that the menu could have been sold with the stuff by the yard. Was there even a choice of colors at this price?…
It’s never a deal, but expense really isn’t the problem with caviar. It’s availability. Unless you’re all dolled up for a night on the town, you’re not going to find caviar on the menu. Why should caviar require a coat and tie to eat? Yet nobody serves it except fancy…
To remind you where I’m coming from: I married into a clan whose family reunions are highlighted by a belly dancer’s performance. Malouf family ties are strong; hundreds of them gather every two years from all over the world to compare their Siti’s–that’s grandma to you, gringo–tabouleh recipes. The food’s…
A January issue of New York magazine featured two long articles: “Why America Hates New York,” and “The Ultimate Mexican Restaurant Guide.” The former article was actually a Newt vs. New York piece, and quoted a lot of statistics about how liberal New York is as opposed to how reactionary…
Cafe Society has been Dallas’ favorite coffee-talk cafe since it opened. It beat the rest of the coffee hustlers here, but the real root of its charm is its attitude. It assumes Dallas reads, talks, converses, and debates. It bases its whole business on that. Its mission statement says that…
