What’s not to like about Ethiopian cuisine? It takes on different attractive personas, registering searing intensity (with jalapeño peppers and mitmita, a hot Ethiopian chili powder), manliness (lots of beef and lamb chunks) and familiarity (collard greens). But its most endearing quality is that it must be eaten with fingers…
Chef Jean La Font says he doesn’t fiddle much with the food at Le Rendezvous. He eschews twists and mergings. He shrugs off plate landscapes framed in sauce dribble and herb dustings. Everything is seeded from safe, comfortable classic structures. And from that track Le Rendezvous rarely stumbles. On those…
Patrick Esquerré of Café Patrique is regrouping and adding some thrust to his fast-casual concept after he shuttered his operation in Mockingbird Station. He says he’s going to inject energy into the Café Patrique at Preston-Forest, starting with a menu shift that will emphasize grilled items, expanded salad selections and…
It’s futile eating spaghetti with chopsticks. The procedure might seem doable at first. After all, there are countless examples of Asian noodles that have a striking resemblance to spaghetti. Yet these Asian noodle specimens, often made from rice or egg, seem tackier, so they adhere to the sticks more readily…
Noodles Ave. has a slightly ratty feel to it. Not that this counter-order-deliver-by-number-table-service is actually a ragamuffin dressed up in colorful ethnic garb. It’s just that there are little things that lead to head-scratching. On one visit, a brood of Noodles Ave. counter workers and kitchen jockeys–presumably on a break…
A sign on the door says that Patrick Esquerré and his crew were locked out of Café Patrique in Mockingbird Station. But not, it appears, before he got most of the fixtures for his fledgling counter-service restaurant out of the building. In a written statement, Esquerré says that expenses associated…
It’s almost as if foreigners have a different word for everything. Really, it’s the fact that “beer” sounds like “alus” in Lithuanian, “sor” in Hungarian and “Budweiser” in Oklahoman that makes life so damn confusing. Dan Quayle admitted as much when he apologized for his inability to converse with Latin…
A couple of years ago, some innovative technical genius created Gaydar, a key-chain device designed to electronically sort straights and gays, up to a distance of 40 feet. It beeps–or perhaps vibrates–when activated by the presence of someone else carrying one of the gadgets. But Dennis Vercher doesn’t need electronics…
Greenville Bar & Grill owner Terri Russo recoils when it’s suggested that her refurbished old bar (established in 1933) borders on upscale. Yet with its clean looks, white-tablecloth demeanor and 51-bottle wine list (called GBG Juice), it would be hard to call it anything else but a stab at a…
Peter Tarantino, who has been wandering around the Dallas restaurant scape (Flying Saucer, Caribbean Red, eccolo Ristorante and enoteca) since his Tarantino’s restaurant near Fair Park succumbed to plumbing offal some 18 months ago, says he will be the first tenant to go into the Davis Building on Main Street…
Margarita Ranch serves margaritas in more weird incarnations than congressmen come in. You can have them prepped with any tequila you want from a huge list, or you can try one of the Ranch’s special margaritas, which range from the cactus flower (tequila, lime and Tabasco) to the Cuba libre-impersonating…
It’s always risky hunting down Asian restaurants in strip malls. Either they’re bad, or more often, they’re so mind-numbingly inoffensive that you worry about falling asleep facedown in a puddle of panang curry. Much less often a killer Asian restaurant is discovered, in all of its searingly honest ethnicity, leaving…
Bistro Latino is a cave. The long narrow space is a hostel of darkness and a bungalow of noise. The dense carpet of diner gibberish and the impenetrable curtain of clangs and tinkles from flatware, glassware, dinnerware and tabletop spanks makes it impossible to tease out the background music in…
Enigma, that promiscuous streak of revery on Routh Street, appears to be no more. The disheveled building, scarred from too many visions (a pond near the front stoop, for example) halted in midstream, is locked up, and most of the odd furnishings, along with the sizable flock of nude sculptures…
A gentleman moderates all impolite thoughts and activities. Indeed, no less authority than Charles Darwin implied that self-control represents the highest form of moral culture–just the sort of statement that confuses the hell out of Baptists who emblazon their SUVs with Darwin-chomping fish. Who knew the progenitor of natural selection…
It’s hard to get a sense of what The Gulf Coast is trying to be. Maybe it’s a consignment store that serves free étouffée with the purchase of two pink flamingos. Or maybe it’s a fried seafood hutch that lets you leave behind all the stuff that was refused on…
Charles Givens isn’t worried. The Oklahoma City developer who specializes in office buildings, condominiums and retirement communities boasts that his Hotel ZaZa, taking shape near McKinney and Maple, will have a 72 percent occupancy rate when it opens in October. This despite a slump in the boutique hotel market, which…
It almost works as a riddle: A rare and expensive wine loses its value when opened, so collectors decant these items only in extraordinary circumstances. At a gala dinner in 1985, for example, The Mansion uncorked an 1870 Mouton Rothschild, then priced at $38,000. A year later, a Dallas-based distributor…
Thai restaurants in Dallas generally fall into two categories: mediocre and great. There isn’t space between the two designations to accommodate gradients. Maybe it’s the water. Maybe it’s the obsession with steaks and frozen margaritas. For some reason Dallas has, with few exceptions, a hell of a time giving birth…
Pei Wei (pronounced pay way) Asian Diner is a restaurant based on a fictitious Chinese chef. The menu says the young Pei Wei used to go to bed thinking of recipes from China, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan while living in Taiwan. Indeed, Pei Wei the restaurant is a mix of…
Old breweries don’t die, they just stay up late to feed barflies square meals. At least that’s what’s happening to the old Hoffbrau Steaks Brewery on Belt Line and Midway in Addison. It’s been taken over by a couple of Houston investors who plan to call it Duke’s Original Road…
Perfect Peking duck requires elaborate preparation. One must massage the carcass, stuff a bicycle pump in the stump where the bird’s head once resided, bloat the thing with air, coat it with honey and spices and hang it somewhere until the skin hardens. There’s more to the recipe, of course,…
