Food & Drink

Maritage is named after a wine category — it’s actually spelled Meritage — created several years ago by an association of California winemakers. Those winemakers had a problem: Most of the world’s truly great wines comprise blends of vintages made from different grapes, most notably those grown in Bordeaux. There…

Fish has always been a funny fin. It could dazzle you with its scaled wonders, then turn around and disappoint you with a few beached blunders. But it would always hook you with a hefty check for the trouble. Launched in 1996 by businessman Steven Upright and chef Chris Svalesen,…

It sounds more like a garage than a restaurant. From somewhere more like Toledo, Ohio, than Vancouver, B.C. A place that sends its management on culinary swings through Oklahoma and Iowa instead of Bordeaux, Italy, and Napa. But earl’s is no ordinary dinner chain. In 1955, Earl “Bus” Fuller, a…

Right there, in a glass case just as you walk up to the counter at Chipotle Mexican Grill on McKinney Avenue is a T-shirt (for sale) with a clever maxim. “Usually, when you roll something this good, it’s illegal,” it says. This statement refers to Chipotle’s massive 20-ounce burritos, which…

Two days before Casa Del Lago opened in February 1999, chef-owner Hector Angeles was looking for something Italian to slip onto his menu, but he didn’t want pasta. He wanted something divergent, maybe twisted. He was stuck. “I saw a contest in a magazine about what you can create with…

A shokado is a type of bento box, a high-sided black container divided into four equal compartments into which tiny portions of meticulously crafted food are placed. Ino Japanese Bistro mimics the shokado bento, taking its minimal elegance to engaging extremes. Walls are bare and white, trimmed with dark dusty…

As a rescue effort, Fishbowl isn’t bad. In fact, this retro lounge fitted from the stuck-up bar affixed to the Stephan Pyles and Michael Cox’s AquaKnox would be a swell place to nibble and sip even if it weren’t next door to the hyper-upscale restaurant. What Fishbowl proves is that…

“You speak Hindi?” asked our server. Our eyes were glued to the television screen. Our mouths were chewing bits of lamb samosa ($3.95), delicious flaky fried pastry pockets jammed with ground lamb, cashews, cilantro, and onion. “No,” I said. “Then how you know?” he asked, waving his hand toward the…

Machu Picchu is Dallas’ first Peruvian restaurant. It’s named for a mysterious ancient Inca town set on a spectacular precipice nearly 8,000 feet above sea level on the eastern slopes of the Andes. The place was essentially unknown until an American archaeologist stumbled across it in 1911 under a blanket…

Maybe this is an evolution of some sort, the kind where the mutations and variations creep at such a slow pace that you barely notice. But Tramontana, a cozy little restaurant in Preston Center with the walls painted to look like the poster-infested bedroom of a café-cultured Francophile, is changing…

Make no mistake. A captivating veranda is a big deal in Dallas, not something to be sniffed at or choked on in the wake of Mercedes Benz exhaust. When you think about it, Dallas is perhaps the most unfriendly patio town in the world, outside of Grozny in Chechnya, or…

It’s hard not to like Z Café. Then again, like the sleepy forward coast of a comfortable marriage, it’s hard to like it without working at it. But you will put forth the effort, because Z, with its sloppily stained black tables, azure trim, black Zs plastered on the walls,…

Every now and then life hands you a perfect moment, one of those spaces of time when everything stops, turns beautifully epiphanic, and suddenly you find yourself babbling the goofy prose found in that Shirley MacLaine tree-climbing book. I have had a few perfect moments: watching the sun set in…