What Dallas lacks is a truly tight, sophisticated dining and lounge experience on the level of New York or Paris or London. How many times have we heard that? And there’s no shortage of budding and established operators who insist they have the formula to finally fill this niche. Yet…
Southlake is one of those formerly odd communities that had restrictive liquor laws. Now that they’ve been relaxed, some entrepreneurs are taking advantage in the new Town Square development in the heart of the town, a kind of shake-and-bake downtown for the bedroom community. Into the Glass is one of…
Wine bars and Dallas don’t mix well, at least not as seamlessly as silicone and trial lawyers. A sweep through Dallas’ wine-bar experiments–Tony’s, Cork, Cru, the flight deck near the vestibule in Nick & Sam’s–reveals half-hearted execution or an emphasis on wine as fashion accessory. Maybe that’s why Mercy is…
It’s a cold, clear Sunday morning as Keith Black shuffles through the sand spread over the sidewalk on Pacific Avenue and opens a makeshift plywood door. It spills into the vestibule of what will soon be the first cathedral to Dallas nightlife in the new millennium, though it’s hard to…
Fishbowl, the Pan-Asian restaurant on Knox Street developed by Carlson Restaurants Worldwide, was shut down suddenly this past Tuesday night. Sources say retailer Pottery Barn, just two doors down the street, will sweep into the space or install a new retail concept where sushi and sake once trod, though neither…
Eat at Café Danielle and you’re forced to shop, or at least urged to browse. The space is divided into settings that come across like tradeshow booths. One nook is a hovel of Buddhas: heads, lotus seatings, fat jolly postures. There’s a case with Faberge egg replicas and a couple…
At first, veteran restaurateur Charlie Venis says Opa! is the Greek equivalent expression of hee-haw. “Well,” he corrects, “what it really means is ‘let’s enjoy life.’ Get excited.” The latter is what we did when our server shouted “Opa!” as he flicked his Bic above the saganaki, setting it ablaze…
Authenticity is hard to acquire. The acquisition is especially difficult when the object of desire is a series of lush tropical volcanic bumps and coral atolls pimpling the South Pacific and you’re landlocked on a stretch of concrete and bricks near an overpass on the North Texas prairie. But never…
Jeffrey Yarbrough’s separation at birth from actor Edward Norton isn’t the only significant detachment in his life. He’s also split from his lucrative club business, which he characterizes as a distraction from his true calling. “My focus in my life is food,” he insists. “I have gotten sidetrack after sidetrack…
Ernie’s is a trip. But to where? Is it a trip back to a Dean Martin-Charo roast skit where the main attractions bob like anchovy-stuffed buoys in a gin lagoon? Or is it a timeless Vegas burp, skillfully outfitted with a Liberace henchwoman tinkling spent pop syrup on a stunted…
Restaurant concept development is difficult for diners to comprehend. People like Phil Romano appear to function solely from gut instinct followed by blunt execution. Then there’s Henderson Avenue czar Tristan Simon, who seems to germinate his concepts on a bed of meticulously plowed spreadsheets fertilized by heaps of financial and…
4/4 North Texas’ reputation as a hothouse for budding jazz talent blossoms a little wider this weekend at the Third Annual North Texas Jazz Festival in Addison, a three-day event mixing established national artists with the best of the next generation. Focused around the renowned jazz program at the University…
Orson Welles has managed to resuscitate his badly decomposed reputation and promise from the grave. Since etching himself in our collective memory as the butt of fat jokes and the intoner of the unforgettable line “we will serve no wine before its time” in television commercials for jug wines by…
Ernest Hemingway cut his adventurer’s teeth as a teen-age Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. The cut went deep. Just six days before his 19th birthday on July 8, 1918, Hemingway was hit by Austrian artillery fire, sustaining injuries to his knee and foot that led…
It’s no secret that drinking can lead to daffiness, but so can abstention, especially the forced kind. February 20 marked the 70th anniversary of the congressional passage of the repeal of Prohibition. So to celebrate this momentous occasion, the Wine Institute has launched a yearlong celebration composed primarily of recollections…
Restaurants burst from lots of divergent structures: old houses, offices, warehouses, dry cleaners, even factories. Sometimes the theme of the restaurant takes cues from its environment. The Old Mill Inn in Fair Park–built for the 1936 Texas Centennial and World’s Fair as an example of a modern flour mill–comes to…
In the current U.S. climate of French-bashing, winemaker Eileen Crane finds herself in the unique position of heading up Domaine Carneros, a joint venture in Napa, California, between France’s Champagne Tattinger and New York-based Kobrand Corp. Crane claims to be the world’s first woman to have built two large commercial…
Breeding is a funny thing. Cross a dragon and a lion and you get Drálion. But what do you get if you pollinate iron with a little creative bookkeeping? Steel Restaurant & Lounge, at least if operator Khanh Dao’s partner Mike Chen is to be believed. Chen, who is suing…
Myths and legends are scattered with hybrids. They’re designed to frighten, fill with awe and serve as jobs programs for cinematic special effects artists. Freakish, these beasts. There’s the centaur, with the lower body of a horse and torso of a man. The Minotaur, the bastard child of King Minos…
For the first time in its history, the Greater Dallas Restaurant Association endorsed a Dallas mayoral candidate. The GDRA tossed its heft behind Dallas City Councilwoman Mary Poss for mayor on the very day the restaurant smoking ban went into effect, March 1, and a day after a Dallas judge…
It’s hard to arouse taste buds in a restaurant named after a bug, especially a large prehistoric specimen that incessantly engorges itself with mosquitoes that may or may not be swollen with human blood. Yet somehow this swift, darting fly fascinates. Is it its elegance, the deft darts it employs…
Probably the only difference between a marriage and a business partnership is that business partners generally don’t get to see belly-button lint on the vanity or have the sheets fluffed over them after dinner at El Chico. But that’s the only difference. They both begin with a glint in the…
