Jon Calabrese and Joe Hickey, the pair who spawned the twin venue Legal Grounds coffee bar (by day) and Savory restaurant (by night), are gestating triplets. In September, Calabrese and Hickey will launch Taste restaurant and State & Allen bar coupled with an urban market anchored by a common kitchen…
Fusion, whether it’s in musical, culinary or thermonuclear idioms, is a tedious term. It’s a sigh stimulant, a drowse inducer, a word that was forged in a quest for succinctness but instead plopped us into the middle of a muddy mealy mouth. Think of how many menus, in one way…
It’s like Oz’s wizard before the curtain is pulled: This picture, anchored at the end of a foggy-gray arching hallway, is a huge head glowing bright green, floating on a wall, tufts of hair reaching up into the air manically like flames stoked with ether. In another room rests an…
Tom Tom Noodle House recently debuted a low-carb menu whereby “every rice plate can be made low-carb by leaving out the rice,” kind of like low-carbing a baked potato by 86ing the spud. But rice-less rice plates weren’t enough to save the Preston Center location, which opened roughly a year…
“I consider myself a tequila connoisseur,” says Agave Azul founder Zotico Reyes. “It’s the spirit of Mexico…the myth of it, the taste itself.” Reyes, a longtime Dallas-Fort Worth restaurant pro (La Margarita, Mi Cocina, Cozymel’s), has both Greek and Mexican heritage, which might explain his attraction to both the “spirit”…
Brant Wood (not the Wood in Deep Ellum’s Trees) calls a portion of Café Brazil’s business day “deep night,” the wee-hour stretch when folks commune to work off whatever self-abuse they have inflicted for the evening. “We do as much business deep night as we do during the regular day…
It’s disconcerting to stroll into a shabby diner and be confronted by a Soviet military uniform near the kitchen. Disconcerting and, somehow, appetizing. This is how Taste of Europe whets. After all, there’s little in the scope of human history more fascinating than Russia, from its tyrannical tsars to its…
It was plain after Jeffrey Yarbrough turned in his chopsticks that noodles had gone corporate. We have the names: Big Bowl, Pei Wei, Noodles & Company. Yarbrough, who launched his Dallas groundbreaking noodle shop Liberty years ago on Lower Greenville, tried to give the concept a boost by dropkicking it…
There has never been a more cumbersome union than the matrimony between municipalities and sushi rolls. Yet the latter spread with bunny-like vigor, despite the mismatches. Sushi Boom in San Francisco has its San Francisco roll (spicy tuna and avocado). SuShi Ya in Chicago has its Chicago roll (shrimp tempura,…
Few entrepreneurial journeys in Dallas have been as unusual as Monica Greene’s. Working in many of Dallas’ finest and most popular restaurants through the 1980s and early ’90s as Eduardo Greene, she personified the quintessential host: gracious, savvy and acutely tuned to the social complexion of the dining room. As…
Next Tuesday, our celebrated urban core will be needled out of its tequila-addled mind when the Dallas version of Iron Cactus Mexican Grill and Margarita Bar debuts. The three-story, 14,000-square-foot restaurant, imported from Austin, comes complete with a cylindrical tower housing a winding staircase, a rooftop deck that overlooks Dallas’…
“Are you a G.I.?” asks the woman behind the counter after an order is put in for Rhine River’s currywurst. Currywurst is knackwurst with a mild curry-ketchup sauce slobbered over it. It’s impossible to take this description too literally. After depositing a knackwurst on the plate dusted with dried parsley,…
Rancher James Fuqua fancies himself a soothsayer. In 1997, a rainy year, Fuqua surveyed the sprawling fields of green grass near his West Texas ranch in Quanah and smelled impending peril. The uneasiness prompted him to increase his water supplies and buy every blade of hay he could get his…
Here’s an experience worth its weight in foie gras: gnawing on bloody-as-hell steak in a garishly masculine steak house and not hearing a single note sung by Frank Sinatra. Or Tony Bennett. Or Nat King Cole. Skip Harry Connick Jr., too. Delete any croons from other packed rats as well,…
Grand Lux Café, the upscale casual diner invented by Calabasas Hills, California-based The Cheesecake Factory Inc. , is being fitted into the Galleria in the north part of a pair of expansion wings flanking the Westin Hotel. The only other cities with Grand Lux are Chicago, Las Vegas and Los…
There are two ways to digest Django on the Parkway: with music or without music. Django must be consumed this way because Django entwines two personalities that come into relief only when the music is sifted out. This Addison venue, now thoroughly washed in burnt brick-red stucco substance on the…
In the end, we’ll all chug and chew from a Brown bag. Or a box, if Melrose chef Doug Brown has his druthers. Brown, the culinary wunderkind who did his teething at Nana Grill and now governs the menus at Melrose Hotel properties in Dallas, New York and Washington, D.C.,…
Convenience is the crack of modern culture. It’s why the remote is the power metaphor of the tract castle and the mobile phone has displaced indoor plumbing as the critical necessity of existence. It’s why cash flows through the air (billions, watch your head) instead of going postal. It’s why…
“It’s not dead.” So says broadcaster Jim White, who has hosted the KRLD Restaurant Show for the past nine years. KRLD NewsRadio 1080 dropped the cleaver on the show last month because, White says, parent Infinity Broadcasting demanded KRLD yank it from its budget. But White says he’s drafting a…
New York magazine proclaimed it the new hanger. Is this a compliment? Hard to tell, especially when you consider ancestry. The hanger steak, a grainy beef cut that a flock of clever chefs nudged into tender meat with intense flavor, quickly landed on bistro menus. But its pedigree is not…
The gold glint of chardonnay is tarnishing. Merlot is passé. Gad, even cabernet is sliding slightly in popularity. Syrah, pinot noir, pinot grigio (why does so much of it taste like two Bayer dissolved in Evian?) are ascendant. So are the wine-producing regions in Oregon and Washington. And Italy. France…
In the auto industry, dipping into the past for design cues has become a mania. Examples form a long string of oval headlights and fenders rounded into ripe hips or etched with sharp creases lifted from bygone eras: PT Cruiser, Ford GT, Mustang GT, Thunderbird, Chevy SSR, MINI Cooper. But…
