Spike is a dwelling of odd contrasts, ones so striking that it’s a good bet they were unintentional, which makes them all the more delicious. On the surface, Spike is another in the long line of Dallas’ shallow nightclubs with pulsing music, lighting that requires bat sonar and shopworn chic…
The main concern was bones. Carp bones. Scrolling down the prolific menu at Shanghai Restaurant (brief menus and fortune cookies never appear at the same restaurant), I became curious about the red-cooked buffalo carp tail. A few menus here feature things like flounder cheeks. Monkfish liver is a popular entrant…
It’s hard to dine in a blur. Eating in a buzz is easy, and it’s not impossible to feed in a fluster. Chewing in a din can be annoying. But dining in a blur is a trudge. Dining in a blur is different from eating in the dark, where you…
Ten years ago Mediterraneo slipped into the ground level of a bank building in the farthest northern reaches of Dallas. My first visit was in 1996. It was for the birds. I gnawed on a dry-cured duck breast and avocado salad with mixed greens, shaved parmesan and Provençal vinaigrette. That…
Erraticism is underrated. Pathological restlessness isn’t a character flaw; it’s a gift, maybe even a mark of genius. Take the late Seymour Cray, the legendary supercomputer architect. Cray devoted his life to spinning miracles. Though his canvas was silicon and his medium sheer number-crunching fury, his supercomputers were nonetheless sculpted…
On the second visit we ended up next to the same car we slipped alongside on the first trip: a red Plymouth Sundance with Tweety Bird slip covers over the front buckets. This was weird: two Warner Bros. canaries leering out at me from a cheap MOPAR on two separate…
No municipality on earth is a better locale for a restaurant pushing backyard cuisine than Plano, bedroom community to the world. But what exactly is gourmet backyard cuisine? If my memory still serves correctly after years of alleged cabernet abuse, backyard cuisine once consisted mostly of Oscar Mayer tubes, Durkee…
It was the year of smoke. So many Dallas restaurant landmarks went up in the stuff in 2003, and so many Pall Malls and Partagas Churchills didn’t, at least not within restaurant walls. And walls will be the most crucial culinary consideration in Dallas from now on, thanks to the…
What is hip? Like a cube of lime Jell-O, hipness is hard to grasp without making a mess. Yet everybody craves this elusiveness, so much so they want to eat it, thinking it will impart some sort of penetrating insights. We all know where to get it, too: New York,…
It sounds easy, but operating a successful neighborhood restaurant is tough: ingratiating yourself with a cadre of regulars, serving decent food, enticing nomads from foreign neighborhoods and protecting the comfort zone you’ve created (never invite assassination attempts by pulling a menu staple after it’s become an icon). To understand the…
Flowing water is said to provoke soothing meditation, especially among those with feng shui (the art of furnishing a room to harmonize with its spiritual forces) on their dumbwaiters and incense residue on their lapels. Moving water has an almost-primordial appeal–aesthetic, psychological, physiological–perhaps hearkening back to the days before we…
McCormick & Schmick’s used to be a toy store: FAO Schwarz, that ages-old chain purveyor of toddler titillation. FAO was bled into anemia by Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us and is now suffering just as the season of shopping psychosis intrudes. This is the sort of pressure that popped FAO…
“Hi, my name is Arthur King. I’m one of the owners of Gingko Tree China Bistro in Flower Mound. We have been open since May 24, and we are very excited to be here. As far as information goes, we are a Chinese Restaurant…We have a lot of different menu…
Everywhere there are the fakes, the counterfeits, the phonies. They make their way to our wrists (my Rolex impersonation suffered band failure, fell to the pavement and was crushed by a real Toyota Corolla), our wallets (keep an eye on those new Andrew Jacksons) and our lips (please don’t bite…
Many things float: dead fish, wine corks, Ivory soap, Enron limited partnerships. Sometimes restaurants float, too–in Texas, no less. That’s the fascinating thing about The Wharf @ Bayview Marina, a bobbing house of “North Florida” cuisine on Lake Ray Hubbard. “We’re actually floating on the water,” says manager Gary Weaver…
Why is Continental cuisine so hard to kill off? Like badly cropped sideburns, it’s ugly. It tastes like an overachieving Swanson TV dinner might if it had loads of self-esteem. And it generally comes with music delivered by people who didn’t get over purple velour the first time around. Loosely…
Perhaps Lola owner Van Roberts operates on a different plane, maybe the kind derived from a salad where the porcinis are subbed with magic buttons. Whatever you make of his latest culinary plunge, The Tasting Room, his balance-sheet projections seem to emanate from a different dimension than those generated by…
One of the inverted glass bowl chandeliers hanging from the ceiling is busted. Not blemished like a chipped tooth, but damaged like a hockey player’s smile. It’s a natural, accidental impairment in a dining room packed with faux threadbare touches. The creamy walls are blotched with a crackle finish–fraudulent architectural…
Comic Jackie Mason once asked: “Jewish civilization is 6,000 years old, and Chinese civilization is 4,000 years old. So where did Jews eat on Sunday night for 2,000 years?” It’s a strange crossover, this Jewish love of Chinese cuisine. Does it stem from shared tastes for chicken soup, tea and…
There’s a virus infecting Deep Ellum. Not the mosquito-borne kind–this is a restaurant virus, one of temperance, sobriety and restraint. Symptoms range, but they all generate the same basic characteristics: dull names; utilitarian menus; simple furnishings; lousy ambience; street fronts inhospitable to lines of cars from Stuttgart and Bavaria; resourceful…
Saffron is the Bentley of the spice rack. The golden, rich and pungent powder rendered from the threadlike stigmas of the flowering crocus is the most expensive spice in the world. At various periods in history, this bouillabaisse staple has been worth much more than its weight in gold. This…
Like chardonnay, merlot is a wine that is simultaneously subjected to derision and gushing plaudits. While the masses lap it up, those with discriminating noses and fat wallets sneer at the stuff, even as they shell out thousands of dollars to prominently stuff examples from Pomerol or Saint-Emilion into their…
