It is well known that Bonny Doon Vineyard founder Randall Grahm has an uncommon approach to wine. To say that he marches to a different drummer is grossly short of the mark. Grahm marches to a Martian linguist employing smoke signals. While typical wine prattle includes descriptors like “delicate hints…
Sapristi! is Italian slang for surprise, or something like that. But what surprised me at this bistro and wine bar were the posters hanging on the wall. “They’re lithographs of the originals,” a manager said. And they don’t have much to do with bistro culture, at least not as far…
Soprano’s, that “AmerItalian” restaurant that Bruce Kaminski opened in February 2000 in Frisco in the former Gulf Coast Seafood & Steaks space with the help of galloping chef Marc Haines (of Fish, Cuba Libre, Sipango, North-South, etc.), was locked up April 24. Kaminski, owner of Longshots sports bar in Addison,…
On a Saturday evening at Green Papaya, glasses clink together and occasionally shatter. Doors creak open, allowing the sharp banter of pots and pans to spill from the kitchen. Voices blend into a consistent buzz, pierced by a bit of laughter here and there. Forks scrape, waiters call out, and…
City Café is one of those Dallas institutions that is perpetually in danger of laurel-resting, of desperately clinging to the vigor for which it was known in an earlier time. Back then, its reputation was established simply by serving up new American cuisine with the edges tweaked just a bit,…
When Phil Romano’s pick-up-joint-disguised-as-a-French Luby’s (also known as We Oui) went the way of all fleshpots, the supposition was that Romano would send his We Oui chef Nick Badovinus on an all-expenses paid recipe-collecting world vacation and then open a restaurant in the young chef’s name. But it’s not to…
Sometimes comparisons just don’t work. For example, New Englanders speak with grating accents just like Southerners. They contributed sports, literature, education and rebellion to the annals of American culture–again, just like the Old South. Of course, New England’s literary greats–Thoreau, Emerson and the like–overshadow Faulkner and his Yaknapa-something County or…
Puffs of acrid smoke plume from Teppo’s yakatori grill, a narrow metal cookery box covered with a bent and loose mesh grate. If you’re seated at the sushi bar near the grill, you get to watch the chef brush a diverse assortment of skewered animal parts with sauce and turn…
Ah, the glamorous life of a Dallas chef: the long hours, the stifling kitchens, the wicked pace of dinner rush, the competition. At least they get to wear cool outfits. In addition, every chef knows that in order to maintain the status of their restaurant, attract new customers or keep…
After more than a year of chasing investors around Dallas with fresh fish ideas, lauded ex-Fish chef Chris Svalesen has finally landed. On Venus. Svalesen plans to dramatically transform Shelly Dowdy’s “swank” Venus Steak House and Supper Club on Lemmon Avenue, shuttered earlier this year, into a seafood restaurant. Work…
Sometimes the Burning Question crew suspects that the editors wish us jail time, disfigurement, death or worse. It’s not that they necessarily hate us, mind you. They just have this thing about deadlines. More than once they’ve sent “goons” around to “teach us a lesson.” Fortunately, these goons are really…
It isn’t hard to see why Tom Ruggeri sought to move his 15-year-old restaurant from the nook on Routh Street and Cedar Springs to across the street in the Quadrangle. After all, now he has a circular drive for Mercedes Benzes, BMWs and Cadillacs to be parked in perpetuity. Under…
Fish restaurant, the nationally lauded downtown seafood spot that businessman Steven Upright and chef Chris Svalsen launched some four years ago in what was then the Paramount Hotel, is now a floater, done in by hot air. According to Upright, one of the three air conditioner compressors on the building’s…
In an old Warner Bros. cartoon, Daffy Duck ambles south of the border, knocks back a shot of tequila in a local saloon and stiffens suddenly, wide-eyed and pale–much like an unprepped George W. facing reporters without Daddy’s friends nearby. Tequila once served as a drink for the masses, powerful…
No one in the restaurant industry wears the “trendy” label without complaint. They scowl when they hear the term and quickly correct unwary types who direct the word at their establishments. Rock Gennaro, mâitre d’ at Samba Room, launched into a lengthy and impassioned denial when the Burning Question crew…
Somewhere in the dark corridors, behind the wood paneling, beyond the rows of mirrors framed in wood or brass, Bob’s Steak and Chop House must have hidden a couple of barrels of dining room testosterone. You can see the effects of hormonal excess everywhere. Bob’s reeks of culinary rutting gone…
Maybe he got tired of inhaling corks. Or maybe his liver joined a union and went on strike as he went from a sniff to a sip. At any rate, Dallas sommelier hotshot Daryl Beeson has cut back his involvement with Voltaire, a restaurant that has enough expensive wine to…
Dallas Texadelphia founder Tom Landis has a problem. It seems the original Texadelphia Philly cheese steak sandwich shop on Leonard Street is in the way of a boutique hotel that will allegedly go up on the property soon. “I think by summer there will be a 200-foot hole down there,”…
Every once in a while the Burning Question crew selects a topic so straightforward that we pursue a few minutes of effortless research and spend the rest of the weekend bowled over in a drunken stupor, participating in events we vaguely remember, thanking those responsible for Miranda rights. But we…
In a moment of clarity, the very late Frank Zappa pointed out that “you can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team or some nuclear weapons,” he continued, “but at the very least you…
It looks like a stage-prop fish market instead of something designed to dress up a restaurant. One whole corner of the bar at Sea Grill is a sloping bin filled with crushed ice. Imbedded in the ice is an assortment of sea life. Paving one slope is a batch of…
Joseph Tillotson, owner of the Barley House, Eastside Grill and Muddy Waters, has just signed a lease for space at 1525 Main Street, one of the oldest (circa 1890s) buildings in Dallas’ central business district. There Tillotson plans to launch The Metropolitan, a two-story, 5,000-square-foot restaurant and bar. “We’re going…
