Charles Givens isn’t worried. The Oklahoma City developer who specializes in office buildings, condominiums and retirement communities boasts that his Hotel ZaZa, taking shape near McKinney and Maple, will have a 72 percent occupancy rate when it opens in October. This despite a slump in the boutique hotel market, which…
It almost works as a riddle: A rare and expensive wine loses its value when opened, so collectors decant these items only in extraordinary circumstances. At a gala dinner in 1985, for example, The Mansion uncorked an 1870 Mouton Rothschild, then priced at $38,000. A year later, a Dallas-based distributor…
Thai restaurants in Dallas generally fall into two categories: mediocre and great. There isn’t space between the two designations to accommodate gradients. Maybe it’s the water. Maybe it’s the obsession with steaks and frozen margaritas. For some reason Dallas has, with few exceptions, a hell of a time giving birth…
Pei Wei (pronounced pay way) Asian Diner is a restaurant based on a fictitious Chinese chef. The menu says the young Pei Wei used to go to bed thinking of recipes from China, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan while living in Taiwan. Indeed, Pei Wei the restaurant is a mix of…
Old breweries don’t die, they just stay up late to feed barflies square meals. At least that’s what’s happening to the old Hoffbrau Steaks Brewery on Belt Line and Midway in Addison. It’s been taken over by a couple of Houston investors who plan to call it Duke’s Original Road…
Perfect Peking duck requires elaborate preparation. One must massage the carcass, stuff a bicycle pump in the stump where the bird’s head once resided, bloat the thing with air, coat it with honey and spices and hang it somewhere until the skin hardens. There’s more to the recipe, of course,…
More fascinating than the food and the thirst-quenching, electric-blue margaritas are the architecture and interior design at Blue Mesa. Both–at least at the Blue Mesa on Northwest Highway and the new Blue Mesa off the Dallas North Tollway in Plano–dazzle with unexpected little flourishes. The Northwest Highway installment has a…
The cafeteria at Molina High School in Dallas offers a Tex-Mex line, a pizza line, a basket lunch line serving such zoological anomalies as steak fingers, something called the country kitchen line and a vegetarian menu. At R.L. Turner High School in Carrollton, a bakery rolls out homemade pretzels, kolaches…
It’s hard to figure out exactly what Stratos is. The word sounds Greek, but it isn’t a Greek restaurant. The menu is packed with sushi, but it isn’t a Japanese restaurant. There’s a dance floor, but it isn’t exactly a club. The three televisions in the bar broadcast sports, but…
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…
“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’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…
In his classic book Into the Valley, John Hershey describes the fear that sweeps over a group of soldiers caught in an ambush. With the actions of men teetering between stunned confusion and outright panic comes the crucial moment between victory and defeat. All it takes, the author points out,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
A couple of weeks ago, the Burning Question crew chanced to sit at a bar next to Ron Dawson, a pleasant 63-year-old gentleman…well, his head still whips around violently at the sight of an appealing pair of breasts, but otherwise he seemed proper enough. “The problem I’m beginning to realize,”…
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…
Thirty or 50 or 100 years ago, Dallas resembled every other American city. Hotter, perhaps, overrun by Baptists and maybe a bit chagrined over that assassination thing, but otherwise pretty much the same: dining on standard Euro-American fare, with a few exotic dishes tossed in. Then Chinese foods hit the…
