We confess: This week’s Burning Question reached us about, oh, eight months ago. Good idea, we thought at the time–but then we deleted it from our in-box by mistake. Fortunately, our editor kept a backup copy. Too bad he sent it the day our laptop fell from a second-story window,…
Il Mulino is the General George S. Patton of restaurants. Not because it is violently audacious or prances through Palermo and Messina–although it does flaunt langoustines from Sardinia–but because it is rife with a paradoxical snarl of highly calculated mannerisms and crudely whittled elegance bordering on caricature. Patton could be…
Chef Tony Gardizi is one of those wandering kitchen types. He’s piloted spatulas and whips at the Riviera, J. Pier in Terrell and the defunct Bali Bar, among others. Now he is executive chef of Guthrie’s, a restaurant fashioned in the former Rooster space by chef William Guthrie, who founded…
Dallas cares. It really does. Voters approved $3 million to fund an assistance center for the homeless. The city just can’t decide where to put the new facility, that’s all. In January, city officials asked organizations intent on feeding the hungry to confine their activities to the Day Resource Center,…
This is what former New York Times food editor Raymond Sokolov has to say about meat loaf: Meat loaf…is a kind of joke. In fact, I can think of two funny things about meat loaf right off the top of my head. One is an off-color parting wish you have…
Etiquette is a social minefield. Codes of conduct exist for just about every occasion in every subculture. At local bars, twentysomething guys know it’s unmanly to refuse a shot. You can’t really call yourself “Uptown” unless you belittle suburbanites (you know, those misguided people in comfortable, modern, inexpensive homes) on…
It used to be the Lighthouse Supper Club. The Lighthouse was a restaurant and bar on the shores of Lake Ray Hubbard. It aspired to be an old San Francisco-style dinner house. To that end, the restaurant included a lounge called “Club She.” Our Club She adventure included black hot…
Nancy Nichols, D magazine’s restaurant critic, despises the use of stars to rate restaurants. “There’s too much time between reviews, and it’s too hard to keep consistency,” she explains. “Not the restaurant’s consistency, but the entity handing out the stars. ” The rest of us depend on a symbol of…
Southlake has a big sky. There doesn’t seem to be much of a lake if you don’t count the water hazards at Timarron Country Club. And it isn’t really all that much south, at least from Dallas vantage points. But it does have a big sky. It also has intriguing…
Let’s pose a cosmic question: If you willingly jump among three jinxes, will they neutralize each other and spell fortune? Rick Stein seems to think so. Stein, former general manager of III Forks, has decided to thrust himself in the middle of a jinx trifecta: He’s opening a classic steak…
Fusion, whether it’s in musical, culinary or thermonuclear idioms, is a tedious term. It’s a sigh stimulant, a drowse inducer, a word that was forged in a quest for succinctness but instead plopped us into the middle of a muddy mealy mouth. Think of how many menus, in one way…
Jon Calabrese and Joe Hickey, the pair who spawned the twin venue Legal Grounds coffee bar (by day) and Savory restaurant (by night), are gestating triplets. In September, Calabrese and Hickey will launch Taste restaurant and State & Allen bar coupled with an urban market anchored by a common kitchen…
Tom Tom Noodle House recently debuted a low-carb menu whereby “every rice plate can be made low-carb by leaving out the rice,” kind of like low-carbing a baked potato by 86ing the spud. But rice-less rice plates weren’t enough to save the Preston Center location, which opened roughly a year…
Dallas has often been described as fickle, pretentious or something in between fickle and pretentious. We’re not certain about the correct word, but “Republican” seems to fit. People in this city simply find it difficult to break away from whichever pack they follow. Some won’t venture beyond LBJ, others refuse…
It’s like Oz’s wizard before the curtain is pulled: This picture, anchored at the end of a foggy-gray arching hallway, is a huge head glowing bright green, floating on a wall, tufts of hair reaching up into the air manically like flames stoked with ether. In another room rests an…
“I consider myself a tequila connoisseur,” says Agave Azul founder Zotico Reyes. “It’s the spirit of Mexico…the myth of it, the taste itself.” Reyes, a longtime Dallas-Fort Worth restaurant pro (La Margarita, Mi Cocina, Cozymel’s), has both Greek and Mexican heritage, which might explain his attraction to both the “spirit”…
It’s disconcerting to stroll into a shabby diner and be confronted by a Soviet military uniform near the kitchen. Disconcerting and, somehow, appetizing. This is how Taste of Europe whets. After all, there’s little in the scope of human history more fascinating than Russia, from its tyrannical tsars to its…
We are, generally speaking, a timid culture seeking vicarious means of adventure. There’s no need to look far for examples. When Robin Williams shouted “carpe diem,” Americans seized the opportunity to purchase T-shirts bearing the message–and that’s just one example. Metal playground fixtures? Too dangerous. A Mexican restaurant serving menudo?…
Brant Wood (not the Wood in Deep Ellum’s Trees) calls a portion of Café Brazil’s business day “deep night,” the wee-hour stretch when folks commune to work off whatever self-abuse they have inflicted for the evening. “We do as much business deep night as we do during the regular day…
There has never been a more cumbersome union than the matrimony between municipalities and sushi rolls. Yet the latter spread with bunny-like vigor, despite the mismatches. Sushi Boom in San Francisco has its San Francisco roll (spicy tuna and avocado). SuShi Ya in Chicago has its Chicago roll (shrimp tempura,…
It was plain after Jeffrey Yarbrough turned in his chopsticks that noodles had gone corporate. We have the names: Big Bowl, Pei Wei, Noodles & Company. Yarbrough, who launched his Dallas groundbreaking noodle shop Liberty years ago on Lower Greenville, tried to give the concept a boost by dropkicking it…
“Are you a G.I.?” asks the woman behind the counter after an order is put in for Rhine River’s currywurst. Currywurst is knackwurst with a mild curry-ketchup sauce slobbered over it. It’s impossible to take this description too literally. After depositing a knackwurst on the plate dusted with dried parsley,…
