It seems like the departure rumors have been around longer than she has. But after more than four accolade-studded years as executive chef and general manager at Laurels atop the Westin Park Central, Daniel Custer is pulling out of Dallas. She had always planned on leaving here, she says, because…
Sure, Texas leads the nation in alcohol-related traffic deaths–1,734 in 1999–and the state’s leniency toward drunk drivers costs it close to $100 million in highway funding. But when it comes to drinking, nothing arouses the ire of North Texas like a harmless blue-and-white card. Just ask. “The Unicard is a…
Question: Is prime beef really prime? Every year in September, the otherwise drab streets of Monmouth, Illinois, erupt with all the color and pageantry of the Warren County Prime Beef Festival. They even elect a festival princess–Miss Prime Beef, no doubt. But what exactly is “prime beef?” “The United States…
It’s like a corral or a Ponderosa steakhouse. At Village Grill, you walk through the door and are immediately channeled down a walkway, like cattle, toward the ordering counter. Behind the counter is a large poster of the menu. There’s also a little decorative collage of wagon wheels and hay…
Tacky misses the point. The outside of the restaurant is painted red, the kind of crimson that occurs when you leave tomato sauce on top of a flame too long. Positioned at various points along the wall are Romanesque statues brushed with antiquing stain or maybe old clam sauce. Strings…
Following months of speculation he was doing it, chef Gilbert Garza finally did it, or at least admitted he did it. After roughly a year of working in the kitchen, Garza bought Suze, the near Northwest Dallas neighborhood restaurant that was Going Gourmet before former Mediterraneo kitchen grunt Suzie Priore…
Maybe eating raw fish and raw sea-critter eggs is extreme, or at least it used to be in Dallas before sushi restaurants started popping up on the face of the metroplex like little red Clearasil targets. But what about fish? They have some pretty extreme dining habits too. Case in…
Peter Tarantino, erstwhile restaurant owner who operated Tarantino’s Restaurant, Bar & Lounge near Fair Park, is having a bumpy ride looking for that “good job” he expressed an interest in after Tarantino’s literally went down the toilet (bad plumbing). His gig with Shannon Wynn’s Eight 0 Management Inc., where Tarantino…
The warning sign came in the form of a beige Melmac plate with a floral design nuzzling the edge. It was hard to look at the faded hamachi (yellowtail), smoked salmon, and red maguro (tuna) stitched with milky strands of something and arranged over the plate, because it seemed so…
By many accounts, the 65-plus-year-old Greenville Ave. Bar & Grill was somewhat of a sewer by the time it was clamped shut in late April, albeit one that leaked malt suds. Yet after just a few months, this watering-hole landmark is poised for a resurrection. Four bartenders from Primo’s on…
Spaghetti and meatballs. It’s the stereotypical Italian dish, and it’s ubiquitous. You can find it frozen, in cans made by chefs with names that sound like bathtub toys, or freeze-dried for hikers so that people who commune with horseflies, skip bathing for days on end, and dine in the dirt,…
Up north, where Coit performs thoroughfare intercourse with Arapaho, where dwarf trees are bred because shade trees would create a pool-clogging crisis, a huge banner flaps in the wind. It’s tethered to Ziziki’s, a little dining room with black and white ceramic floor tiles and teal awnings that look like…
The onset of the new millennium has not been kind to Reata, the Southwestern-style steakhouse roosting 35 floors up in the Bank One Tower in downtown Fort Worth. In fact, it’s kind of unraveling it. It began March 28 when Reata, whose name is Spanish for “rope,” got in the…
There’s little that’s special or notable about PoPoLos Café. And that’s why it’s so special. The food isn’t particularly imaginative, but it’s mostly well prepared, and this is accomplished without pretension. The atmosphere is simple and clean without a hint of hauteur. That this restaurant could get back on its…
The thing you don’t want to do in a restaurant called We Oui is default to crass mode by playing double entendre with the name, especially in a Dallas brasserie with a menu that’s an American-French mutt. No. That would be like serving pork n’ beans at a wine tasting…
After nearly a year of collecting dust while its rows of fountain jets squirt decoratively in front of the for-lease sign, the space that was once Mediterraneo at the Quadrangle before it was PoPoLos at the Quadrangle, which before that was J. Pepe’s, has a new tenant. Ruggeri’s Restaurant is…
It’s like an Indo-Chinese revolving door, that space. Back in 1996 it was Saigon Savor. Then it was Saigon Bistro. As Saigon Bistro is how I remember the space. It seemed more elegant back then. That’s because it was. Carpet — or maybe it was big throw rugs — hugged…
The slapping pitter-patter thump of the tabla is contemplative. It’s soothing and eerie. And this is what they pipe through the sound system at Udipi Café, a restaurant in Richardson serving South Indian vegetarian cuisine. The tabla is coupled with flutes that rise and fall with the intensity of the…
Santiago Peña is back to cutting up and bending metal for restaurants. The sculptor and construction contractor, who made his mark on Dallas dining by welding thematically relevant forms for Star Canyon and AquaKnox, recently finished work on a new restaurant, Thai Tango in Flower Mound. Peña says he studied…
It’s Saturday night, and Shelly Dowdy is gliding across the floor of her restaurant in a tight-fitting gown that envelops her Rubenesque form like an iguana skin. An animal-print wrap is slung around her waist. She looks scared. Venus Steakhouse & Supper Club is packed, and the American Cancer Society…
Jeroboam flight Bam. Anile’s gone. That fast. With the opening of Jeroboam–the brasserie set to crystallize in the Kirby building downtown–just a couple of weeks away, Jim Anile, the former Melrose Hotel executive chef who was set to commandeer the menu, has flown west to work at a new hotel…
EuroTex Café is a racquetball court of a restaurant that echoes with Elgar instead of slaps of spherical rubber. Trickles of sound bounce off the walls too, from a fountain with four frogs leaking water from various orifices. EuroTex Café is a clean, fresh downtown lunch and breakfast spot serving…
