Many things have been crafted from old gas stations: coffee bars, topiary shops, car bra boutiques, bootleg 8-track dealers, galleries with fuzzy black light paintings. But a tapas bar has to be among the most original. Yet this is exactly what Ildefonso Jimenez–a key player in the founding of Café…
Tuscan lurch It’s hard to tell how the once-trendy Tuscan glamour hut known as Toscana, shuttered since mid-February, will be resuscitated. One rumor, at least, seems to have legs, and that is that ex-Sfuzzi pros Michael Costa and Dean McSherry, creators of the consulting firm DMC Hospitality, will attempt to…
Honchos at the Stoneleigh Hotel, onetime home of the classic continental room Ewald’s and purveyor of some of the best sushi in Dallas, have decided to sharpen the culinary edges in this circa-1923 hotel. So they shuttered Ewald’s, the dining room launched by longtime Dallas chef Ewald Scholz, hung a…
Naming a restaurant after a breed of cattle might seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in Texas, the No. 1 state in cattle production. But when you look at the Charolais, a breed of cattle originally from France (and named for a district in that country), you have…
UnShared Vision Looks like chef Robert Auston’s laudable quest for the crapless 12-ounce steak has been thwarted. Last week I reported that Auston, founder of Ianos Trattoria and partner with Tim Hager in Shared Vision, the company that owns Mediterraneo and the shuttered Toscana, was on the verge of transforming…
Bizú (which means little kiss in French) kissed off, and it’s not hard to see why. Though the transformed McKinney Avenue space that was once the home of Sfuzzi and Coco Pazzo was sexy and smart in all its mirrored, votive-candled, organza-draped glory, the food was iffy, especially for the…
One of my dining companions called Ciao Marco Italian “fast supper,” a word play on fast food. Which is odd, because though the service is pleasant here, it isn’t necessarily fast. And though the prices are reasonable, it isn’t necessarily a value. In reality, Marco is “easy supper” — easy…
Beer bust I’ve always liked cheap beer, a taste I acquired in college that to this day is sustained by my brother-in-law, who frequently lugs 12-packs of Keystone Light over for dinner and then forgets where in the refrigerator he left them (behind the leftover herb-crusted Spam loaf). So imagine…
Much as I try, I can’t seem to find a common thread between Volvos and haute cuisine. Volvos are austerely functional vehicles, hauling child protective seats with the resolve of a D-6 dozer. They’re the automotive equivalent of granola with a side of stewed prunes, which, along with boutique lefty…
No Fork over III Forks Steak House owner Dale Wamstad (a.k.a. Del Frisco) has taken his long-running community property battle with his ex-wife Lena Rumore to the Louisiana Supreme Court. Rumore has been fighting since late 1995 to get a piece of the $22.7 million that Wichita, Kansas-based Lone Star…
Dear Mr. O’Dowd: Right off the top I’ll admit I don’t know much about Irish food (is there a lot to know?). I’m German. And there’s not a whole lot to know about German food either, at least not in a haute sense. Assembling cool kitchen appliances, we’ve got that…
There was me — that is, the Kraut — and my zheena, and we sat in the Milkbar making up our rassoodocks about what pischcha to nibble on for the evening. This devotchka, all dressed in a malenky white vinyl skirt with these flip horrorshow go-go boots high up her…
Haines hikes to Henderson Remember when everyone was saddling Dallas chef Avner Samuel with the word “peripatetic”? Well, maybe not everyone. Just a few writers with a thesaurus fetish. And I’d be the last person to call chef Marc Haines peripatetic. But consider his journey over the past five months,…
There’s a guy in San Francisco named John Cunin who was the longtime maître d’ at a place called Masa’s before he decided to open his own place in 1990 called the Cypress Club. The Cypress Club was (and still is, I suppose) one of those see-and-be-seen places. People like…
Rope twister Reata owner Mike Evans says he knew things were getting weird when he saw a large patio umbrella swirling outside the much-lauded restaurant’s 35th-floor window in the Bank One Tower in downtown Fort Worth. So he directed Reata’s staff to evacuate some 100 guests into the building’s center…
Deli madness Maybe the next market segment ripe for plucking by the World Wrestling Federation is New York-style delis, at least in Dallas. In early January, Alan Gilbert of Gilbert’s Deli filed a lawsuit against Dallas doctor Gary Morchower, his wife Elizabeth, and one of their progeny who has the…
Kampai Sushi & Grill is a new restaurant on Addison Circle next to Antonio Ristorante and across from the just-opened Avanti Euro Bistro. But this isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that Kampai faces “Blueprints at Addison Circle,” a structure that, according to the city of Addison, is…
Time was that the 99-cent threshold for pricing was the sole domain of the grocery store, or at least it seemed that way. It’s an old strategy. Knock a penny off a price and make it seem like the customer is saving a buck, while the cent saved ends up…
It’s not surprising that a venue like Ciudad D.F. surfaced like a bubble on Dallas asphalt. What’s surprising is that it has taken this long. Ciudad is Monica Greene’s (of Monica’s Aca y Alla in Deep Ellum) tribute to her hometown and a Dallas interpretation of the cuisine found in…
Fish stink Former Fish chef Chris Svalesen says he was vexed to read in The Dallas Morning News that he was close to a consultancy agreement with Nick and John Natour, owners of The Enclave, to help them reopen Gershwin’s. Though Svalesen confirms he chatted with the Natours about the…
There are a few things that Ellington’s doesn’t get quite right. One of them is a statement in the restaurant’s publicity blurb: “We like to fry,” it states. “It may not be politically correct, but one taste of our fried chicken, chicken-fried steak, or pan-fried catfish, and you’ll swear off…
French meat munch Emerging Brands, the division of Carlson Restaurants Worldwide that came up with Samba Room, is scouting Dallas for space to house a new concept: Mignon. Billed as a 1960s French steakhouse that brings jazz and blues back to dining, Mignon will feature steak, whole trout, fondue, iced…
