There aren’t many places around Dallas where you can eat a sea cucumber family-style. Heck, there probably aren’t many places outside of municipalities with China Town tracts that serve the wormlike sea creature. But the cucumbers are here at Chef Hsu, in various culinary treatments: braised, stir-fried and fried, and…
Waterfalls are mostly good things: They beautify yards and public spaces; they create white noise that can cause blissful drowsiness; and they make swell vertical thoroughfares to traverse in a barrel. But sometimes waterfalls kind of suck, especially if they invade your space when you already have one installed. Just…
It’s easy to imagine The Metropolitan on any corner in downtown Boston or Chicago. Unlike most Dallas restaurants parked in strip malls, high-rises or on thoroughfare frontage roads, The Metropolitan is in a structure older than your average Weezer fan. Lots older. The Metropolitan is part of the Stone Street…
Mark Maguire, founder of Maguire’s Regional Cuisine in North Dallas, is dressing down. Not changing from button-downs to Kid Rock pop-top tank tops, but from North Dallas to Uptown. Maguire calls his shift Maguire’s “M” Grill & Tap, a casual departure set to open in early November in the space…
Imagine, for a moment, a world without bartenders. A city of sober club hoppers, their vision unimpaired, would doom the latex industry–and that’s just one scenario. Envision Deep Ellum lined with antique shops, NASCAR fans sitting up suddenly and blurting, “Hey, them cars is just going around in circles,” literature…
If Alberto Lombardi possesses one quality, it’s persistence, gobs of it. He took a huge gamble on McKinney Avenue, installing Bizú, that natty slinger of mediocre Franco-American grub, in the former Sfuzzi space, which also served as a crypt for Coco Pazzo. When Bizú bit it, Lombardi slipped in Mangia…
For once I wish someone in Dallas would create a wine bar that follows the syntax of the billing and puts the “wine” before the “bar.” More often than not, the wine-bar designation is a shallow ruse used to draw denizens hoping to lap the drippings of sophistication into what…
Restaurant creator Phil Romano has shed his Eatzi’s partner. Restaurant Giant Brinker International (Chili’s, Macaroni Grill, On the Border, Maggiano’s, Big Bowl) announced it would divest its interest in Eatzi’s and sell its share to an investment group led by Romano. “[T]he Eatzi’s transaction will allow us to concentrate on…
Even in Plano, everything about Bob’s is exaggerated, from the endless mahogany wood paneling to the near-golf-ball-sized jelly beans kept in a large bowl near the entrance. That goes for the drinks, too, especially the martinis. In truth, the martini is an appalling beverage to belt anytime before or during…
Over tens of thousands of years, human beings harnessed fire, created language and developed rudimentary tools as they slowly learned to tame the land. Either that, or God, after designing our flag and writing up a neat little pledge to go along with it, provided such things to humankind fairly…
It’s pointless to point out how sushi restaurants have proliferated in the Dallas area over the past few years. It’s not a trend anymore. It’s a near onslaught. It’s easier to get strips of white tuna on a rice bumper than it is to get white shirts starched and on…
Tanked fish are often a default dining room décor item in the restaurant biz; a living bauble with a maintenance contract that fills the void left by enervated imaginations. You see them everywhere, mostly in salty water, flaunting their Day-Glo color schemes through a maze of rocks, vegetation and sometimes…
The Burning Question crew gathered recently at Sevy’s Grill in the middle of a workday for a…um…dental appointment. During our sojourn, bartender James Pintello mentioned something about atmosphere affecting the taste of a drink. “I’d order cognac if I was sitting in a library, with a leather chair and a…
The Dallas Morning News reported earlier this month that Phil and Janet Cobb’s Salve! was choked off by lawsuits. (Apparently this admission was contained in a press release that a manager at the Cobbs’ Mi Piaci refused to provide to the Observer stating it was crafted exclusively for DMN critic…
At one point in the classic movie Battleground, a lieutenant inquires about the location of a strategic bridge. When a sentry stammers uncertainly, the officer snaps, “You ought to be sure of things, soldier,” before leading his squad into the darkness. The lieutenant and his squad are Germans, by the…
Caviar is the lusty ghost hovering around Marty’s Bistro, the full-service restaurant that grew out of the 59-year-old wine and gourmet food shop. And a rare ghost it must be. The left flap of the menu is riddled with explicit, blown-up color glossies of the stuff: a piece of toast…
If there’s one thing Café Izmir founder Ali Nazary is passionate about, it’s donar k-bobs, at least for now. Though it may sound like a fund-raiser for a thousand Roberts, donar k-bobs are actually the Greek treat known as gyros (not pronounced like the term used to denote a whirligig)…
Italian cuisine has had a rough row to hoe in Dallas. Either it’s mostly mediocre, or it’s so expensive that it’s hard to digest more than on a monthly basis without rupturing something valuable. That means there’s a culinary niche for the daring to exploit, a ripe market for someone…
Beau Nash is a Crescent Court bauble, a patinated little room enclosed in glass and attached to a stylish bar planked with marble and squirted with brass. Tightly arranged works of art embroider the walls. Requisite white cloths hang from the tables. The main dining room, walled on one side…
Mass-market restaurant chains often take extraordinary steps to stress their particular ethnic identity. Cracker Barrel, for example, oozes Southern charm–that is, the South of Moon Pies, RC Cola, lynchings, Bonnie and Clyde and rabid defiance of all things learned–from every crevice. At Bennigan’s, hostesses greet you with obscure Gaelic phrases,…
Salve Ristorante Italiano, the 9,000-square-foot, 170-seat restaurant launched by Mi Piaci founders Phil and Janet Cobb and Mi Piaci partner David Stubblefield, is closed. Opened in early 2000, the $3 million McKinney Avenue Milano-style restaurant has been the subject of death rumors for some nine months. Many restaurant-industry pundits predicted…
For a while, it was kingfish. The Dallas Morning News drooled. D magazine ogled. Esquire magazine named it the best seafood restaurant in the country in 1997. When chef Chris Svalesen and businessman Steven Upright opened Fish (tagged “an upscale seafood restaurant”) in the Paramount Hotel in late 1996, they…
