The more things stay the same, the more they change. Just ask Ron Corcoran, founder of Sipango. Last summer, he plugged founding chef Matthew Antonovich back into the ever-morphing nightclub-discothèque-Cal-Ital-Tuscan steak house to reanimate its long-gone culinary luster. Antonovich returned after a five-year string of cooking and non-cooking pursuits, such…
Cars and dining go together like Botox and TV news anchors. Whole restaurant segments and a rash of clever inventions have been spawned from the marriage of food and motoring: diners, drive-ins, cup lids, drive-up windows, talking Jack heads, cup holders, probably even disposable diaper wipes (keep a tub in…
In a February article in the online magazine Slate, Columbia University Professor Duncan Watts exhumed the work of the late Princeton social psychologist Solomon Asch to explain what Watts called the Kerry cascade. The phenomenon, Watts says, is the strange dynamic by which Massachusetts Senator John Kerry rapidly swept to…
Forty-nine hundred McKinney Avenue has always had an identity problem. Does it really want to be Italian? Or more accurately, will we let it be Italian if it really is? Or is this spot next to a dry cleaner really never meant to be more than a hoagie deli with…
Spike is a dwelling of odd contrasts, ones so striking that it’s a good bet they were unintentional, which makes them all the more delicious. On the surface, Spike is another in the long line of Dallas’ shallow nightclubs with pulsing music, lighting that requires bat sonar and shopworn chic…
Last October The New York Times called Texas “a patchwork of dizzying gradations of wetness.” In Plano, those gradations are apparently so disorienting that residents there can’t seem to ease the regulatory tangle that stands between them and a wet whistle. Consider this: Last month, a petition drive in Plano…
The main concern was bones. Carp bones. Scrolling down the prolific menu at Shanghai Restaurant (brief menus and fortune cookies never appear at the same restaurant), I became curious about the red-cooked buffalo carp tail. A few menus here feature things like flounder cheeks. Monkfish liver is a popular entrant…
We’ve always thought “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it” was a proverb reeking of genius. And its steely profundity came to mind late last week when Sipango founder Ron Corcoran announced that big changes are in store for his restaurant/nightclub, now that one of his…
It’s hard to dine in a blur. Eating in a buzz is easy, and it’s not impossible to feed in a fluster. Chewing in a din can be annoying. But dining in a blur is a trudge. Dining in a blur is different from eating in the dark, where you…
Ten years ago Mediterraneo slipped into the ground level of a bank building in the farthest northern reaches of Dallas. My first visit was in 1996. It was for the birds. I gnawed on a dry-cured duck breast and avocado salad with mixed greens, shaved parmesan and Provençal vinaigrette. That…
First, the Dallas Observer’s own Zac Crain breaks the news that crime is a growing problem in Deep Ellum (“Cruising for a Bruising,” August 14). There is much wringing of hands. Next police use pepper spray to break up an unpermitted but otherwise nonviolent street party on New Year’s Eve…
Erraticism is underrated. Pathological restlessness isn’t a character flaw; it’s a gift, maybe even a mark of genius. Take the late Seymour Cray, the legendary supercomputer architect. Cray devoted his life to spinning miracles. Though his canvas was silicon and his medium sheer number-crunching fury, his supercomputers were nonetheless sculpted…
Nothing will dampen the spread of the Dallas steak house: not mad cows, not prime beef at triple-bypass prices, not heinous visions of “downer cow” kielbasa (who has the spine for that?). And nothing will throw a bucket of A-1 on Dallas’ lust for blue-blood beef. In fact, the steak…
On the second visit we ended up next to the same car we slipped alongside on the first trip: a red Plymouth Sundance with Tweety Bird slip covers over the front buckets. This was weird: two Warner Bros. canaries leering out at me from a cheap MOPAR on two separate…
No municipality on earth is a better locale for a restaurant pushing backyard cuisine than Plano, bedroom community to the world. But what exactly is gourmet backyard cuisine? If my memory still serves correctly after years of alleged cabernet abuse, backyard cuisine once consisted mostly of Oscar Mayer tubes, Durkee…
It was the year of smoke. So many Dallas restaurant landmarks went up in the stuff in 2003, and so many Pall Malls and Partagas Churchills didn’t, at least not within restaurant walls. And walls will be the most crucial culinary consideration in Dallas from now on, thanks to the…
There’s no greater threat to democracy (other than Congress) than drinking and voting. But what about voting and drinking? In North Texas, it’s becoming as all-American as German car leases. Witness McKinney, Allen and the mother of all American suburbs, Plano. Groups from each city are racing (or have raced)…
What is hip? Like a cube of lime Jell-O, hipness is hard to grasp without making a mess. Yet everybody craves this elusiveness, so much so they want to eat it, thinking it will impart some sort of penetrating insights. We all know where to get it, too: New York,…
Pool cues or bamboo sticks? Chopsticks or billiard chalk? These were once the riveting questions posed up the Dallas North Tollway. But plans to plop a Cool River Café in the former Voltaire/Bamboo Bamboo space appear to be snuffed, though Consolidated Restaurant Operations Chairman Gene Street holds out a chance…
It sounds easy, but operating a successful neighborhood restaurant is tough: ingratiating yourself with a cadre of regulars, serving decent food, enticing nomads from foreign neighborhoods and protecting the comfort zone you’ve created (never invite assassination attempts by pulling a menu staple after it’s become an icon). To understand the…
While (some) restaurants are evacuating Deep Ellum–East Wind Vietnamese Restaurant and the much-rumored but unconfirmed flight of Sambuca Jazz Café to the former Salve! space on McKinney Avenue–some battle-hardened mavericks armed with taps and pearl onions are actually moving in. Nick Hidi, who earned his nightclub stripes operating a spot…
Flowing water is said to provoke soothing meditation, especially among those with feng shui (the art of furnishing a room to harmonize with its spiritual forces) on their dumbwaiters and incense residue on their lapels. Moving water has an almost-primordial appeal–aesthetic, psychological, physiological–perhaps hearkening back to the days before we…
