After exiting Scott Jones’ (Café Italia) Screen Door, chef Joel Harloff (Melrose Hotel, Mi Piaci, Bistro 1401/Joshele) has re-entered the One Arts Plaza dining fray at Paul Pinnell’s Dali Wine Bar & Cellar, which copped its name from Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali. You could say Harloff’s got a sizable…
Minutes I waited for my food in Steel count: 45 Things I ordered that required cooking count: 0 I drove with purpose. I saw the red “S” on the black awning, double confirmed that I was in the right place at the sight of a couple of ass-clowns in ass-clown…
Salad bar that must get passed up for fried goodies at least 1,000 times a day count: 1 Tie count: 4 Flip-flop count: 12 Seems like every restaurant has a mascot these days. Applebee’s has that ridiculously annoying talking apple (Wanda—please stop being an apple and go back to being…
Blue Canyon Kitchen is one great wail of kitschy vigor, so loud your ears ring. Aspen logs, fully barked, hang from the ceiling. Tables are ringed with chairs made from pruned sticks and branches and are upholstered in fake fur. Hollowed-out aspen stumps hold arrangements of pussy willows. Prime steaks…
While the Hilton Bella Harbor resort retail/spa/haute nosh complex takes shape on the western side of Rockwall along the shores of Lake Ray Hubbard, the east side will bloom a resort of its own. Parker Coddington, whose background is in commercial construction, will erect a 75,000-square-foot “family entertainment center” in…
Embedded in the ceiling, high above the dining room, is a series of lighted, saucer-like depressions. Huge silvery propellers are fixed within, but they don’t spin like ceiling fans. They rotate in short, precise increments. To spin would invite bedlam. Servers would stumble with vertigo. “It’s very disruptive to the…
From Los Angeles, a steroided-up sports bar finds its home in Victory. “It’s kind of like a pub meets ESPN Zone meets Bellagio Sports Bar,” says Lonnie Moore of the Los Angeles-based Dolce Group. It’s called The Boardroom, a $3.5 million, 7,800-square-foot upscale sports lounge to be injected this summer…
Chicks slicing meat when I walked in the door count: 2 People in line count: 452 If there’s one thing I like to eat, it’s meat. (No matter how I rewrite that sentence it keeps coming out sounding gross, so you’re just gonna have to get your mind out of…
It’s all about being green. Oprah gives tips on going green. TIME.com has a weekly green column. NBC has hosted a green week. Continental Airlines. Honda. Everyone…well, not everyone, but Bush still has some time in office. Green was on the top of my mind for my latest dining mission:…
Giant American flag count: 1 Tiny Greek flag count: 50 Gyro (pronounced yeero and not jyro or guyro) is Greek for half-moon, soft taco-looking thing filled with yummy lamb. And when you’ve got a hankerin’ to eat lots of stuff you’re uncomfortable pronouncing aloud, Anton Café downtown delivers. I ordered…
Aft the Cliff Café’s gravel parking lot is a brick house—an ancestral McMansion with subtle ornate strokes that predate soaring chateau turrets and vaulted front stoop eaves. It’s perched on a patch of brown grass and spindly brush on an expansive lot. There is wood trim and mottled brick. The…
After plowing down the Hard Rock Café on McKinney Avenue and scraping the plot clean, Uptown developer Brett Landes is flexing his muscle with a 16-story boutique apartment complex rumored to have a couple of Dallas celebrity investors. Landes won’t confirm the celebrity part, but he has partnered with former…
Flat screen TV count: 1 Friendly behind-the-counter lady: 1 So, I was at the Dallas Central Library, totally engrossed in Jewel’s A Night Without Armor (an oldie, but a goodie) when I smelled the smell of fried wonderfulness for less than 10 bucks. It was grease without that nasty whiff…
There’s magic to the kebab, properly prepped, fired with finesse over glowing coals. There’s a hairsplitting technique to properly trimming and cubing meats before stabbing and bunching them on a skewer. There’s a deep secret truth to the marinating and the seasoning and the splashing with onion juice. There’s a…
Doors held open for me count: 2 Temperature of restaurant: 30 below zero with a slight chance of “holy crap my nose just froze off of my face” So, yesterday my stomach and I were having a debate about what I was going to eat for lunch. My stomach was…
Takes some nerve to open a restaurant in the westernmost flatlands of Frisco and call it BayGrill. It doesn’t even have a bay window, this bistro, much less proximity to a body of water. It is a pretty little place, however, sitting on the edge of oblivion at Legacy Drive…
Chinese cuisine, with rare exceptions, is a mongrel of conformity in these parts: a risk-averse version of the intensely risky food. It’s transmogrified, morphed, tamed and sanitized, made pliant and meek. Sometimes you can barely recognize the stuff. Oh, there are the disheveled spaces here and there, hollowed out of…
Marcus Pineyro, the 20-something SMU grad who slicked up Mexico City street food with his Urban Taco taco lounge in Mockingbird Station last year, is expanding. First stop: DFW International Airport where he’ll ply his street fare in Terminal C near gate 22 come April. Then Pineyro will level a…
People sitting in truck beds: 18 Motorcycles: 2 Times I wondered if someone would come to my car to take my trash or if I should just drive off with a tray attached to my car: 5 Have you ever seen the blinking lights of Keller’s Drive-In as you cruise…
You can see the curving steel beams rise like a bump in the distance, cranes hovering over them like mantises, the spine arching out of a wave. Olenjack’s Grille rests in the thick of it, or what is likely to be the thick, standing ready to exploit intermittent captive audiences…
There’s nothing worse than a crappy burger. OK, maybe a crappy hot dog is worse because it’s already made of crap and the crappy ones would have to be made out of something crappier. Anyway, chef Tim Love says there’s nothing worse than a crappy burger. That’s why the founder…
There are plenty of ways to get a good cheap lunch in Dallas. You can use the old, “I paid last time.” You can sign yourself up for a homemade cold-cut guiltwich at Mom’s. You can yoink somebody else’s lunch out of the work fridge—there are countless options. But, I…
