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…
The military has a wonderful habit of turning simple concepts into incomprehensible abbreviations or ironic juxtapositions. Lunch, for example, becomes MRE. That’s short for meals ready to eat. Perhaps this explains how officers learn quickly to misstate the obvious. After getting his ass whipped in Russia, the great Napoleon rallied…
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…
How to define 2002? The most notable figures were pedophiles, Donald Rumsfeld and the Rally Monkey. Hollywood produced yet another Rob Schneider insult. Creative minds working with endless colors and fabrics from all over the world settled on bare teen-age midriffs as the year’s fashion sensation. And when Trent Lott…
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…
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…
No one really knows much about the origins of eggnog. It’s difficult even for the most skilled historians to fathom the circumstances that led someone to whisk eggs, cream, sugar and ale into a mug. Nor does anyone spend much time researching the association between the spiked milk shake and…
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…
Like the burger and onion ring, Tex-Mex has become a tavern staple, and it’s no surprise why. It’s salty, which generates the thirst that generates the cash from drink sales. This cuisine is highly absorptive, which means it serves as a stomach-lining hurdle: a bean-cheese-tortilla-salsa speed bump that keeps your…
Like most contemporary Asian outlets, Green Pepper is replete with high-tech touches, subtle though they are. Plastic chairs in black and yellow surround dark tables. Walls washed in subdued yellow hover over dark wallpaper wainscoting imbedded with Chinese characters. And Green Pepper has a motto: “We are a BYOB restaurant…and…
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…
This is just an assumption, but it’s probably valid. Chicken-fried steak played a key role in President Bush’s recent policy victories at the United Nations. Without the Texas delicacy, inspection teams would still be idle and Saddam Hussein, that old nemesis of the Bush family, would be doing whatever it…
Hibachi Rock’s vestibule is crammed with Japanese dolls, and Polaroids paper the wall. A manager says these photos were shot some three years ago when this Allen restaurant opened. There was a steady racket rumbling just beyond the dolls and snapshots. As we moved toward the glass inner door, it…
Henderson Avenue nightlife necromancer Tristan Simon–whose Cuba Libre Cafe and private club called Sense have been generating more buzz than a two-speed nose hair trimmer–has purchased a big chunk of Genghis Grill, a Dallas chain of create-your-own-stir-fry Mongolian barbecues. Consilient Restaurants L.P., Simon’s command and control umbrella, picked up 50…
When Voltaire opened in 1999, it was billed as one of the most expensive restaurants ever devised in the city of Dallas. Owner Scott Ginsburg never disclosed the total cost, but it most certainly ran into the several millions considering the chandelier by famed lighting designer Ingo Maurer valued at…
Not so very long ago, the Burning Question crew created quite a disturbance at Paris Vendome. Geez. Invade France, nothing happens. Send them Jerry Lewis films, they just beg for more. Ah, but sip an aperitif after dinner and they explode in dismay. “In Europe, every drink has its meaning:…
Not everything Phil Romano touches turns to gold. We Oui slipped off the landscape on a trail of French kitsch greased with red lipstick. Lobster Ranch got caught in a chowder undertow. Eatzi’s nearly succumbed to a vicious bite by the Big Apple. But gold isn’t what’s important. What’s important…
Call it Shakespeare in modern garb. Over the past several years, Hollywood presented us with Othello set on a high school basketball court, Hamlet wandering the aisles of a Blockbuster store, Romeo and Juliet cowering from the prying lenses of security cameras and Prince Hal wandering the streets of Portland…
The name Noodles Kitchen is a jarring composite of a plural and singular noun. It sounds more like a culinary lair for a Dick Tracy nemesis than a peddler of doughy strands. The décor takes that tiny jar and amplifies it: art deco new age Asian contemporary with a huge…
It’s no surprise that a North Texas bedroom community would turn a California fascination into a viable business. After all, California is the American birthplace of dreams, fantasy and personal computer wizardry. Everyone wants to touch its gloss, to be a part of its vanguard, to have a grab at…
