Last time chef Tony Gardizi’s name was linked to a startup menu he was grinding Parmesan at Vino & Basso, the Italian restaurant and wine bar in the former Toscana space that collapsed under the withering fusillade of legal briefs and changed locks. Sometime after that he showed up at…
California: ocean winds, sunny days, Hollywood glamour, cocktail-like fusions of culture, varied landscapes and traffic. California cuisine: fresh, light and healthy. When I heard the name Catalina Room and read talk of the Golden State on the restaurant’s Web site, I wondered if the Golden State could migrate successfully into…
Merkow’s steak is an ace of spades and a seven of hearts. Those are the cards Merkow’s Seafood & Steak owner Gregg Merkow was dealt when he pocketed $561,195 last year in a poker tournament at the Grand Casino Tunica in Mississippi. He used this win to capitalize his restaurant,…
Double Wide founder Jim Siebert, who left the Deep Ellum bar earlier this year, is no longer involved a bid to resuscitate the legendary Trader Vic’s restaurant once tucked in the circa 1967 Dallas Hilton Inn on Mockingbird Lane and set to reopen in the Hotel Palomar slowly coalescing in…
As of this writing, the spinach tragedy seems to be abating. Despite The Wall Street Journal’s headline “Spinach’s pain is arugula’s gain,” a New York Times dispatch revealed several East Coast grocery stores began restocking the iron-rich foliage as federal officials continued to reassure the public that the stuff was…
The number of times Dallas has attempted to coach pizza to at least mediocrity seems uncountable. Of course, it’s possible we never really tried to perfect pizza. It’s possible we just put enough effort into these pies to differentiate them from cardboard. They still sell like hotcakes, after all. Some…
Sense, the groundbreaking private nightclub for well-heeled quasi-middle-agers, is no more, though it will live on to host private parties until the end of the year when its lease expires. Tristan Simon, creator of Sense and its sibling Candle Room, geared to aspirational 20- and early 30-somethings, blames Sense’s demise…
It is raining hard the second time I make it to Kona Grill. One of those bad boyfriend summer rains–the kind that shows up unexpectedly, sticks around long enough to dampen your hopes and then moves on. As the hostess shows me to a table near Kona’s front window, I…
It’s hard to get used to the 4513 Travis St. address in this guise. Its predecessor Sipango was a temple of boho chic, a hall of used brick and mortar grit softened by dense nicotine cumulus roiling in the bar. The Cal-Ital cuisine, dispensed from a semi-open kitchen with a…
So Consolidated Restaurant Operations Chairman Gene Street, who has confessed to a fetish for what he calls the Dallas blond mystique, has inked a deal to fill the former Star Canyon space in the Centrum with a Silver Fox Steakhouse in January. Or rather, operations partner Mark Loebs has. Loebs,…
Craft is brevity. Look at the menu. It’s little more than a series of columns with headings such as “meat” and “pasta, grains & beans” and subheads such as “raw” and “gratin.” And it’s terse. Foie gras, for instance, is slipped–unadorned–under the “meat” and “roasted” headings. There is no prose…
After taking a dive as a headliner when Boston Market flipped pages to Chapter 11 some years ago, rotisserie chicken is staging a comeback. There’s Jack Ekhtiar’s Marco Pollo, which he hopes to expand. Now there’s Chic From Barcelona, which opened in late August in a former vacuum cleaner shop…
“We want to be the P.F. Chang’s of steak houses,” Texas de Brazil founder and chief operating officer Salim Asrawi said when the first Texas de Brazil churrascaria opened in Addison in 1998. Churrascarias are those Brazilian grills where skewered meats are roasted over open pits, continuously cycled through the…
Names of dishes roll off the tongue with touches of lyricism: gumbo, jambalaya, muffuletta, po-boy, étouffée, red beans and rice. The syllables are priceless–spoken fragments that could easily give birth to endless haiku. Po-boy drowned in a Jambalaya gumbo gloat Teething étouffée Or not. But what if you toss DaZa…
What’s so wrong with bald? Bald (or a well-groomed balding, mind you) is sexy, cool, natural and, most important, tasteful. So why is it that the toupee is still in existence? I’ve seen lots of hair so bad it looks like a toupee, but never have I found a convincing…
Last time we sampled chef Bruno Mella’s craft, it was at Mel’s on Main, a short-lived Deep Ellum restaurant and bar featuring a mounted and framed butcher knife along with dinner plates autographed by Julia Child and Emeril Lagasse on the walls. There we sampled spongy swordfish with an ammonia…
Nothing says family dining like a tawdry tune about love at last call. Jimmy Buffett might agree with that, but Saltwater Willy’s Seafood and Steakhouse, well, not so much. Allow us to tell you a story: During a long-ish wait for a late-arriving friend, the wannabe pirate’s greatest hits played…
Mike Hoque, president of American Limos & Transportation and the construction firm Tuscany Choice Development LLC is busy reeling them in. Via his restaurant group Fresh Catch LLC, headlined by Go Fish restaurant in Addison, Hoque is blitzing the Dallas orbit with a faster Go Fish: Fish Express, shilling mostly…
From the outside, it isn’t much. It’s easy to miss: a double-decker strip mall stretch done in drab concrete gray with charcoal awnings. But the Nakhon Thai restaurant strip nook grabs you anyway because the word Thai is done up in bright red. Must stand out like a swank Manhattan…
Basketball announcer Marv Albert’s brief conversation with Marco Polo’s ghost: Marv: You’ve had a hell of a career. The silk road. Working the zone for head Mongol Kublai Khan. Playing some devastating offense at Hsiang-yang during the siege by the Mongol hordes. And then you did some time in prison…
The thousands of miles separating Milan from Saigon are hardly felt just east of downtown Dallas. Natives call the neighborhood Old East Dallas or Little Asia, the developers building $350,000 townhouses a couple of blocks away call it the Upper East Side, but Italian restaurateur Alessio Franceschetti calls it his…
MapQuest can’t digest Southlake Town Square. Punch in one of its Plaza Place addresses, and it strings you across the Mid-Cities, threads you through Fort Worth and dead-ends you in a residential area near a place called Lake Worth. Or at least it did on my first aborted visit to…
