According to the cafe’s menu, a Zaguán “is the elaborate entry-passage in the grand old colonial homes of Venezuela, Spain and Colombia.” This entryway is carefully carpeted with a pebble-stone mosaic, it adds. Indeed, the motto for this cafe is “a mosaic of tastes.” And Zaguán is that, as varied…
“Hole in the wall” is a sort of dining Holy Grail; the object of a fervent quest for hidden culinary riches dressed up like a Hee Haw extra. Like Rousseau’s noble savage, the true hole in the wall glimmers with irresistible romance and beats with the myth of primeval superiority…
Politicians have it easy. Television “journalists” such as Larry King and Katie Couric toss them softball questions, and no one expects an accurate response. Radicals like Rush and G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North dominate the supposedly liberal airwaves, limiting discourse to grunts of approval or disdain. Where 30 years…
Celebrity chef Stephan Pyles, who was recently tapped by Hotel ZaZa to oversee the development of its restaurant Dragonfly (a beast that feasts in-flight), has grabbed Crescent Court Executive Chef Jeff Moschetti to take hold of the kitchen. The California Culinary Academy graduate, who has also held positions at The…
“Miss America ate here.” This is a swell publicity claim for any restaurant, especially one planted among the sticks in a tiny town named for an itty-bitty tree with a fungus problem. Miss America combines all the things that make for good promo sizzle: beauty, talent and sex–or the lack…
Sometimes fresh seafood just isn’t enough to keep a restaurant afloat, even when the main course is dressed like a cowboy and the joint’s interior looks as if it were pilfered from a Sesame Street set. At least that’s what Phil Romano (Macaroni Grill, Eatzi’s, Fuddruckers, Cozymel’s) may think about…
The French have a saying, “vive la difference,” which basically means “we surrender” but is often translated as a celebration of the dissimilarities among people and cultures. Americans, for some reason, strive to eliminate perceived flaws and unique qualities from our consciousnesses. Accordingly, we try everything from plastic surgery to…
At this point on the dining timeline, Avanti Ristorante is perhaps better known for its longevity than its food. After all, more than a handful of restaurants execute its brand of Nor-Ital Mediterranean fare, often with better results. But Avanti has been doing it for 14 years; that’s a near…
Poor Caesar Barber. For the past 27 years, the cumbersome maintenance worker from New York tried only to meander harmlessly through life. But a gang of marketing toughs from McDonald’s and Burger King and other fast-food chains pummeled him daily with slogans. Teen-age hoodlums threatened to “super size” his orders…
Not long ago, Mud Bugs Cajun Café was known as the House of Voodoo, but the name was jettisoned swiftly, not long after it opened. You could see the scraps of plywood stacked in the rear from which the Mud Bugs signs were cut, painted orange and posted on the…
Venezia is a slice of institutional cafeteria ambiance done up in Italian red and green, with a heavy emphasis on the green. It has a counter up front and a dining room with tables covered in green and white checked tablecloths. An awning hangs over the semi-open kitchen with Christmas…
National prune breakfast month was in January. National egg salad week was April 12-16. National roast suckling pig day is December 18. Every scrap of kitchen fodder has a day or month devoted to it, from bicarbonate of soda (December 30) to cheese balls (April 17). So why shouldn’t Texas…
A tornado abruptly changed the course for Reata, the popular Fort Worth “cowboy cuisine” restaurant. In March 2000, the furious whirl ripped through Fort Worth, popping the windows out of the restaurant perched on the 35th floor of the Bank One Tower and flinging its furniture more than a mile…
A recent article on the Web titled “Pro Fishing is a Cash Cow” by James Swan, a media columnist for North American Hunter magazine, points out that there are more than 35 million sport fishermen (and fisherwomen?) in the United States, a number that trumps the golfer and tennis racketeer…
Most of us understand the concept of evil. We know from repeated prompting, for example, that a man who controls a nuclear arsenal, backs out of international accords, achieves power through dubious means and threatens other nations represents evil without question. Yet more than half of the voting population approves…
The noodle house was supposed to conquer the Dallas restaurant front, dotting it with shanties of twisting and slurping instead of fortresses of carving and chewing. Food pundits pointed to London and New York and Los Angeles, where noodle houses proliferate, and pronounced Dallas fit to breach this clique of…
Sometimes a good idea can smart right in the fly buttons. Just ask Sipango founder Ron Corcoran and his partner Eric Kimmel, founder of The Joint restaurant, publisher of the defunct Ouch magazine and international used rag hawker extraordinaire. Last spring, Corcoran and Kimmel had planned to open a hybrid…
Jeffrey Yarbrough (founder of Club Clearview and the new Deep Ellum club Open), the visionary entrepreneur who was first to tease Dallas with the noodle-house trend that never got traction, is set to open a bigger Dallas copy of Liberty Noodles, the pan-Asian noodle residence he opened in late 1997…
From the outset, this week’s Burning Question disturbed us. In days of yore, adventurers survived perilous tests of will and strength before reaching their destinations. Consider the travails of Xenophon and his 10,000, Beowulf, Ahab, Odysseus or George Clooney–invariably, members of such expeditions suffer some ill, whether brutally slaughtered by…
It’s hard to know when exactly you’ve come upon “a.” The sign says Abbotsford Court, a special-events facility, an indication that you’re about to enter a banquet space of some 15,000 square feet tucked behind Ferrari’s and Morton’s off Midway Road on a sea of Addison asphalt. But nothing denotes…
The Eskimo Cookbook has the following instructions for boiled owl: Take the feathers off. Clean owl and put in cooking pot with lots of water. Add salt to taste. The instructions for cooking a loon are even more succinct: Never cook a loon. Do not make loon soup. The book…
Here’s an idea for a great new “reality” program: Take a group of malleable–in other words, trendy–people and tell them to find an upscale restaurant in Dallas that shuns crème brûlée. Survivors will next scour Oak Lawn, Knox-Henderson and West Village in search of a place without a martini menu…
