Thai food in Dallas is typically lumbering and uninteresting. The sauces are flabby, the textures tired, the flavors muddled. In this city, Thai cuisine lacks searingly distinct flavors or exotic subtlety. Tucked amid Addison’s swath of strip malls, Thai Orchid is one of the precious few Thai restaurants that skirts…
It’s hard to know what to make of Via Real, a restaurant that’s been around for roughly 15 years, including 10 years in Las Colinas. But it sure makes a lot of its “Mexican cuisine with Santa Fe style.” Santa Fe is known for its fiery food, torched with lots…
It’s hard to pinpoint the birth of the first chain theme or “eatertainment” restaurant. Was it Chuck E. Cheese or T.G.I. Friday’s? Maybe it was Bennigan’s. But this would only be possible if ferns and old signs could be considered objects of compelling amusement. No, it was Hard Rock Café,…
FoodStar shamble As of yet, no buyers have surfaced to take a chance on Mediterraneo and Toscana, the beleaguered restaurants of the bankrupt FoodStar Restaurant Group. The value of the restaurants is less than the debt load it’s dragging — at least that’s how trustee Rob Milbank put it in…
Voltaire is verbose — not the witty 18th-century writer and philosopher who penned Candide, but the restaurant dreamed up by radio mogul Scott Ginsburg after his original plans to build a hamburger joint for his kids were derailed. The servers like to talk. “Your chef tonight is a gentleman by…
Where’s PoPoLos? One of the first things that was supposed to re-emerge from the FoodStar Restaurant Group’s ashes was PoPoLos. Original owner Maury Jaffer, who had sold the restaurant to the group in late 1997 for $1.1 million, got it back last fall on undisclosed terms. He made plans to…
I’m swearing off restaurant prognostication. Other than accurately predicting that Chuck Norris’ stogie lounge, Lone Wolf, symbolized the death knell of the cigar craze, every other prediction has been a bust. Last year, I confidently predicted (though, of course, not on the record) that the restaurant business in Dallas would…
Maybe it’s not surprising that gifted chef Avner Samuel, the man who single-handedly turned the word “peripatetic” into a cliché in Dallas, adopted the name he did for his global tapas restaurant. For Samuel, a compact and volatile Israeli, had the habit of never staying in one place for more…
Chicken booger boo Dallas restaurateur Gene Street sounds exhausted after letting one wiggle out of his crosshairs only to have it bagged by one of the big boys. “We worked on it for a long time,” Street sighs. “We were real close.” The “it” to which Street refers is bankrupt…
What makes Thai cuisine such a tongue festival is the electrical intensity of the flavors, the stark textural contrasts, and the laser-like leanness of the ingredients. Sadly, far too few Thai or Thai-influenced restaurants pull this off. Most metroplex Thai excursions descend into plodding, viscous potpourris with only the occasional…
If you do one thing at Mel’s on Main, go to the restroom. Not that you may have a choice in the matter, especially after plunging headfirst into the horrid menu of “continental cuisine with an American flair.” Even if you don’t need to “go,” visit the john anyway, just…
Zagat 2000 Nobody needs to tell Texans we eat out more than everybody else. But a couple of New Yorkers went ahead and did it anyway. The millennium edition of the Zagat Survey of America’s Top Restaurants (a book that Andrew Lloyd Weber says obliterates the need for any other…
Sipango boingo Sipango has a new chef: Cole Kelley, former Breadwinners night chef who has also had stints at The Mansion, Dakota’s, Atlantic Cafe Too!, and Yegua Creek Brewery. Kelley replaces chef Marc Haines, who left the restaurant last month to lay the groundwork for an Internet enterprise dubbed Net*Chef,…
Back in the early ’90s, Buick began a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to lure younger motorists into its fold of stodgy sedans. The bait was the newly revamped Skylark. One television ad featured California artist Ed Lister, who composed an abstract painting before the camera, inspired by the car’s odd sloping…
There were no sushi rolls on our table, and this drew attention. Well, maybe there was one: an untouched California roll stiffening on a small dish. It was ordered for the 4-year-old at our table, but she was more interested in the tuna sashimi, plucking thick strips from a bowl…
Exposure to a horny toad must make you garrulous. How else can you explain the incessant chatter of the servers at Horny Toad’s Cantina? They want to know what you think of the menu, how your food looks, how it tastes, if it’s still good after 30 minutes, whether you’re…
FoodStar burns-out Sputtering on the brink of fizzle for several months, FoodStar Restaurant Group was euthanized just before Thanksgiving when U.S. Judge Steven A. Felsenthal allowed it to slink into bankruptcy. The company had been locked in a tug-of-war since October 7, when former FoodStar President Michael Caolo attempted to…
I’m not sure I understand the thinking behind Citizen, the new preciously hip Asian restaurant launched by the M Crowd Restaurant Group, the same folks who birthed Mi Cocina, The Mercury, Taco Diner, and Mainstream Fish House. The menu, another one of those Pan-Asian blends glued together with a little…
Big hair hazard It’s little more than a steel-studded brick bunker garnished with bright flashes of pink insulation, but Phil and Janet Cobb, owners of Mi Piaci Ristorante Italiano in Addison, were itching to show off their next restaurant. Salve! Ristorante, a $2.5 million upscale Italian eatery scheduled to open…
Question one: Why Abacus? Why name a cutting-edge restaurant for an ancient calculator made of wood, wire, and beads? Longtime Dallas chef Kent Rathbun says he and partner Robert Hoffman, a former Coca-Cola distributor, ruminated over and ran trademark searches on a long list of names before arriving at two…
Dog bites Not long after Club Babalu owner Alfredo Hinojosa announced plans to transform the disheveled and shuttered Arcadia Theater on Lower Greenville into Liquid at the Arcadia, an upscale Latin dance club, a neighborhood group calling itself the Barking Dogs of Lower Greenville raised its leg. Barking Dogs founder…
Swimming from the goldfish Do managers at AquaKnox fear the glare of public life in a Fishbowl? Fishbowl is the new hip “’60s pan-Asian” (don’t ask us what that means) noodle-wok-sushi joint set to flood the AquaKnox lounge later this month. But shortly after the concept was announced, Executive Chef…
