Cabo Grande has been pushing chicken this August. Sorry to be so late conveying this PR puffery (the flier picture of a leg and thigh is very yellow), but chicken (even when slow roasted with Southwestern seasonings for $7.95) is hard to get excited about. What is interesting about Cabo…
It didn’t take more than a couple of bites before dining at York St. got me thinking about Lloyd’s of London. Lloyd’s, founded in 1680, is the venerable insurer that was brought to the brink of ruin by asbestos litigation, among other things. It’s also the company that famously wrote…
It wasn’t too long ago that Frankie Carabetta was set to operate a McKinney Avenue sports bar with his name on it. That was when Tracie Barthlow, owner of Bridges Gourmet Coffee, was his business partner. But a bitter rift and a lawsuit forced an end to that partnership. Now…
That Rocco’s was once Highland Park Cleaners is not hard to imagine. This tiny hut could have been little else, save for a hotdog stand or one of those mailbox places that charges you double to ship fruitcakes at Christmas. It’s easy to imagine plastic bags stuffed with suits and…
There once was a place in Fort Worth’s Sundance Square called Ellington’s Southern Table. It wasn’t long after the place opened and it was mercilessly skewered by the reviewers (not us…we pricked it politely) that it became Ellington’s Chop House. After that, the name was edited down to Chop House,…
Here’s a riddle: Take away the fine dining establishments that define Dallas nightlife. Remove the bright clusters of familiar chain restaurants that enliven Plano, Lewisville and Frisco. Close all liquor stores in The Colony and board up Addison’s strip. Do all this and what will you have? Mull it over…
It’s funny how people in Dallas refer to everything north of LBJ as some kind of untamed wilderness. They call it “way up north,” or “Oklahoma,” even the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But that’s just silly. Plano and its less civilized siblings Frisco and Allen aren’t populated simply with feral…
Barring a sudden Ice Age or, less likely, a burst of energy by city inspectors, Dallas likely won’t see 36° in August. It looks like the month will come and go without the opening of seafood restaurant 36, chef Chris Svalesen’s restaurant named for the optimum holding temperature of fresh…
Sometimes in our daily lives we unwittingly explore the fuzzy boundaries between brutishness and sophistication. It’s a tricky path between refined and plebeian, really. Purchase a steel frame chair with a cheap canvas seat from Wal-Mart, and you’re just some slob from The Colony. Call the same piece a Bauhaus…
It’s not hard to stare across the turbid ripples of Lake Ray Hubbard and imagine romance. Lake Ray Hubbard spans 22,745 acres, so it looks like an ocean through a slightly sozzled night squint. And though Lake Ray reaches a maximum depth of only 40 feet, there is still plenty…
Italian Cowboy, the cartoonish Tex-Ital marvel at Spring Valley Road and Central Expressway, has conked out, or maybe pooped out. It seems Italian Cowboy owners Francesco and Jane Secchi, who also own Ferrari’s and Il Grano, noticed the premises was afflicted with the recurring odor of sewage since before the…
Several years ago Jeffrey Yarbrough thought up a wild idea for his wife’s 25th birthday. Anyone could reserve a table at some Dallas hot spot, he decided, but only a hardy few would dare brave the vast uncharted territories outside the metro area. So the owner of Club Clearview and…
Bistral Neighborhood Bistro & Bakery will shut down at the end of August, if it isn’t sold. If this doesn’t prove that McKinney Avenue is in the grips of a gustatory curse, then nothing will. Just this year, I count Mangia e Bevi, O’Dowd’s Little Dublin and now Bistral as…
It’s difficult to imagine a more important year in baseball annals than 1908. It was the year of “Merkle’s Boner,” which isn’t what you think it is. In an era when cocks woke people up in the morning, bungholes opened kegs, and dicks patrolled the streets, respectable men and women…
Sometimes Big Bowl isn’t big enough to fit all of the corn flakes that want to get in. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, they give you one of those flashing, vibrating duck calls that always seem to go off the second you get the bartender’s attention. This is unfortunate,…
If you’re a member of Dallas’ mildly xenophobic and snooty downtown demimonde, then the last thing you ever say when fishing for something to do is, “Let’s go to Frisco.” We’re not talking about the city by the bay, but the 33,000-strong and growing ‘burb in north, north Dallas, where…
Retro commercials on TV Land assure us of several critical things. A Coke, for example, tamed angry 1970s linebackers. Cartoon owls knew the answers to universal riddles, like the number of licks necessary to break through to the center of a Tootsie Pop. Most important, America’s seafood industry dredged only…
I like Las Colinas. Some may think it sterile and static, but these are the shallow ones. How could you not love a 12,000-acre master-planned community that among other things is home to the world’s largest equestrian sculpture: a herd of bronze mustangs galloping across a granite stream? Las Colinas…
The Crescent Court carcass of Phil Romano’s We Oui, his casual restaurant that was a little bit French and a little bit slutty, is poised to morph into an upscale casual New Orleans grubbery called Gumbo’s. But first the new concept owners, Austin-based Fired Up Inc., will have to tear…
Every time this country ends up with a Bush in the White House, several things most assuredly occur: The government inflicts some regrettable incident on Japan, the nation tumbles into a recession, a presidential pet writes a book, and everyone worries about the vice president’s ability to run things. We’re…
It didn’t take long for it to succumb to the McKinney Avenue virus. Or was it those debilitating stout trots? Whatever it was, O’Dowd’s Little Dublin appears to be on ice. Last week a simple sign on the door said as much, but it’s hard to pin down what happened…
Only a few weeks from the planned opening of their first restaurant in 1996, Texadelphia owners Brian Mitts and Tom Landis ran into a little problem. “We were in an old house, a pier-and-beam construction house,” Mitts recalls. An inspector looked at the foundation and called the owners together. “We…
