Other than a few odd moments of confrontation–Fred and Ginger bickering over pronunciation, Dan Quayle “correcting” a grade school kid’s spelling–the potato (sorry, Dan) enjoyed a relatively placid existence over the years. For example, through war and protest, boom and bust, the classic mashed potato recipe remained a dinner staple,…
Steel is the super-hard result of a hellish fusion of iron with carbon. It’s a curious name for a restaurant that seeks to stand out from the crowd of “Asian fusion” offerings popping up like Rogaine fuzz across the Dallas area. But then again, the name wasn’t selected to serve…
The word that invades the mind after visiting The Silver Room is disparity–or maybe it’s dissonance. This dynamic starts with the room itself, which started out as the defunct 8.0 in the Quadrangle and ended up as 8.0 bereft of charm, or maybe interior decorating. The Silver Room simultaneously flirts…
Denny’s hasn’t changed much, according to Bridgette Goode. Back in 1991, 18 members of a black youth group attending a civil-rights conference in San Jose, California, tried to enter a Denny’s restaurant. The staff asked them to pay in advance for food service and to pay a cover charge–must have…
Pet rocks died, as all pets eventually do–especially when they are just inanimate hunks of stone. Mood rings turned a permanent, dismal mauve. Leg warmers unraveled. The XFL, well, who really cares? All fads wind up their brief and pointless lives in landfills or antique malls or syndicated television. But…
Somehow, it’s incongruous to call a place serving American bulk cuisine levitated with Southwestern brushes The Abbey Texas Café. After all, abbeys were monasteries, and monasticism entails asceticism, or the practice of disciplined self-denial. This torment may include silence, a prohibition against private property, an embracing of bodily discomfort, poverty,…
Fishbowl, that hip “Sixties pan-Asian” noodle-wok-sushi works that subsumed the lounge once soldered to AquaKnox, the posh sea-flesh parlor created by chef Stephan Pyles and Michael Cox, has now swallowed AquaKnox itself. Whole. AquaKnox owner Carlson Restaurants Worldwide shuttered the restaurant earlier this month and is in the process of…
St. Patrick supposedly drove the snakes from Ireland many centuries ago. Naturally, Americans celebrate his feat by descending on bars and destroying brain cells en masse. It all makes sense, somehow. To do it up right, however, many celebrants spend part of the holiday in a pub. Of course, Dallas-area…
If there is one thing Suze is about, it’s romance. Not the frilly, why-does- everything-smell- like-a- lady’s-underwear- drawer kind of romance, but the quaint, cozy, Bob Villa rusticity kind. Suze is a quietly austere, softly lit, thoughtful sort of love story, the kind that lets you fill in the blanks…
After two years of serving pancakes, omelets, cheeseburgers, meat loaf, and liver and onions, Buttermilk Café, that old-style diner that steakhouse mogul Dale Wamstad launched with the III Forks Trading Post months after III Forks, has blown out its pilot light. “We don’t ever want to hear the word breakfast…
Troy Tilley, a bartender at Sneaky Pete’s in Lewisville, states flatly that patrons running a tab should pay a tip of 20 percent of the tab. Of course, he prefers that they pay cash. “Your higher-paying bar positions are when people buy one drink at a time,” he says. “They…
Does tipping the maÎtre d’ get you a better table? It works on television. Slip the maitre d’ a 20–or even some advice on cheap long-distance service–and voilà, you skip ahead 10 places in line, ahead of the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Modanos. Servers part and bow in servile…
Carson’s Palace is literally a megaplex: a huge adult entertainment game room with enough television screens (between 28 and 32, depending on which part of the press kit you read) to mush the brains of the entire population of Flower Mound. Carson’s not only sports a coat of arms with…
The amazing thing about Phil Romano’s abrupt move to ice We Oui was not that he did it so fast, but that he did it at all. Most operators, especially those with a creative streak as exuberant as Romano’s, tend to get so personally involved with their chef d’oeuvres that…
When German scientists discovered a direct link between smoking and cancer many years ago, anti-smoking advocate Adolf Hitler was determined to ban cigarettes from the Third Reich. Yet even Hitler, an absolute dictator willing to murder millions, couldn’t pass anti-smoking laws. What hope, then, does state Rep. Glen Maxey have…
George Bernard Shaw was an atheist, yet he observed Lent. Don’t scoff. He believed Lent a perfect occasion “for giving up reading other people’s books.” Every year at this time–between Ash Wednesday, when people empty ashtrays onto their foreheads, to Easter, when many Americans embark on their annual trek to…
You gotta love a dish that includes wet naps as dessert. Ribs are that kind of food, one that permits decent, churchgoing folks such as ourselves to behave like uncouth culinary heretics; a food that permits polite people to converse with brown rings around their mouths while spluttering chaw-hued spittle…
Perhaps the best thing to do when visiting Gershwin’s is have a drink. Actually, this is the best thing to do when visiting any restaurant, but it is particularly important at Gershwin’s because the bar is spacious, warm, and well-stocked. Plus, it has a big fish tank with fish that…
A big post card made its way into the Dallas Observer offices last week. On the front was a bright color photo of a Caribbean chicken salad with peanuts and tropical papaya. On the flip side was the recipe for the salad under the headline: “USA Peanuts…what fun tastes like.”…
The study of human behavior has come a long way since men of science read bumps on the head or measured the distance between a person’s eyes. Now, we inquire into environment or research the human brain. Yet for more than a thousand years, scholars have deliberately ignored the predictive…
You must admit, it’s an odd name for a steakhouse. Steakhouses are more apt to tout their hangar-sized wine cellars and rosters of fine red wines. But Keg Steakhouse & Bar is more than just a place to let red-meat juice moisten your chin while dribbles of Cabernet ruin your…
Rumors up and down Greenville Avenue have the Milkbar, Kim and Holly Forsythe’s quasi replica of the bar in A Clockwork Orange, in a life-threatening jammiwam. “No, we’re not closing at all,” scoffs Holly, who says she’s traced the rumor to a competitor up the street. Indeed, Forsythe boasts Milkbar…
