At one point or another, our political, moral and cultural leaders have all become concerned with the beer goggle effect. Former President George Bush referred to it in his inimitable fashion as “the vision thing.” The once great and now dead Jerry Garcia spoke of those with “two good eyes”…
Eat at Café Danielle and you’re forced to shop, or at least urged to browse. The space is divided into settings that come across like tradeshow booths. One nook is a hovel of Buddhas: heads, lotus seatings, fat jolly postures. There’s a case with Faberge egg replicas and a couple…
Fishbowl, the Pan-Asian restaurant on Knox Street developed by Carlson Restaurants Worldwide, was shut down suddenly this past Tuesday night. Sources say retailer Pottery Barn, just two doors down the street, will sweep into the space or install a new retail concept where sushi and sake once trod, though neither…
Jeffrey Yarbrough’s separation at birth from actor Edward Norton isn’t the only significant detachment in his life. He’s also split from his lucrative club business, which he characterizes as a distraction from his true calling. “My focus in my life is food,” he insists. “I have gotten sidetrack after sidetrack…
Authenticity is hard to acquire. The acquisition is especially difficult when the object of desire is a series of lush tropical volcanic bumps and coral atolls pimpling the South Pacific and you’re landlocked on a stretch of concrete and bricks near an overpass on the North Texas prairie. But never…
Ernie’s is a trip. But to where? Is it a trip back to a Dean Martin-Charo roast skit where the main attractions bob like anchovy-stuffed buoys in a gin lagoon? Or is it a timeless Vegas burp, skillfully outfitted with a Liberace henchwoman tinkling spent pop syrup on a stunted…
Restaurant concept development is difficult for diners to comprehend. People like Phil Romano appear to function solely from gut instinct followed by blunt execution. Then there’s Henderson Avenue czar Tristan Simon, who seems to germinate his concepts on a bed of meticulously plowed spreadsheets fertilized by heaps of financial and…
It’s curious that disgruntled foreigners always dismiss Americans as weak-willed and comfortable types likely to fold when threatened. Just why they confuse us with France, we’ll probably never know. Before characterizing Americans as soft and passive, terrorists and their ilk should first check out the brutal events dominating our culture:…
Few things are more quintessentially American than our ability to cast each and every individual into a compound so dense that it squanders uniqueness and identity. We stereotype Southerners as lazy and dim-witted–so incogitant, a professor of ours once said, that “whenever two Southern teams play football, there’s always some…
Orson Welles has managed to resuscitate his badly decomposed reputation and promise from the grave. Since etching himself in our collective memory as the butt of fat jokes and the intoner of the unforgettable line “we will serve no wine before its time” in television commercials for jug wines by…
Ernest Hemingway cut his adventurer’s teeth as a teen-age Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. The cut went deep. Just six days before his 19th birthday on July 8, 1918, Hemingway was hit by Austrian artillery fire, sustaining injuries to his knee and foot that led…
Restaurants burst from lots of divergent structures: old houses, offices, warehouses, dry cleaners, even factories. Sometimes the theme of the restaurant takes cues from its environment. The Old Mill Inn in Fair Park–built for the 1936 Texas Centennial and World’s Fair as an example of a modern flour mill–comes to…
It’s no secret that drinking can lead to daffiness, but so can abstention, especially the forced kind. February 20 marked the 70th anniversary of the congressional passage of the repeal of Prohibition. So to celebrate this momentous occasion, the Wine Institute has launched a yearlong celebration composed primarily of recollections…
Myths and legends are scattered with hybrids. They’re designed to frighten, fill with awe and serve as jobs programs for cinematic special effects artists. Freakish, these beasts. There’s the centaur, with the lower body of a horse and torso of a man. The Minotaur, the bastard child of King Minos…
Many years ago, we actually worked in television. Not cooking shows, although we spent some time in public television–the haven, prior to the Food Network, of culinary programming. Instead, we ended up working on college football, basketball and other such events. Now, think about this for a moment. The Food…
Breeding is a funny thing. Cross a dragon and a lion and you get Drálion. But what do you get if you pollinate iron with a little creative bookkeeping? Steel Restaurant & Lounge, at least if operator Khanh Dao’s partner Mike Chen is to be believed. Chen, who is suing…
It’s hard to arouse taste buds in a restaurant named after a bug, especially a large prehistoric specimen that incessantly engorges itself with mosquitoes that may or may not be swollen with human blood. Yet somehow this swift, darting fly fascinates. Is it its elegance, the deft darts it employs…
For the first time in its history, the Greater Dallas Restaurant Association endorsed a Dallas mayoral candidate. The GDRA tossed its heft behind Dallas City Councilwoman Mary Poss for mayor on the very day the restaurant smoking ban went into effect, March 1, and a day after a Dallas judge…
It’s hard to believe this downtown street-level dining room was once a seafood restaurant hailed by Esquire magazine as one of the nation’s best. This ringing praise occurred at a time when most Dallasites thought “Downtown” was the song that made Mrs. Miller famous. (No, not that Mrs. Miller; we…
Probably the only difference between a marriage and a business partnership is that business partners generally don’t get to see belly-button lint on the vanity or have the sheets fluffed over them after dinner at El Chico. But that’s the only difference. They both begin with a glint in the…
You understand, of course, the consequences of forwarding an alcohol-related topic to the Burning Question crew. We are experiential reporters, meaning we never simply ask experts for their input. Instead, we visit the sites, drink the drinks and suffer the nauseating aftereffects. Curiously, our sense of dedication and willingness to…
Red glamour is baffling. The restaurant Citizen sports a portrait of Chairman Mao, that lovable Chinese leader whose four-year orgy of state-sponsored terror, rape, cannibalism, torture and starvation, known as the “Great Leap Forward,” left untold millions dead. How is it that a Warhol portrait of Mao is considered cutting-edge…
