“I want to be a sustenance provider,” says restaurant operator Shannon Wynne, dousing any desire he might harbor to slip into the upper crust of the dining-out biz. Wynne says he’s spooked by the mid-to-upper levels, which suffered from dried-up expense accounts and a dismal tourist trade in the wake…
It was originally dubbed Buddha Bar, and the name was intended to signify a sense of serenity, a mode of contemplation, an evocation of composure. It’s not clear what the enlightened one would have thought of this. Maybe he would have tossed it into the same category as sex, which…
Mico Rodriguez, the main brain behind the M Crowd Restaurant Group (Mi Cocina, Taco Diner) and the Restaurant Life (The Mercury, Mercury Grill, Citizen), has just bagged Taqueria Cañonita, the Mexican restaurant Stephan Pyles and Michael Cox developed before it was subsumed by Carlson Restaurants Worldwide along with Star Canyon…
“It’s better to look good than to feel good.” The adage works in most social settings and perhaps the occasional funeral. The inverse works for most sporting events held in a stadium. But no matter how you play with the words–reversing them, putting an umlaut over the vowels, converting a…
Though it may be sheepish wishful thinking to suggest it, the Dallas restaurant market appears to be locked in the straining grunts of a rebound. I say this because the city’s most hexed strip of asphalt (and paving bricks), McKinney Avenue, is making recovery noises. Sources say the space that…
Though born in New York, Billy the Kid was a New Mexico outlaw doing most of his treachery (he had been charged with 12 murders by the time he was 18) in and around Lincoln County, New Mexico. Lincoln County is also the home of Smokey Bear, at least according…
On the surface, the most compelling reason to dine at Tabouli’s, a restaurant serving Middle Eastern fare, is the tent room. And if you dig deeper, it turns out to be the only reason. Not that the food is necessarily bad outside the confines of the tent (though it is…
Daddy Jack Chaplin, the Dallas restaurateur who turned his back on Texas citizenship and hightailed it for Connecticut, just struck a deal with Tim Dorsey of Fairmount capital to bring more Daddy Jacks restaurants to the Dallas area. The deal, which calls for one Daddy Jacks restaurant each year over…
Fondue is dangerous. The special forks are long and sharp with rippled tips that function almost like fishhook barbs, though not as effectively. After piercing cubes of beef or chicken or shrimp, the forks are plunged into hot oil or boiling broth, the moisture from the food exploding in a…
The temperance movement reappears in odd ways sometimes. Just ask Barry Adler and his business partner, Phillipe Naovri. In December, the pair opened Buddha Bar in the space near Lovers Lane and Inwood Road that once housed Marrakesh, Dallas’ only Moroccan grub-shoveler. But a couple of weeks ago, Adler and…
In many ways, Perry’s is just another steakhouse. The steakhouse formula has been perfected for so long in the Dallas restaurant crucible that it seems any competent restaurateur can sleepwalk through the execution. Perry’s dubs itself a classic Dallas dinner house, which could mean several things, from Black-eyed Pea to…
Bill Wisener’s right index finger is stained a ghoulish shade of orange. It gleams almost Day-Glo against the starched white of the Carlton cigarettes he chains together in one seamless series of puffs. To his right is a black-and-white monitor with the screen broken into four quadrants, his eyes on…
More than one person has tried to make a local wine and food journal fly in Dallas. There are even some bodies to testify to this. Remember the Dallas Food & Wine Journal launched in 1995? That big-format magazine lasted only two issues. But Mike Whitaker, who publishes The Link,…
Scented Geranium suffers from an affliction that strikes restaurateuring neophytes and veterans alike: culinary inconsistency. Granted, getting what are often complicated dishes singing on the same note time and time again without fail is a tough thing to accomplish, especially on days when the kitchen staff hasn’t shown up or…
Norman Abdallah says it’s narcotic. He says it more than once during a short conversation, so it must be something he really believes. He has another restaurant concept with Fired Up Inc., the company he founded with fellow Brinker International alumnus Creed Ford, and he doesn’t say this about its…
Ed Bamberger, the one-time IBM public relations professional who transmogrified into a Dallas food writer pumping out prose for Dallas Home Design magazine, America Online/Digital City DFW and Where Dallas magazine, has traded his pen for a Cupid barb. Bamberger purchased the Dallas-Fort Worth rights to Single Gourmet (www.singlegourmetdfw.com), a…
Left in the hands of suit types, cuisine often fuses, blurs and finally melts into a stain on a spreadsheet, homogenized beyond recognition. At least that’s how it tastes sometimes, after some “hot” cuisine trend has been mainstreamed and sanded into milquetoast. It might not be fair to characterize Z’Tejas’…
It might seem that Tristan Simon, founder of Cuba Libre and Consilient Restaurants company, is getting a little megalomaniacal on his Henderson Street turf. First there’s Sense, the upscale bar he’s opening across from Cuba Libre in March with Bob’s Steak & Chop House founder Bob Sambol. Then a few…
If there was ever a year that bulged with ups and downs, ebb and flow, mood swings and yin-yang fluxes, 2001 is that year. Only instead of a series of peaks and valleys, 2001 was more like a time line of troughs with the summits sheared off, leaving depressions that…
Movies are for popcorn, lots of yellow-oiled, oversalted puffed kernels in a bucket the size of a Freightliner with a side tank of Coke. And some Twizzlers and Goobers to chew on as the credits roll by while you try and figure out what the hell David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive…
Just as bachelor cooking makes liberal use of ketchup and fire, Irish cooking makes liberal use of beer. Certain foods are simmered or soaked in Guinness or ale to add interest to everything else, which is boiled. Trinity Hall, the Irish pub in Mockingbird Station, is no exception to this…
It’s been said that if you took all the broiled steaks served in Dallas restaurants on any given day and laid them end to end, you would have enough meat to pave all of Santiago Calatrava’s new Trinity River bridge designs and still have enough petite fillets to patch the…
