Next Tuesday, our celebrated urban core will be needled out of its tequila-addled mind when the Dallas version of Iron Cactus Mexican Grill and Margarita Bar debuts. The three-story, 14,000-square-foot restaurant, imported from Austin, comes complete with a cylindrical tower housing a winding staircase, a rooftop deck that overlooks Dallas’…
Poets, sages and thinkers of great magnitude have grappled for centuries with the fundamental mysteries standing in the way of human progress–stuff like hunger, indigenous populations, the environment, that sort of thing. None of them, however, dared tackle the most perplexing question of all: Is there a correct way to…
Here’s an experience worth its weight in foie gras: gnawing on bloody-as-hell steak in a garishly masculine steak house and not hearing a single note sung by Frank Sinatra. Or Tony Bennett. Or Nat King Cole. Skip Harry Connick Jr., too. Delete any croons from other packed rats as well,…
There are two ways to digest Django on the Parkway: with music or without music. Django must be consumed this way because Django entwines two personalities that come into relief only when the music is sifted out. This Addison venue, now thoroughly washed in burnt brick-red stucco substance on the…
Grand Lux Café, the upscale casual diner invented by Calabasas Hills, California-based The Cheesecake Factory Inc. , is being fitted into the Galleria in the north part of a pair of expansion wings flanking the Westin Hotel. The only other cities with Grand Lux are Chicago, Las Vegas and Los…
Convenience is the crack of modern culture. It’s why the remote is the power metaphor of the tract castle and the mobile phone has displaced indoor plumbing as the critical necessity of existence. It’s why cash flows through the air (billions, watch your head) instead of going postal. It’s why…
In the end, we’ll all chug and chew from a Brown bag. Or a box, if Melrose chef Doug Brown has his druthers. Brown, the culinary wunderkind who did his teething at Nana Grill and now governs the menus at Melrose Hotel properties in Dallas, New York and Washington, D.C.,…
Humans long ago declared victory in our long struggle to overcome the forces of nature. We spray on tans, burn Duraflame logs, flash huge CZ rings and dine on farm-raised salmon. Of course, our old foe never really accepted defeat and still threatens humankind on occasion with harmless little pinpricks,…
New York magazine proclaimed it the new hanger. Is this a compliment? Hard to tell, especially when you consider ancestry. The hanger steak, a grainy beef cut that a flock of clever chefs nudged into tender meat with intense flavor, quickly landed on bistro menus. But its pedigree is not…
This exchange actually occurred between two members of the Burning Question crew after a night of research in which we visited The Meridian Room, The Old Monk, Candle Room and Sense: “Did I do anything stupid at Sense last night?” “We went to Sense last night?” Later, after we completed…
“It’s not dead.” So says broadcaster Jim White, who has hosted the KRLD Restaurant Show for the past nine years. KRLD NewsRadio 1080 dropped the cleaver on the show last month because, White says, parent Infinity Broadcasting demanded KRLD yank it from its budget. But White says he’s drafting a…
In the auto industry, dipping into the past for design cues has become a mania. Examples form a long string of oval headlights and fenders rounded into ripe hips or etched with sharp creases lifted from bygone eras: PT Cruiser, Ford GT, Mustang GT, Thunderbird, Chevy SSR, MINI Cooper. But…
The gold glint of chardonnay is tarnishing. Merlot is passé. Gad, even cabernet is sliding slightly in popularity. Syrah, pinot noir, pinot grigio (why does so much of it taste like two Bayer dissolved in Evian?) are ascendant. So are the wine-producing regions in Oregon and Washington. And Italy. France…
Most of us recognize outstanding service instantly, whether in the form of an act, such as unfolding a napkin and pulling out a chair, or a record of self-sacrifice–like spending a few weeks in the National Guard. A set of handy idioms (“the customer is always right,” “have it your…
Cars and dining go together like Botox and TV news anchors. Whole restaurant segments and a rash of clever inventions have been spawned from the marriage of food and motoring: diners, drive-ins, cup lids, drive-up windows, talking Jack heads, cup holders, probably even disposable diaper wipes (keep a tub in…
The more things stay the same, the more they change. Just ask Ron Corcoran, founder of Sipango. Last summer, he plugged founding chef Matthew Antonovich back into the ever-morphing nightclub-discothèque-Cal-Ital-Tuscan steak house to reanimate its long-gone culinary luster. Antonovich returned after a five-year string of cooking and non-cooking pursuits, such…
Certain words, when placed side by side, just sound wrong. It’s rather jarring, for example, to encounter phrases such as “French soldier” or “irrefutable evidence” or even “Bush administration”–phrases that, while grammatically correct, confound logic. In the same manner, we accept Tennessee sour mash or single-malt highland scotch. Should Yoichi,…
In a February article in the online magazine Slate, Columbia University Professor Duncan Watts exhumed the work of the late Princeton social psychologist Solomon Asch to explain what Watts called the Kerry cascade. The phenomenon, Watts says, is the strange dynamic by which Massachusetts Senator John Kerry rapidly swept to…
Once upon a time, daring engineers threatened the very heavens with dazzling feats of construction. Of course, we are referring to that marvelous epoch a few years ago, when upscale restaurants pushed dishes to new heights–literally. Chefs stacked cuts of meat on a foundation of mashed potatoes framed by crisp…
Forty-nine hundred McKinney Avenue has always had an identity problem. Does it really want to be Italian? Or more accurately, will we let it be Italian if it really is? Or is this spot next to a dry cleaner really never meant to be more than a hoagie deli with…
Early one evening, about a year ago, the Burning Question crew encountered a suburban couple venturing into the wilds of Lower Greenville for the first time in years. It was fascinating to observe them as they watched, with a kind of “people still do that?” amazement on their faces, the…
Spike is a dwelling of odd contrasts, ones so striking that it’s a good bet they were unintentional, which makes them all the more delicious. On the surface, Spike is another in the long line of Dallas’ shallow nightclubs with pulsing music, lighting that requires bat sonar and shopworn chic…
