Everyone says it’s the beef. It’s the cut. It’s the animal. It’s the grade. Sometimes it’s the broiler: all 1,800 degrees worth. At N9NE Steak House, the broiler is 1,200 degrees: “1200öF: We proudly serve prime aged steaks and chops,” reads the menu. From there the choices unravel: filet mignon…
Vue restaurant and its sidekick lounge Nine 7 Two seem gripped by blunders. First, it had to change its name from Veuve (French for widow) to Vue (French for view) after Veuve Cliquot Champagne parent Louis Vuitton Mot Hennessy’s legal team threatened to bludgeon it with “trademark dilution” lawsuits. Then…
Seafood is brain food” says the motto on the menu at Fish Express. Given the name of the place, an expectation of good fish served quickly would seem to be a no-brainer. Here, however, they have adopted the Amtrak model of “express.” Place an order at the walk-up counter on…
Grace Jones’ voice spills from the lounge and hovers over the table. These are the hazards of placing a loft lounge over your dining room. The rhythms of one hijack the cadence of the other, stirring up discordant stew. On another occasion it was even more explicit. Thumps from the…
In retrospect it seems Luqa director of operations Kyle Kepner was a commander not so much of a layered urban restaurant-lounge but of construction delays and indigested ambitions. Luqa and Petrus Lounge (originally conceived as Cascades) went through years of false starts, missed deadlines and millions in design and construction…
What about the dinosaurs? This is often the question posed when science wrestles with God, when empirical evidence scrums with Scripture. The big bones are clearly in the ground, but Tyrannosaurus Rex is absent from the Bible—a huge reptilian omission for a book with a reptile clearly playing a starring…
Beau’s is like a temporarily rearranged living room, the kind you’d disassemble and neatly refit to absorb extras guests. Sure, its setting in a quarter of the Crescent Court lobby is elegant. The glass tables are thick, with an opaque appliqué on the bottom giving them a sandblasted look. There’s…
This week Trader Vic’s, the classic repository of tiki culture and gaudy cocktails, reopens to apparent anxious expectancy stoked by nostalgia. “There’s a multitude of people coming by,” says Rusty Fenton, a principal in Realty America Hospitality, which is reanimating Trader Vic’s. “It’s like a Mecca. Our PR is almost…
To say the service and pacing of courses at Le Rendezvous is leisurely is to make them sound too rushed. This newly reopened French place on the southwest corner of Royal Lane at Preston Road adheres to the classic continental style, meaning continents could shift a smidge in the time…
What’s most amazing about Little Katana, the Travis Street edition, isn’t the food, though some of it is astounding. The Asian bouillabaisse for instance, is as orange as a road hazard cone and hot enough to jiggle tonsils (more on this later). No, what’s most amazing is the Little Katana…
N9NE, Park Cities Prime, BLT. Steakhouses are the kudzu of the Dallas dining industry. Sure, there’s a culling every now and again: Smith & Wollensky, GF Prime, Fleming’s, Ruth’s Chris, etc. But they come back thicker and pricier, wearing more feminized plumage. Can our gullets and bill clips sustain them?…
Indian cuisine is an unruly knot of temperaments. It’s not easy to tame. It’s even harder to unravel and understand once it is tamed. Take curry. It’s a simple word that has multiple meanings. It’s a fragrant leafy herb. It’s a paste composed of clarified butter and powerful spices. It’s…
This trip is strange. After messing around in mountainous Breckenridge, Colorado—not skiing, but snowshoeing, camping and dropping bobbers in lakes—chef Kevin Ascolese is back in flattened Dallas. Ascolese, you’ll recall, etched his résumé in some of Dallas’ finest stabs at fine Italian—Sfuzzi, Mi Piaci, Salve! Ristorante and Ferré. Now he’ll…
Gourmands make their graves with their teeth. —French proverb Bijoux is for those who hate food—hate to be away from it, hate it when it’s irresistibly beautiful, hate the poisons it sends coursing through the veins, hate the scourge of its addiction and, most of all, hate themselves for loving…
Hearing that Deep Ellum Café is back in business in its original location at 2706 Elm St. is like finding out that a good old friend has moved back to the neighborhood. This was one of our favorite haunts in the late 1980s, back when Deep Ellum was coming into…
Behind the Geisha Steak and Sushi Lounge sushi bar is a sushi clock: ticktock, ticktock. Shrimp is two, octopus is three, salmon eggs (ikura) are five and so on. Behind the Geisha lounge bar are high-definition flat screens. The first quarter unwinds: ticktock, ticktock. “I’d be better if the Cowboys…
On one hand, the West End is a historic district slag heap, a once-bustling entertainment district reduced to has-been diversion rubble by obsolescence and maybe a few things named Victory, West Village and The Shops at Legacy. The last strands of has-been evidence you can count on a few fingers:…
Hotel Lumen bills itself as an enlightened hotel. It “illuminates its sophisticated setting” with “light-themed” artwork and a “vibrant retro feel.” Enlightened. Illuminates. Lumen. A pattern blooms. Suddenly, a contrarian element cuts through the glow racket. Social, the “swanky” restaurant tucked in the bowels of the enlightened Lumen, is dark…
N9NE Steakhouse is set to open in Victory Park January 18. N9NE (pronounced “nine”) is the “signature” property of Las Vegas-based N9NE Group, parent of Ghostbar and founded by Michael Morton (son of Morton’s the Steakhouse founder Arnie Morton) and Scott DeGraff, who operate restaurants and nightclubs in Chicago, Las…
We would like CHIC from Barcelona to become a welcoming oasis in Dallas. We want people to think of Chic when they think of Barcelona. We want people to think of Barcelona when they think of CHIC. Thus reads the Chic from Barcelona “vision” statement, a piece of circular thinking…
They’re relics: Stephan Pyles’ bone-in cowboy rib eye and Dean Fearing’s lobster tacos. They cling to evolving menus like vestiges from a bygone era when Texas mattered. Southwestern cuisine is dead. It went out with a wheezy whimper. The city’s SW power trio—Dean Fearing, Stephan Pyles and Avner Samuel—who were…
Gershwin’s, the 20-year-old classic that thrust its distended belly skyward last June, is about to roll over and play living. In mid-January, the former Gershwin’s space will reopen as Saltwater Willy’s—an identical twin of the casual dining concept that debuted in front of Grapevine Mills more than a year ago…
