Some whisperers contend the Dallas restaurant business is bracing for a couple of body blows. First, there’s Delta Airlines pulling out of its Dallas hub. “They’re not thrilled about it,” says Tracey Evers, executive director of the Greater Dallas Restaurant Association (the restaurateurs, she means). “Those people eat out a…
Those old enough probably remember Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, a popular television series in which the hosts tracked hungry beasts roaming the savannah or crept up on skittish prey. Well, consider the Burning Question crew literary heirs to Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler. Over the past few weeks we’ve…
Water. Maybe it’s a myth that the secret to great pizza is water. Dallas has notoriously bad water. It’s so hard you could break your nose splashing handfuls of it into your face in the morning, which means it’s better at waking you up than making your pizza rock. There…
Dallas restaurant publications come and go with the regularity of…well, regularity. Dining Book, Dallas Food & Wine Journal, Vine Dallas–there are probably others. Wait a minute; didn’t The Dallas Morning News once have a quarterly insert magazine called Wine & Food that disappeared really Quick? See how fast the go…
William Guthrie is a collector: books, utensils, antiques, family photographs. Much of his trove peppers his restaurant, Guthrie’s. Guthrie says he has more than 1,500 hardback cookbooks, a collection of tomes that dates all the way to 1796 and one from which he pulls recipes. He also keeps old recipes…
Steak drives men to ramble. Specifics? Monte Morris. Before Tristan Simon and his merry band of Consolidated Restaurant operators lured him to run Cool River Café in Las Colinas, Morris was burrowed in a steak house up in Denver. Then Simon broke from Cool River to launch Cuba Libre, bringing…
Sometimes, after we’ve called in sick with a strange “stomach virus,” we spend the day testing Bloody Mary recipes and watching cooking shows. According to television, chefs spend their days sipping wine with Andrea Immer on some ocean-side deck, fishing for rainbow trout in a roaring mountain stream, roaming Tuscan…
What’s astounding about the Gaylord Texan Resort is this: no bugs. Not a single gnat, fly, ant, earwig or pill bug milling about the stone terraces or burrowing in the dirt. And there is plenty of dirt. The center node of the Gaylord is one gigantic terrarium with uncountable varieties…
Young restaurant veteran Marie Grove opened Stolik Restaurant Lounge (which means little table in Czech) one year ago with all of the relish and bravado that often blurs twenty-something vision. She abandoned a scholarship to attend Southern Methodist University to take the Dallas landscape by storm, promising to exploit what…
When asked to evaluate the art of bartending, few people mention the drink itself. “It’s not the drink, but your actions behind the bar that matter,” claims Manny Murillo of the Library Bar. By that he means a combination of attitude, customer service and attention to waitstaff. “You can get…
Saffron Room is soaked in amber. This is not surprising, given the luxuriously ruddy-yellow spice from which it takes its name. What is surprising is that this restaurant holds a mere 30 seats. This intimacy is exploited in the usual ways, with votive candles, sheers fencing the tables and pillows…
Now comes a lawyer who says I blew it. Roy Morris, an attorney representing former high-tech mogul Mark Floyd, says that statements published in the July 1 Hash Over column referring to Floyd as an investor in the defunct restaurant Vino & Basso are false. In that column, I referenced…
A Savory warning was delivered not long ago. The warning was this: Savory’s menu will change shortly, and when that happens you won’t be able to get the chilled Moroccan tomato soup. Time it right, because missing the soup would be a blunder. Forewarned, we slipped into Savory on time…
Europeans often complain that Americans lack sophistication, particularly when it comes to matters of leisure. Our faults are many: We refuse to stuff ourselves into Speedos; we regulate our lives with air conditioning and fail to keel over by the thousands when temps top the 90 mark…make that the 30…
Believe us, we’ve been involved in some pretty despicable acts. There was the night we convinced a noted chef to chug wine straight from the bottle. The day we filled our editor’s vial of miracle hair-restorer with Nair. The time we slipped several $18 hamburgers onto a friend’s bar tab…
Stolik means “little table” in Czech. The name is brilliantly captured on the menu: a tiny, crude, hand-stamped ink impression of a table, precisely pressed in the center of the creamy cover stock (a tiny barstool illustrates the bar menu). This expresses much: space, honesty, simplicity, warmth, timelessness. On this…
Old Hickory sommelier Darryl Beeson, a pro who has carved an impressive vine furrow through greater Dallas with stops at The French Room, The Mansion, Voltaire and Steel, says that 60 percent of the checks winding through the steak house’s coffers spring from locals. Given that Old Hickory is embedded…
The defining moment came on a Tuesday night at The Quarter. Clusters of men and women milled about and intermingled casually, but the night was young. A stunning, raven-haired woman named Jill explained that she and her friends hang out in bars “to get out of the house, regroup, find…
Employing Buddha to drive nightclub adrenaline is odd when you think about it. There are bars named after this enlightened fellow (here there was Buddha Bar before it went Bali Bar before it went bust), and Buddha busts and figures inexplicably fill nightclub alcoves, dugouts and pedestals. At Sambuca Uptown,…
Iron Cactus is the kind of place you reflexively rally around if you have even the tiniest traces of civic pride in your veins. Iron Cactus is just the sort of temple to healthy urban eating that Dallas needs in its endlessly fussed-over downtown: a sleek monument of brash architecture…
Remember the ’90s? Most of the world loved us, everybody had money to spend, we could kick back at Dallas restaurants and whip out a cigar…which reminds us: good thing we put an end to all that hanky-panky in the White House. Feel a lot better off now, we do…
G.F. Prime Steakhouse is excited about prime. A quick perusal of the menu confirms this. G.F. Prime has prime starters. G.F. Prime has prime salads. G.F. Prime has prime soups and sandwiches. G.F. Prime has prime entrées, prime “additions” and “The Prime Finish.” Are you primed yet? G.F. Prime is…
