More fascinating than the food and the thirst-quenching, electric-blue margaritas are the architecture and interior design at Blue Mesa. Both–at least at the Blue Mesa on Northwest Highway and the new Blue Mesa off the Dallas North Tollway in Plano–dazzle with unexpected little flourishes. The Northwest Highway installment has a…
The cafeteria at Molina High School in Dallas offers a Tex-Mex line, a pizza line, a basket lunch line serving such zoological anomalies as steak fingers, something called the country kitchen line and a vegetarian menu. At R.L. Turner High School in Carrollton, a bakery rolls out homemade pretzels, kolaches…
It’s hard to figure out exactly what Stratos is. The word sounds Greek, but it isn’t a Greek restaurant. The menu is packed with sushi, but it isn’t a Japanese restaurant. There’s a dance floor, but it isn’t exactly a club. The three televisions in the bar broadcast sports, but…
It was originally dubbed Buddha Bar, and the name was intended to signify a sense of serenity, a mode of contemplation, an evocation of composure. It’s not clear what the enlightened one would have thought of this. Maybe he would have tossed it into the same category as sex, which…
“I want to be a sustenance provider,” says restaurant operator Shannon Wynne, dousing any desire he might harbor to slip into the upper crust of the dining-out biz. Wynne says he’s spooked by the mid-to-upper levels, which suffered from dried-up expense accounts and a dismal tourist trade in the wake…
“It’s better to look good than to feel good.” The adage works in most social settings and perhaps the occasional funeral. The inverse works for most sporting events held in a stadium. But no matter how you play with the words–reversing them, putting an umlaut over the vowels, converting a…
In his classic book Into the Valley, John Hershey describes the fear that sweeps over a group of soldiers caught in an ambush. With the actions of men teetering between stunned confusion and outright panic comes the crucial moment between victory and defeat. All it takes, the author points out,…
Mico Rodriguez, the main brain behind the M Crowd Restaurant Group (Mi Cocina, Taco Diner) and the Restaurant Life (The Mercury, Mercury Grill, Citizen), has just bagged Taqueria Cañonita, the Mexican restaurant Stephan Pyles and Michael Cox developed before it was subsumed by Carlson Restaurants Worldwide along with Star Canyon…
On the surface, the most compelling reason to dine at Tabouli’s, a restaurant serving Middle Eastern fare, is the tent room. And if you dig deeper, it turns out to be the only reason. Not that the food is necessarily bad outside the confines of the tent (though it is…
Though born in New York, Billy the Kid was a New Mexico outlaw doing most of his treachery (he had been charged with 12 murders by the time he was 18) in and around Lincoln County, New Mexico. Lincoln County is also the home of Smokey Bear, at least according…
Though it may be sheepish wishful thinking to suggest it, the Dallas restaurant market appears to be locked in the straining grunts of a rebound. I say this because the city’s most hexed strip of asphalt (and paving bricks), McKinney Avenue, is making recovery noises. Sources say the space that…
Fondue is dangerous. The special forks are long and sharp with rippled tips that function almost like fishhook barbs, though not as effectively. After piercing cubes of beef or chicken or shrimp, the forks are plunged into hot oil or boiling broth, the moisture from the food exploding in a…
Daddy Jack Chaplin, the Dallas restaurateur who turned his back on Texas citizenship and hightailed it for Connecticut, just struck a deal with Tim Dorsey of Fairmount capital to bring more Daddy Jacks restaurants to the Dallas area. The deal, which calls for one Daddy Jacks restaurant each year over…
A couple of weeks ago, the Burning Question crew chanced to sit at a bar next to Ron Dawson, a pleasant 63-year-old gentleman…well, his head still whips around violently at the sight of an appealing pair of breasts, but otherwise he seemed proper enough. “The problem I’m beginning to realize,”…
In many ways, Perry’s is just another steakhouse. The steakhouse formula has been perfected for so long in the Dallas restaurant crucible that it seems any competent restaurateur can sleepwalk through the execution. Perry’s dubs itself a classic Dallas dinner house, which could mean several things, from Black-eyed Pea to…
Thirty or 50 or 100 years ago, Dallas resembled every other American city. Hotter, perhaps, overrun by Baptists and maybe a bit chagrined over that assassination thing, but otherwise pretty much the same: dining on standard Euro-American fare, with a few exotic dishes tossed in. Then Chinese foods hit the…
The temperance movement reappears in odd ways sometimes. Just ask Barry Adler and his business partner, Phillipe Naovri. In December, the pair opened Buddha Bar in the space near Lovers Lane and Inwood Road that once housed Marrakesh, Dallas’ only Moroccan grub-shoveler. But a couple of weeks ago, Adler and…
Scented Geranium suffers from an affliction that strikes restaurateuring neophytes and veterans alike: culinary inconsistency. Granted, getting what are often complicated dishes singing on the same note time and time again without fail is a tough thing to accomplish, especially on days when the kitchen staff hasn’t shown up or…
More than one person has tried to make a local wine and food journal fly in Dallas. There are even some bodies to testify to this. Remember the Dallas Food & Wine Journal launched in 1995? That big-format magazine lasted only two issues. But Mike Whitaker, who publishes The Link,…
Ed Bamberger, the one-time IBM public relations professional who transmogrified into a Dallas food writer pumping out prose for Dallas Home Design magazine, America Online/Digital City DFW and Where Dallas magazine, has traded his pen for a Cupid barb. Bamberger purchased the Dallas-Fort Worth rights to Single Gourmet (www.singlegourmetdfw.com), a…
Way back in grad school, the Burning Question crew devised a cunning plan to wrest free beer from our favorite nightspot. Our scheme involved weekly visits to the bar, befriending the owner and dating the waitresses–and it worked well. Indeed, even now, when we revisit our past, the DJ plays…
Norman Abdallah says it’s narcotic. He says it more than once during a short conversation, so it must be something he really believes. He has another restaurant concept with Fired Up Inc., the company he founded with fellow Brinker International alumnus Creed Ford, and he doesn’t say this about its…
