One fine day in the Big Apple, a restaurateur recognized New York Times food critic Eric Asimov scanning a menu. It was, in food-service industry terms, the equivalent of the moment before the landing craft hits the beach at Normandy–a brief and terrifying span between innocence and the unknown. In…
One of the most fascinating bits of Venezuelan trivia floating in cyberspace concerns ice cream. It seems an ice cream parlor in Merida, a semitropical city wedged between the highest peaks in the Venezuelan Andes, holds the world record for offering the most ice cream flavors. The shop serves some…
Big Shucks is a shack of torture. Not only do they make you stand in line to order food and beverages at the counter, they force you to remember every single item, from the gumbo to the full pound of steamed snow crab legs to the number of wine margaritas…
Former Fish restaurant chef Chris Svalesen is trying everything–anything–to bring cash flow into his 36 Degrees seafood restaurant. He’s opened The Net Result, his fresh seafood market attached to the restaurant, and he’s been serving dinner and Sunday brunch for at least a month now. Svalesen launched lunch service last…
Perhaps the modern measure of a city’s evolution, its maturity, its spastic lunges into sophistication, is the distinctiveness of its shopping mall food courts. Perhaps the days of greasy hung chow, fried chicken parts and bulletproof pizzas served in plastic baskets are waning. At least they are waning here, if…
Pastry chef David Brawley has rolled and caromed like a food-service pinball of late. First he cut loose from Phil and Janet Cobb’s Salve!. Then he made his way far up north to The Mercury, Mico Rodriguez’s flashy new restaurant in the Shops at Willow Bend. But that gig quickly…
Often, but not always, Indian food assumes the shades of warning signs and traffic cones. At Sitar Indian Cuisine, it’s the tandoori dishes that come out this way. Lamb chunks and chicken parts are bright orange, as if spray painted by some graffiti vandal. The tandoori is an Indian oven…
Damn. It’s frustrating to discover a restaurant’s signature dish spelled out on the front of the menu after you’ve trolled through a half-dozen or so mediocre dishes. But there it is, right on the plastic menu cover: “Half Shells Seafood Grill, Home of the Oyster Nacho.” Not that I know…
Its beige brick façade is hardly flattered by the dim brown trim edging the roof. The sign above the front awning has the word “Buckner” hastily scrawled over the word “Barbecue,” done up in neat block letters. It seats roughly a dozen. “It’s kind of a small, intimate setting,” says…
Emeril Lagasse has a nightly show on the Food Network, a failed sitcom and a catchphrase. He is, in the currency of the times, an American icon. Clint Stoerner quarterbacks America’s team. He is merely a future trivia question. Strange, but true. Flipping through cable, browsing newspapers or magazines, even…
Nothing is the same anymore. Case in point: It’s been reported that at college career fairs, the longest lines are in front of the CIA recruitment tables. Another pointed case: Tom Landis, a co-founder of the Dallas Texadelphia Philly cheese steak restaurant chain, is running for Dallas mayor. He says…
Many, many years ago, a man named Peter Zenger defended the rights of a free press with such vehemence that the idea became sacrament. In the Gulf War–and today–the media chafed under censorship restrictions. Reporters protecting sources for a sensitive story occasionally end up in prison. But the Burning Question…
Pastazios bills itself as a parlor steeped in New York breeding. The menu boasts authentic Big Apple pies. The inside of the restaurant, dressed in diner-ish duds, doesn’t give anything away, but there are lots of New York profile photos, one of which prominently features the World Trade Center towers,…
It’s hard eating pasta with rippled Arnold’s thick Austrian accent warping “hasta la vista, baby” through your head. It’s hard to focus on the pasta, the crepes, the shrimp, the scaloppine, the one wall with wine bottles imbedded haphazardly into the plaster. It’s even hard to reconcile that wall with…
Mongo Man is a 9-foot “warrior mascot” who has the thankless job of traveling around to the various restaurants in the BD’s Mongolian Barbecue chain. That means Mongo Man has the unenviable task of frolicking around some 26 locations from Texas (Las Colinas, Plano) to Colorado, Illinois and Florida. Mongo…
Onetime Dallas wunderkind Doug Brown, who made his mark atop the Wyndham Anatole at Nana Grill before cutting bait for Palm Springs, has clawed his way back from California to the large D. It seems his stint at Murial’s Supper Club went sour after the venture’s main investor lost a…
The Bay Leaf could easily be just another one of those dark, strenuously hip Deep Ellum joints fashioned out of aging warehouse brick and smoky oil paintings. On certain nights it even has live jazz, tucked up front by the door. During non-live-music times, though, Bay Leaf jazz is like…
Inside Al’s Prime Steaks and Seafood the temperature hovers comfortably in the 70s. Wind and rain smack against the restaurant’s walls, belying one of Marx’s lesser maxims: “It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature.” It’s the same story downtown at Jeroboam, over at Brother’s Pizza or at…
Baja California Grill, the Addison Tex-Mex mayhem opened last year by businessman Ken Franklin (former owner of Jaxx Café), bit the desert sands last December. But this past March, Franklin unloaded the hapless grill to a pair of new owners who have ambitiously set out to nudge it into upscale-casual…
It’s hard to not think of Arthur’s as an icon of perseverance amid the unforgiving brutality of the Dallas restaurant scene. Owner Mohsen Heidari, in addition to grappling with the constant and typical tortures of employee turnover, spoilage, government inspectors, taxes and critics, has had to deal with asbestos, bad…
“Part of the secret to success is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.” Voltaire didn’t utter that one (Mark Twain did), but the quote might apply to events at Voltaire that climaxed with the departure of lauded chef George Papadopoulos. Running rumors say…
Chez Gerard is a crotchety old cottage born some 17 years ago on McKinney Avenue at a time when French cuisine spelled sophistication. The restaurant has changed little since then, and a French kiss might not smack of the sophistication it once did, but that doesn’t mean Chez Gerard fumbles…
