Before launching into this week’s topic we must pat ourselves on the back for a vaguely heroic act. Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, a man we presume to be New Zealand’s ambassador to Canada wound up in our beat-up Kia. Because our conversation focused on beer and American tastes in…
To discover the essence of a restaurant, you often must probe beneath the covers and mine for subtexts. Do this with Café Japon, and what do you discover? A carnival of lips. Lips grace publicity materials. Lips part and loll on the Café Japon Web site. There they are, dabbed…
The demands of life force little trade-offs every day. Burgers and fries are far more appealing than a simple green salad, for example, but a constant diet of the all-American combo may transform those once-healthy arteries into grease traps. Even worse, it could turn you into a documentary film director…
Back in the day, after restaurants were ravaged by bursting equity market bubbles and brutal terrorists kicking in New York City’s architectural teeth, wine drinkers went downscale. Go-go ’90s expense accounts were pinched. Travel slowed to the speed of Web conferencing. Wine lists sloughed off the perpetually allocated cult cabs…
The focal point in Salum is a circa 1940s buffet captured at auction in New York. It is both an obstacle and a hem loosely defining a spacious portal spilling into the kitchen. This is not an open kitchen in the ordinary sense, where chefs can only be observed from…
Hard to see what dry-aged prime steak and hand-thrown pizzas have in common, but there must be something. Maybe pizzerias are customizing steak house iceberg lettuce wedges with bone-in pepperoni. No matter. Tristan Simon has poached former Dallas Pappas Bros. Steakhouse GM Judd Fruia to shepherd the expansion of Consilient…
It takes more than just guts to stare down gambling’s finest in front of a national TV audience. In the common vernacular, it takes brass cojones or perhaps a Big Johnson. Derick “Tex” Barch must think so, anyway. While the veteran poker star was finishing third this summer in the…
Culinary terminology has slipped through the looking glass into that ambiguous place where a word means just what someone intends it to mean. For instance, some restaurants advertise “new American” cuisine, an imprecise catchall phrase referring to menus featuring, oh, French, Italian, Southwestern and whatever else the chef wishes to…
The Bronx is divided into wings. Walk into the vestibule and notice the bistro-ish dining nook off to the left with simple chairs and wooden tables that look like they absconded from the flea market in Canton. To the right is the bar. This is where booth benches are fashioned…
Former Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse CEO William L. Hyde Jr. is swapping broilers for rotisseries. Hyde, who resigned from his post of the then-89-unit steakhouse chain in late 2003, has teamed up with former City Grill (Atlanta) chef Roger Kaplan to license the Zea Woodfire Grill concept from a New Orleans…
Like the sirens of mythology, professional kitchens are diabolical fiends bent on destroying any human form lured into their realm. Think we’re being a tad dramatic? Early one evening several years ago, Marc Cassel and his team finished up preparations for dinner service at Star Canyon. Perfection or something near…
Near the end of our second visit to Randy White’s Hall of Fame Barbeque a guest at our table asked a pointed question: Why would a local football legend lend his name to such a place, and shouldn’t every hall of fame across the country write a stern “cease and…
It’s early in The French Room. It’s filled not with diners but with music plucked and bowed from a string quartet. A harpsichord joins the jam. Later, “Musette” by J.S. Bach is played. On a harp. The music does much to craft the rarefied ambiance. The music sets the pace…
Project Lagniappe (lagniappe is a Creole expression for an unexpected gift), the Katrina rehabilitation project spearheaded by the Greater Dallas Restaurant Association and Whit Meyers of the now-bankrupt Green Room and Jeroboam restaurants, is beginning to bear fruit. Through Deep Relief, the part of the project that allows displaced New…
Don’t call Vickery Park. It’s just a neighborhood tavern tucked alongside dressier venues on Henderson Avenue, after all. No need for reservations and, besides, the phone’s hidden in some back office. Hmmm–if a phone rings in an empty room, does it make a sound? “We never hear it,” staff members…
Once upon a time, Tristan Simon bought up the Barley House location, sketched out plans for a casual drinking spot serving pub fare called The Porch and set an opening date sometime toward the end of this year. But the usual delays kicked in, giving the Henderson Avenue impresario more…
If we could somehow bring bickering groups together and help them find common ground, would we end up with a perfect world? The difficulties are enormous. For instance, we asked Andrew Lostetter, a bartender at Sense and single malt Scotch aficionado, his opinion of the typical Dewar’s fan. “You think…
Sushi is a commodity, one with a vigor that shows no signs of dissipating. It has conquered strip malls, fast food and grocery stores. Sushi has come a long way since the days when eating raw fish and crunching the glass bead roe of smelt and flying fish seemed the…
On an October evening, James Winkler works a crowd of some two dozen mostly young, attractive professionals. The group sits in rapt attention as he evangelizes for a substance that is as intimidating and inscrutable as it is coveted: wine. They laugh at his anecdotes, such as the one involving…
There’s a scene in the football-bashing film North Dallas Forty in which a doltish offensive lineman sets out to meet some investors who plan to use his name on a chain of restaurants. Before leaving the clubhouse, he’s confronted by the comparatively brainy Nick Nolte, who christens the place “Joe…
t’s Thursday, October 13. Thank God it’s not Friday, because as luck would have it, we find ourselves in the Richardson Hotel. Richardson has beached itself on hard luck–the victim of popping tech bubbles. Instead of buzz, the Telecom Corridor is a hall of echoes. But help is coming. Accounting…
Mention gin, and people instantly respond. Often it’s with a disrespectful groan. Kenny Daniel, bartender at Primo’s, just shakes his head ruefully when you say the dreaded word. “The worst hangover I ever had was over gin,” he says. “Three days.” A woman by the name of Ashley, whom we…
