Tim Penn, who was the opening executive chef at Il Sole, has blown out of his most recent executive chef post at the lauded Bay Leaf restaurant in Deep Ellum. Bay Leaf owner Ronnie Crayton says Penn cut loose to pursue consulting exploits and to spend more time with his…
Chef Joseph Maher insists the color that drenches his North Dallas restaurant is not orange. “Actually, it’s papaya,” he corrects. “Papaya is my favorite fruit.” Whatever the hue, the textured color soaks Mirabelle’s walls, trim and, clumsily, the ceiling acoustical tiles. There’s a novel relationship between color and fruit swirling…
It’s difficult to approach a restaurant transplant like Roy’s with a whole lot of hope and without a whole lot of suspicion. From the press kit, Roy’s kind of seems like a Hawaiian vacation exhibit in the Palace of Wax, one with a toque-wearing Roy Yamaguchi facsimile tossing leis around…
Cube farmers in corporate America strive mightily for one thing and one thing only: a power title for their business cards. A power title opens doors, you see. In a few short words it conveys far more information than DKNY, Cole-Haan, Lexus or Rolex combined. Hand over a card with…
The interior of The Old Monk is outfitted in woods of varying degrees of wear and significance. Tables come in diverse shapes: from rectangular to square to circular, most of them deeply scuffed. Wooden stools hug little table rims wrapped around building posts and hugging exposed brick walls. Other barstools…
Royce Ring, who left Carlson Restaurants Worldwide’s Emerging Brands (Samba Room, Fishbowl, Timpano, etc.) to launch his own restaurant company dubbed Triple R Group, has landed his first Triple R chef. Tim Byers, who comes from New York’s Thom, a Pan Asian restaurant in 60 Thompson, a boutique Hotel in…
What’s not to like about Ethiopian cuisine? It takes on different attractive personas, registering searing intensity (with jalapeño peppers and mitmita, a hot Ethiopian chili powder), manliness (lots of beef and lamb chunks) and familiarity (collard greens). But its most endearing quality is that it must be eaten with fingers…
Chef Jean La Font says he doesn’t fiddle much with the food at Le Rendezvous. He eschews twists and mergings. He shrugs off plate landscapes framed in sauce dribble and herb dustings. Everything is seeded from safe, comfortable classic structures. And from that track Le Rendezvous rarely stumbles. On those…
Patrick Esquerré of Café Patrique is regrouping and adding some thrust to his fast-casual concept after he shuttered his operation in Mockingbird Station. He says he’s going to inject energy into the Café Patrique at Preston-Forest, starting with a menu shift that will emphasize grilled items, expanded salad selections and…
It’s futile eating spaghetti with chopsticks. The procedure might seem doable at first. After all, there are countless examples of Asian noodles that have a striking resemblance to spaghetti. Yet these Asian noodle specimens, often made from rice or egg, seem tackier, so they adhere to the sticks more readily…
Noodles Ave. has a slightly ratty feel to it. Not that this counter-order-deliver-by-number-table-service is actually a ragamuffin dressed up in colorful ethnic garb. It’s just that there are little things that lead to head-scratching. On one visit, a brood of Noodles Ave. counter workers and kitchen jockeys–presumably on a break…
A sign on the door says that Patrick Esquerré and his crew were locked out of Café Patrique in Mockingbird Station. But not, it appears, before he got most of the fixtures for his fledgling counter-service restaurant out of the building. In a written statement, Esquerré says that expenses associated…
It’s almost as if foreigners have a different word for everything. Really, it’s the fact that “beer” sounds like “alus” in Lithuanian, “sor” in Hungarian and “Budweiser” in Oklahoman that makes life so damn confusing. Dan Quayle admitted as much when he apologized for his inability to converse with Latin…
A couple of years ago, some innovative technical genius created Gaydar, a key-chain device designed to electronically sort straights and gays, up to a distance of 40 feet. It beeps–or perhaps vibrates–when activated by the presence of someone else carrying one of the gadgets. But Dennis Vercher doesn’t need electronics…
Greenville Bar & Grill owner Terri Russo recoils when it’s suggested that her refurbished old bar (established in 1933) borders on upscale. Yet with its clean looks, white-tablecloth demeanor and 51-bottle wine list (called GBG Juice), it would be hard to call it anything else but a stab at a…
Peter Tarantino, who has been wandering around the Dallas restaurant scape (Flying Saucer, Caribbean Red, eccolo Ristorante and enoteca) since his Tarantino’s restaurant near Fair Park succumbed to plumbing offal some 18 months ago, says he will be the first tenant to go into the Davis Building on Main Street…
Margarita Ranch serves margaritas in more weird incarnations than congressmen come in. You can have them prepped with any tequila you want from a huge list, or you can try one of the Ranch’s special margaritas, which range from the cactus flower (tequila, lime and Tabasco) to the Cuba libre-impersonating…
It’s always risky hunting down Asian restaurants in strip malls. Either they’re bad, or more often, they’re so mind-numbingly inoffensive that you worry about falling asleep facedown in a puddle of panang curry. Much less often a killer Asian restaurant is discovered, in all of its searingly honest ethnicity, leaving…
Bistro Latino is a cave. The long narrow space is a hostel of darkness and a bungalow of noise. The dense carpet of diner gibberish and the impenetrable curtain of clangs and tinkles from flatware, glassware, dinnerware and tabletop spanks makes it impossible to tease out the background music in…
Enigma, that promiscuous streak of revery on Routh Street, appears to be no more. The disheveled building, scarred from too many visions (a pond near the front stoop, for example) halted in midstream, is locked up, and most of the odd furnishings, along with the sizable flock of nude sculptures…
A gentleman moderates all impolite thoughts and activities. Indeed, no less authority than Charles Darwin implied that self-control represents the highest form of moral culture–just the sort of statement that confuses the hell out of Baptists who emblazon their SUVs with Darwin-chomping fish. Who knew the progenitor of natural selection…
It’s hard to get a sense of what The Gulf Coast is trying to be. Maybe it’s a consignment store that serves free étouffée with the purchase of two pink flamingos. Or maybe it’s a fried seafood hutch that lets you leave behind all the stuff that was refused on…
