Any menu can be delicious if a team of cooks puts their hearts and minds into making it so. But few restaurants in Dallas gave themselves as mighty a challenge as Gung Ho, which came out of the gate in February with an eye-roll-inducing name and an equally odd concept:…
Zaytinya, the new Turkish kitchen in Frisco from celebrity chef José Andrés, is the kind of restaurant where two tables can order completely different things and come away with vastly different opinions. A table that gets lucky will love their meal and tell all their friends; a table that guesses…
Dallas health inspections are broken. The system suffers from arcane city rules that prioritize routine inspections over revisits to failing establishments, leading to rampant grade inflation, manipulation of data in the public-access database, and budgets that fail to cover new technology or keep up with the booming local restaurant industry…
After a lengthy, suspenseful search, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra finally announced Monday that it has found a new music director to replace Jaap van Zweden: Italian conductor Fabio Luisi. Luisi, 59, is currently music director of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Zurich Opera and Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, an opera festival…
Fusion has become a dirty word in the food world. High-end chefs line up on the field of battle, ready to trade words over whether fusion is the driver of innovation and cross-cultural exchange or a craven attempt by white Americans to profit off the cuisines of immigrants. But there’s…
Dallas-Fort Worth has the biggest Laotian food scene in North America. More than a dozen eateries, ranging from traditional mom-and-pop markets to brewery-hopping food trucks, are introducing Texans to Lao cooking. But if you’ve never had Laotian food before, what should you expect?
On Aug. 18, 2016, the Lakewood location of Mi Cocina, a popular upscale Tex-Mex chain, faced one particularly unhappy visitor: a Dallas health inspector. The food safety report filed that day graded Mi Cocina at 60 points out of 100. The details weren’t pretty. Flies in the kitchen. No hot…
This weekend, Jaap van Zweden concludes his tenure as music director of the Dallas Symphony with performances of perhaps the most famous work in the orchestra’s repertoire: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But there’s another piece on the program, a major world premiere of a new work written especially for the DSO…
Dallas’ next culinary revolution began in a quiet specialty grocery store in Irving, a small shop where boxes of imported foods line the metal shelving all the way up to the ceiling. Here, in 2004, a woman named Boonmie Phennara fired up a Bunsen burner to make dinner for visiting…
When I first walked into Express Kabob, the restaurant was empty. Not just empty of customers — empty, period. As the door shut behind me, the sound attracted the attention of no employees. I tried opening and closing the door again. No luck. I picked a chair up and dropped…
Dear Paul, This isn’t easy for either of us. I just want to write about delicious food and where to find it; you just want to enjoy a lucrative public career without the media reminding diners that you allegedly once got high and slammed a woman into the wall in…
Deep Ellum has a new bar from the team behind Armoury — and although Ruins has a distinctive Mexican accent, it feels a whole lot like Armoury. That’s not a bad thing. Ruins is still in its “soft open” phase, with the grand opening party scheduled for Wednesday, but it’s…
Not all of Plano’s Sichuan restaurants are alike. Some, like Little Sichuan, stash their traditional dishes in a binder of specialty items kept separate from the usual litany of wontons and stir-fries. Some, like Fish House, specialize in live seafood straight from the tank, coated red with spices or served…
Fachini, chef Julian Barsotti’s new tribute to classic Italian-American cooking, is officially open. And Barsotti, owner of Dallas favorites Nonna, Carbone’s and Sprezza, has big plans for the new restaurant. At Fachini, theatricality and retro cool will be the orders of the day. Snazzily attired waiters — expect full tuxedos…
Every neighborhood needs its spot. What is a neighborhood without a restaurant where you can feel totally at home with a plate of reliably good, unfussy food? A soulless collection of houses, that’s what it is. The corner of Hampton Road and Illinois Avenue, deep in the heart of Oak…
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s guest star this weekend, 25-year-old Italian concert pianist Beatrice Rana, has never played with the orchestra before, but five years ago, a weekend in North Texas changed her life. Rana took home the silver medal in the 2013 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, an award that…
This little purple building, tucked away on Haskell Avenue in an old East Dallas neighborhood that hasn’t yet had its moment, carries a lot of history. It was built as a Sinclair gas station in 1932, the same year that Sinclair trademarked its beloved dinosaur logo. The Texas Historical Commission…
For a restaurant that opened over a decade ago, Nonna still feels like a secret. It hovers on the edges of the spotlight, watching as newer openings and other Dallas favorites steal our attention. Its website hails from an era of the internet when people thought it was a good…
Many Dallas-area restaurants fancy themselves unique, but only a handful serve foods that you truly cannot get anywhere else in town. When we set out to create a list of dishes and cuisines served at only one restaurant, we didn’t realize how hard it would be. Conversations like this kept…
If a restaurant is full, that probably means everyone likes it. If the place is empty, that probably means nobody likes it. This was the basic test my family followed when I was a kid and we went on road trips. Since the internet was not overflowing with opinionated amateur…
What is it that makes Tei-An such a satisfying restaurant? The little things. This is a place where every tiny detail deepens your gratification, adds to your respect. Tei-An is a restaurant where you can see that an owner and staff have thought carefully about every last moment. The wooden…
On the outside of downtown Dallas’ 400 Record Building, a tube of glass ascends from the sidewalk to a dining room perched above. Inside that glass ring, a spiral staircase whisks diners around a sculpture by Jean-Michel Othoniel that resembles a long, glittering necklace. Entering Bullion is like ascending into…
