It might seem that Tristan Simon, founder of Cuba Libre and Consilient Restaurants company, is getting a little megalomaniacal on his Henderson Street turf. First there’s Sense, the upscale bar he’s opening across from Cuba Libre in March with Bob’s Steak & Chop House founder Bob Sambol. Then a few…
Steve Kelly describes 2001 as a series of irresistible shocks smashing against a once-solid food-service industry. “We went like gangbusters last year,” recalls Salve’s executive chef. “Then this year the convention-center remodeling drove convention business away, then September 11, and then down, down, down.” It’s no wonder Kelly feels as…
Left in the hands of suit types, cuisine often fuses, blurs and finally melts into a stain on a spreadsheet, homogenized beyond recognition. At least that’s how it tastes sometimes, after some “hot” cuisine trend has been mainstreamed and sanded into milquetoast. It might not be fair to characterize Z’Tejas’…
If there was ever a year that bulged with ups and downs, ebb and flow, mood swings and yin-yang fluxes, 2001 is that year. Only instead of a series of peaks and valleys, 2001 was more like a time line of troughs with the summits sheared off, leaving depressions that…
Just as bachelor cooking makes liberal use of ketchup and fire, Irish cooking makes liberal use of beer. Certain foods are simmered or soaked in Guinness or ale to add interest to everything else, which is boiled. Trinity Hall, the Irish pub in Mockingbird Station, is no exception to this…
Movies are for popcorn, lots of yellow-oiled, oversalted puffed kernels in a bucket the size of a Freightliner with a side tank of Coke. And some Twizzlers and Goobers to chew on as the credits roll by while you try and figure out what the hell David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive…
Not long ago, chef Dominic Shipp and his wife, Stephanie Shipp, opened the Red Onion Bistro in Denton. It was an effort to bring sophisticated fare to that northern suburb, and it was mostly successful in its quest. But then the Shipps decided to move from their strip mall location…
The French always complicate things. From brandy to sparkling white wine to butter, everything they produce succumbs to regional designations. While Land O’ Lakes tastes the same whether dolloped on bread at the French Room or melted over Eggo waffles in the Burning Question crew test kitchen, France labels butters…
It’s been said that if you took all the broiled steaks served in Dallas restaurants on any given day and laid them end to end, you would have enough meat to pave all of Santiago Calatrava’s new Trinity River bridge designs and still have enough petite fillets to patch the…
If anyone has earned the right to label his craft “all peoples’ cuisine” (a proletarian twist on the tired “global fusion”), it is Avner Samuel. This culinary wizard has cooked his way around the globe with stops in Jerusalem, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Dallas and Boca Raton, Florida. As a…
A seismic wiggler is rippling through Deep Ellum. Not enough to crack the streets, but maybe enough to rustle the nose jewelry. Over the summer, the space once home to Mel’s on Main reopened as Main St. Sports Bar, a haunt that serves wings and other things that go well…
Not long ago, an article in The Wall Street Journal pronounced the era of dressing down for work dead. Uptight-and-starched was slowly creeping its way back into boardrooms and cubicles, the article assured. And it had evidence: A large custom shirtmaker noted a 12 percent uptick in white-shirt orders; a…
Donald Eugene Lytle looked at Americans long and hard, then grappled with our very souls, extracting a truth both frightening and self-evident. We complain constantly about our government, our bosses, traffic cops, editors or anyone else in authority. We are, according to Lytle, a bunch of independent-minded bastards. Yet instead…
Despite what many of us may think, or suspect anyway, former Voltaire executive chef George Papadopoulos is not relieved to be free of his Big D ties. In fact, he gets wistful when you bring up Dallas. “I loved it over there,” he says from somewhere in New York. “It…
What the film Pulp Fiction is to tersely cogent dialogue, Big Night is to food. Big food. Great food. Food assembled with painstaking and uncompromising joy. Big Night is a film where food stars as lyrical verse, the kind that seduces, inspires and casts off potent metaphors as it warms…
After a long search that included vetting, getting and bloodletting, Voltaire finally has found a new chef. He is chef Joseph Gutierriz, otherwise known as Chef Joseph. Chef Joseph trained at La Gastronome in the Basque region of France and Spain, and he’s plied his trade at such places as…
One fine day in the Big Apple, a restaurateur recognized New York Times food critic Eric Asimov scanning a menu. It was, in food-service industry terms, the equivalent of the moment before the landing craft hits the beach at Normandy–a brief and terrifying span between innocence and the unknown. In…
One of the most fascinating bits of Venezuelan trivia floating in cyberspace concerns ice cream. It seems an ice cream parlor in Merida, a semitropical city wedged between the highest peaks in the Venezuelan Andes, holds the world record for offering the most ice cream flavors. The shop serves some…
Big Shucks is a shack of torture. Not only do they make you stand in line to order food and beverages at the counter, they force you to remember every single item, from the gumbo to the full pound of steamed snow crab legs to the number of wine margaritas…
Former Fish restaurant chef Chris Svalesen is trying everything–anything–to bring cash flow into his 36 Degrees seafood restaurant. He’s opened The Net Result, his fresh seafood market attached to the restaurant, and he’s been serving dinner and Sunday brunch for at least a month now. Svalesen launched lunch service last…
Perhaps the modern measure of a city’s evolution, its maturity, its spastic lunges into sophistication, is the distinctiveness of its shopping mall food courts. Perhaps the days of greasy hung chow, fried chicken parts and bulletproof pizzas served in plastic baskets are waning. At least they are waning here, if…
Pastry chef David Brawley has rolled and caromed like a food-service pinball of late. First he cut loose from Phil and Janet Cobb’s Salve!. Then he made his way far up north to The Mercury, Mico Rodriguez’s flashy new restaurant in the Shops at Willow Bend. But that gig quickly…
