Former Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse CEO William L. Hyde Jr. is swapping broilers for rotisseries. Hyde, who resigned from his post of the then-89-unit steakhouse chain in late 2003, has teamed up with former City Grill (Atlanta) chef Roger Kaplan to license the Zea Woodfire Grill concept from a New Orleans…
The Bronx is divided into wings. Walk into the vestibule and notice the bistro-ish dining nook off to the left with simple chairs and wooden tables that look like they absconded from the flea market in Canton. To the right is the bar. This is where booth benches are fashioned…
Project Lagniappe (lagniappe is a Creole expression for an unexpected gift), the Katrina rehabilitation project spearheaded by the Greater Dallas Restaurant Association and Whit Meyers of the now-bankrupt Green Room and Jeroboam restaurants, is beginning to bear fruit. Through Deep Relief, the part of the project that allows displaced New…
It’s early in The French Room. It’s filled not with diners but with music plucked and bowed from a string quartet. A harpsichord joins the jam. Later, “Musette” by J.S. Bach is played. On a harp. The music does much to craft the rarefied ambiance. The music sets the pace…
On an October evening, James Winkler works a crowd of some two dozen mostly young, attractive professionals. The group sits in rapt attention as he evangelizes for a substance that is as intimidating and inscrutable as it is coveted: wine. They laugh at his anecdotes, such as the one involving…
Sushi is a commodity, one with a vigor that shows no signs of dissipating. It has conquered strip malls, fast food and grocery stores. Sushi has come a long way since the days when eating raw fish and crunching the glass bead roe of smelt and flying fish seemed the…
t’s Thursday, October 13. Thank God it’s not Friday, because as luck would have it, we find ourselves in the Richardson Hotel. Richardson has beached itself on hard luck–the victim of popping tech bubbles. Instead of buzz, the Telecom Corridor is a hall of echoes. But help is coming. Accounting…
Odd to open a restaurant named after a child’s card game. In the past, chef Chris Svalesen has been more succinct. “Fish” was the downtown restaurant that made him famous. He later went obscure, naming his next restaurant after a Fahrenheit measurement: Thirty-Six Degrees, the optimum temperature at which fresh…
Dallas restaurants have plunged deeply into the effort to ease the anguish caused by Katrina. Behold Project Lagniappe (Lagniappe is a Creole expression for an unexpected gift). In large part spearheaded by Whit Meyers of the Entertainment Collaborative (Green Room, Jeroboam) and the Greater Dallas Restaurant Association, Lagniappe consists of…
Here’s a prediction: Fuse will last as long as a lit fuse. But it won’t go out with a megaton cherry-bomb pop. It will go out with a pfffft. A dud. Then someone will try to salvage it and change the name to Gasket, or some other thing that can…
Just because you’re upscale doesn’t mean you can’t kitsch. Riccardi’s does it, with flair maybe, but it does it. Riccardi’s is tucked in the space that was once the elegantly flashy Mediterraneo, back in the day when the restaurant was going to be the Benz in the FoodStar restaurant group’s…
Investor Steve Hartnett is thinking in the round. And he’s thinking Grapevine. After all, Grapevine is equidistant between Dallas and Fort Worth. It has the Gaylord Texan resort. It’s accessible by steam locomotive (its name is Puffy). That’s why Hartnett, former partner in Consolidated Restaurant Operations (Cool River Café, III…
Chef Stephan Pyles views his life in increments of 10. His Routh Street Café stint ran for 10 years. Star Canyon hung for another decade. Now, after roughly five years traveling and consulting, Pyles is in the blocks for another 10-year sprint, or at least that’s how long his lease…
Nobu has a sake called Devil Killer. Not sure why this brew is branded a demon slayer, but a large slanted bottle of the stuff is $20. Maybe Satan is cheap. Maybe the prices would sever his carotid artery. Maybe Nobu is Hades for the penny pincher, which in a…
Jean-Michel Sakouhi is a little bitter. Two reasons: Scuffles with his landlord on McKinney Avenue, and the big mistake he made transforming his Le Paris Bistrot into Figaro Café to distance it from the anti-Frenchism that bubbled after the U.S. boogie to Baghdad. “People understand that food is not politics,”…
One of the fascinating elements of Standard is roadkill. Not on the menu, mind you. Still, if an edible animal is killed by an all-season radial rather than a sharp neck twist, does it really matter? Ultimately, it doesn’t, because the roadkill is in the restaurant as a prop, glaring…
Early one morning this spring, Chris Lawler accidentally kicked a coiled rattlesnake slumbering in a row of grape vines. The rattle didn’t shake. The snake didn’t strike. It barely moved. The reptile was immobilized by the chilly desert air. This same air is why Lawler thinks he can move Texas…
By the time New Year’s Eve 2005 rolls through Lower Greenville Avenue, the institution known as John’s Café will be gone. After 33 years. Why does this matter? It’s the food. John’s packs them in–from lawyers and local musicians to the bed-headed and hungover braving the morning sun to drink…
As the old Japanese proverb says, if you have the pleasant experience of eating something you haven’t tasted before, you life will be extended by 75 days. Never heard that proverb before, but real or not, Sushi Zushi milks it, turning dining into a full-fledged life-extension process. But for this…
Clams, our most popular item, is not even on our menu –Bone Daddy’s vestibule sign The servers at Bone Daddy’s House of Smoke wear a tightly regimented uniform. It consists of Mary Jane shoes, white socks with lace trim folded down and earrings. Stationed between these garments are black hot…
Jaden’s, the upscale restaurant and bar/lounge at the Knox Promenade Center off Central Expressway, was just pronounced dead. The restaurant went first, done in a couple of months ago by dining ennui. The owners kept the bar open, but everyone thought it was dead, too. So they killed it in…
What is Hibiscus, anyway? Why is this restaurant so marinated in hype? Is it the special effects? Partly. In the beginning there were those black headbands with the bright red hibiscus blooms in the center that were worn by the kitchen crew. They were a chic trademark. They created buzz…
