Food is the new whatever used to occupy the portion of our minds devoted to culture. Unfortunately, that implies a certain amount of the old “wine snob” mentality. Diners flashing authority in culinary matters expect to learn arcane details when scanning menus, and woe to chefs who fail to identify…
When the inaugural Savor Dallas event wrapped up last February, Jim White and co-founder Vicki Briley-White declared the thing successful. After all, some 4,000 people showed up for a two-day bender, along with dozens of local restaurants and hundreds of wineries. Yet glitches occurred: A registration area staffed by volunteers…
Self-styled “foodies” regularly fire off tedious monologues on the evils of processed foods and commercial farming. Personally, we think curbing outbreaks of scurvy is a reasonable payoff for all those crates of tasteless vegetables sitting in grocery bins. In any case, the Burning Question crew is more offended by popular…
Odd to open a restaurant named after a child’s card game. In the past, chef Chris Svalesen has been more succinct. “Fish” was the downtown restaurant that made him famous. He later went obscure, naming his next restaurant after a Fahrenheit measurement: Thirty-Six Degrees, the optimum temperature at which fresh…
It’s Saturday night in Eden, and the gods are angry. We’re sitting inside the small converted ranch house watching a restaurant in the midst of a serious meltdown. The air conditioning unit malfunctions. Butter melts on the plate, and our waitress, already frazzled, wipes damp wilting hair from her glistening…
Once a restaurateur reaches a certain level of success, he or she often branches out. It’s nothing unusual to see a second Monica’s pop up in the ‘burbs or another Mi Cocina open somewhere. Well perhaps Iris owner Susie Priore doesn’t understand the concept of local expansion. She’s teaming with…
Curb appeal is important in this city, or so we’re told. Gotta look good at the valet stand, so upwardly mobile guys lease well-appointed Beemers. Best to sign over a good chunk of credit to bartenders and waitstaff, too. Otherwise dates, colleagues or friends might discover you earn a paltry…
Here’s a prediction: Fuse will last as long as a lit fuse. But it won’t go out with a megaton cherry-bomb pop. It will go out with a pfffft. A dud. Then someone will try to salvage it and change the name to Gasket, or some other thing that can…
Dallas restaurants have plunged deeply into the effort to ease the anguish caused by Katrina. Behold Project Lagniappe (Lagniappe is a Creole expression for an unexpected gift). In large part spearheaded by Whit Meyers of the Entertainment Collaborative (Green Room, Jeroboam) and the Greater Dallas Restaurant Association, Lagniappe consists of…
Each year when we reexamine the people mixing cocktails around the city, a certain, shall we say, insecurity creeps into our minds. Thousands of bartenders work in Dallas and its surrounding ‘burbs and most pour a decent drink. By the time the fifth martini begins severing contact between brain cells…
Things aren’t always what they seem. Take, for example, Main Street Blues Room. At first glance it’s a rustic tin utility building more suited to storing old tractor parts than housing a restaurant. The name itself evokes lurid images of precarious dives, boozehounds slumped at the bar, sultry music and…
Never know when a craving for chicken tajine might strike, but just hang on. Rocky Boustani signed a deal to set up an upscale Moroccan restaurant called Tangerine in the space once occupied by Sipango. Expect mostly authentic cuisine with a few contemporary touches and a couple nods to the…
Investor Steve Hartnett is thinking in the round. And he’s thinking Grapevine. After all, Grapevine is equidistant between Dallas and Fort Worth. It has the Gaylord Texan resort. It’s accessible by steam locomotive (its name is Puffy). That’s why Hartnett, former partner in Consolidated Restaurant Operations (Cool River Café, III…
Just because you’re upscale doesn’t mean you can’t kitsch. Riccardi’s does it, with flair maybe, but it does it. Riccardi’s is tucked in the space that was once the elegantly flashy Mediterraneo, back in the day when the restaurant was going to be the Benz in the FoodStar restaurant group’s…
Some time back in the ’80s, college baseball players began donning “rally caps” late in losing games. Nothing magical, really, just regular ball caps twisted into bizarre shapes. We doubt there’s a statistical correlation between manhandled hats and come-from-behind victories. In fact, deep down most of us know spells designed…
Buzz past Manny’s Uptown Tex-Mex Restaurante during prime time on a Saturday night, and you’ll likely glimpse a chaotic scene. Hungry would-be diners mob the entry waiting for a table. They loiter in clusters on the lawn, bump elbows at the bar and mill about the patio. Sometimes people wait…
James Pintello was tending his usual Sunday night shift behind the bar at Sevy’s when he received a rather unusual phone call. Someone on the other line began quizzing him–full name, military service and so on. So the veteran bartender nipped the session and asked for a quick explanation. Don’t…
Nobu has a sake called Devil Killer. Not sure why this brew is branded a demon slayer, but a large slanted bottle of the stuff is $20. Maybe Satan is cheap. Maybe the prices would sever his carotid artery. Maybe Nobu is Hades for the penny pincher, which in a…
Chef Stephan Pyles views his life in increments of 10. His Routh Street Café stint ran for 10 years. Star Canyon hung for another decade. Now, after roughly five years traveling and consulting, Pyles is in the blocks for another 10-year sprint, or at least that’s how long his lease…
There’s an inspiring point in the Disney film Miracle, when hockey coach Kurt Russell lectures his team on moments, opportunities or something. We’ve pretty much memorized the speech. Naturally it came to mind when we first considered this week’s topic. The real Dallas; well, to solve that riddle would quickly…
Urban provincialism is an interesting thing. Over and over we hear people inside the loop dismiss anything north of LBJ or lodged in the mid-cities. Much more difficult, it seems, to navigate an unbending multi-lane highway than suffer the halting drive on Oak Lawn Avenue. So they miss out on…
The once-hip patio and lounge known as Republic shut down without warning a few weeks ago–you know that much, particularly if you banged on the doors for a while. Now Jason Quiroga, initial bar manager, reports that he and one of the original investors, Bill McCrorey, regained control of the…
