It’s hard to believe this downtown street-level dining room was once a seafood restaurant hailed by Esquire magazine as one of the nation’s best. This ringing praise occurred at a time when most Dallasites thought “Downtown” was the song that made Mrs. Miller famous. (No, not that Mrs. Miller; we…
Red glamour is baffling. The restaurant Citizen sports a portrait of Chairman Mao, that lovable Chinese leader whose four-year orgy of state-sponsored terror, rape, cannibalism, torture and starvation, known as the “Great Leap Forward,” left untold millions dead. How is it that a Warhol portrait of Mao is considered cutting-edge…
It’s no mystery why bibs are strapped to diners before they arm themselves with pipe wrenches and little twin-pronged awls to mutilate whole lobsters: Lobster butter-splatter makes a Loony Toon tie look like hell. The real mystery is why bibs aren’t strapped on before adults are allowed to play with…
Chef David Burdett and Cameron Morris have been around for a while, creating little catering hybrids founded on comfort food with upscale touches. At Rooster, they carved a pioneering “new Southern” patch in the Dallas landscape. Then they took over Brent Place at Old City Park, crafting food in the…
Frankie Carabetta, the robust bar and pizza maestro who linked with Ed and Michael Ruibal of Landscape Systems of Texas to compose Rocco’s pizzeria (since sold), McKinney Avenue Tavern and Corner Bar on McKinney Avenue, has shucked his McKinney Avenue bonds and infiltrated the famous Routh Street Café space that…
Like virtually every Dallas restaurant that doesn’t deploy a platoon of white-coated servers who can say “excellent choice, sir” in 14 different languages including legalese, bureaucratese and NFL huddle-grunt, Maguire’s M Grill & Tap is riddled with televisions. It’s fortunate that we live in an age of relentless CNBC stock…
Though it was conceptually groundbreaking as it ushered in a fusion of tastes from Thailand, Korea, China, Laos, Malaysia, Vietnam and India under one roof, the orginal Liberty Noodles was mostly a bore. From the start the food was plodding, sloppy, indistinct and unworthy of a second glance. It didn’t…
Dallas millionaire and Porsche/Audi/VW dealer Scott Ginsburg concedes that his biggest mistake with his Voltaire and Bamboo Bamboo restaurant adventures was in thinking his chefs could also grip operations. “From a pure enterprise point of view, the first thing you need to do is choose a manager, and I failed…
Almost everything that can be done has been done to the sandwich, an innovation named after the fourth Earl of Sandwich from the town of Sandwich, a municipality in southeast England. It’s been injected with special sauce, prodded with deviled this and that, smeared with Jiff and fruit, frilled with…
Indian food has had a tough time here. The land of steaks as thick as phone books and spuds the size of VW Beetles is inhospitable to cuisine more complex than a T-bone. Stripped down to its basics, Indian grub incorporates some two dozen herbs and spices, including coconut, chilies,…
So much public health concern, so much smoke. Earlier this month a horrified New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg reportedly dispatched the NYPD to Madison Square Garden to halt a Rolling Stones concert. It seems guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood were puffing onstage in violation of the city’s strict no-smoking…
Former Sfuzzi co-founder Patrick Colombo, developer of the Italian restaurant Ferré and the chic wine bar Crú, both in the West Village, says he is close to consummating a deal on the space that was most recently Alvin Granoff’s Eccolo Ristorante and Enoteca before it was Alvin Granoff’s Ecco Italia…
The really profound thing about 36 Degrees, longtime Dallas chef Chris Svalesen’s newest venture, is the appropriateness of the name. Not simply that the name represents the optimal holding temperature for fish, but also that it perhaps describes the number of stages Svalesen’s vision will pass through before it is…
For a downtown groundbreaking, it was a little rickety. It opened with a video presentation highlighting the milestones of Dallas nightclub impresario Keith Black. But sound for the video, projected from twin screens and featuring a leggy nightclub minx spewing breathy descriptions of the Black legacy encompassing clubs such as…
Brewpubs have had a hard row in Dallas. When a measure passed the Texas Legislature in 1993 permitting the brewing and sale of beer at the same site, some 40 brewpubs popped up in Texas within just a few years, eight in Dallas alone. The corpses–Coppertank Brewing Co., Moon Under…
The numbers are startling, but maybe it’s only because of where we live. Judging by our contemporary fetishes of steak palaces, prime beef, Kobe beef burgers (who will be the first restaurateur to introduce a dry-aged prime sloppy joe?), pork chops that could fill a men’s club cleavage and rib…
First off, a correction: In the Dish wrap-up for 2002 published in the January 2 edition of the Dallas Observer, I mistakenly reported that Deep Sushi in Deep Ellum had closed. In fact, Sushi Nights was the Deep Ellum sushi restaurant that shuttered in 2002. I apologize for any inconvenience…
In August, Voltaire closed. And that pretty much sums up the Dallas restaurant complexion for 2002. Voltaire’s death rattle served as a worn metaphor, a symbol of what was expected to happen but didn’t–the big bang that rattled the windows and agitated the lava lamp but left the infrastructure unfazed…
At first glance the link between Roy Orbison and wine isn’t obvious. He did record the song “Lonely Wine,” and the tune “All I Have to Do Is Dream” does contain the line “I can make you mine, taste your lips of wine, any time…” But it’s hard to imagine…
There’s a lot of indignant rant in the culture these days over the knee-jerk, Glock-click tendency of many of us to associate anything Italian with mobster chic–and maybe baked ziti. In April 2001, the American Italian Defense Association filed a lawsuit against the producers of the popular HBO series The…
Why do the munchies that are served with belts of booze have to possess culinary panache? They don’t, or maybe shouldn’t. After all, such craft is ultimately pulverized into an alimentary ooze mere moments after creation and hustled through yards of plumbing. Sure, the same thing happens during a fine…
Celebrity chef Stephan Pyles, who has spent the past few months drafting and spit-polishing the food-service operation for Hotel Zaza and its restaurant Dragonfly (and has just signed an agreement to stay on for another year to keep the polishing spit flying), has found himself in the middle of a…
