My first taste of North Texas was a nibble of Arlington. I was staying in a tract home in a neighborhood with far too many tricycles and souped-up Hyundais. I’m not sure if this was the cause, but I soon developed a potent thirst for wine. In Arlington, I soon…
When Citizen opened roughly four years ago, its mix of neo-Asian fusion with a traditional sushi bar threw off so much heat that it was nearly impossible to get near it on a weekend night. The bar area, with banks of white televisions (now converted to plasma screens) bolted onto…
There’s no sushi bar here. (But there is sushi.) There’s counter seating equipped with an expansive view of the square open kitchen. It’s like watching ballet, the daredevil kind with knives and flames. Orders come in, and chef-owner Seiji Wakabayashi ladles orange fluid into a saucepan. Another pan gets a…
Great things can disappear in an instant as some momentous burp rattles mankind and alters the face of history. Pompeii, a town southeast of Naples, Italy, built on a spur of prehistoric lava, is just one example. In A.D. 79, it was destroyed in a flash by a hard-driving, molten…
Royal Tokyo is a piece of history, forged on griddles and refined over seaweed strips, that reaches its crowning summit on a slab of creamy beef. This curious route began three decades ago. It was elaborate, fabricated by Japanese master carpenters and draped in garden architecture with bonsai trees, waterfalls…
Tracy Miller and Alice Cottrell believe their restaurant is haunted. They’ve heard stories from construction workers, toiling well into the wee hours, telling of eerie sounds humming through the spaces in the historic Boyd Hotel where their restaurant took shape after the pair operated a catering company for six years…
Some of us have peculiar habits. Some of us suffer under peculiar rules. Abstaining from wine with dinner is a peculiar habit. Dry is a peculiar rule. This was brought home to me on a recent visit to Coppell when I stepped into Siam Thai Cuisine, a tiny strip mall…
It covers some 22,745 acres, but its maximum depth is just 40 feet. Normal water clarity is murky, even turbid. Yet Lake Ray Hubbard is regarded as a swell recreational depot with lots of good fishing (bass, catfish, crappie) and sailing, though there are no camping areas, beaches or swimming…
Joseph Gutierriz’s inauguration into the kitchen was spiritual. And short. At age 5, he was shipped off to seminary where he learned to cook for monks. “In Spain, in Catholic families, when you have a son that is a priest, you have a safe gate to heaven,” he says. In…
It’s always an iffy proposition to wander into a dining room as desolate as a godforsaken rock formation. Sure, it could be an undiscovered sliver of raw sublimity, a hidden bit of dazzle. But it could also be a puff of culinary stench of such potency that it keeps diners…
Our range guide was a veteran of the first Gulf War, so it wasn’t hard to steer the conversation to the lingering mysteries of the sequel. Saddam? “Dead,” he said tersely. WMD’s? “Buried deep in the desert,” came his reply. The paltry resistance of the vaunted Republican Guard? Only a…
At the heart of Smith & Wollensky is this slogan: “A steak house to end all arguments.” This comes clipped from a headline over a 1997 New York Times S&W steak house review by critic Ruth Reichl. The piece centered on an annual argument in her family over three New…
Right now, it’s a ghost town. Not one born of death and abandonment, but of birth and anticipated growth. There are a few things: a children’s store, an Asian fusion restaurant called Café Beignet and a toy store. But more is on the way. Much more. Above the storefronts rest…
He pulls it out from a manila folder stuffed with other old photographs. “This is me,” says sushi evangelist Scott Melton, pointing to one of three boys in short-sleeved white shirts with slivers of black ties slicing across their surfaces. “It’s kind of Lee Harvey Oswaldish, isn’t it?” It was…
There are three of them in Dallas. Thai is one. Indian is another. And Italian. OK, there’s Chinese, but that’s an easy one to decipher: no Chinatown. The former are three types of cuisine that, with rare exceptions, stumble in Dallas. No matter who inspires the food or where they’re…
The first set arrived at our table riddled with little pockets of grease. Pools, really, shimmering gold, some shallow, some preposterously deep. Pappadam is like horribly scarred skin with creases and sharp ripples and craggy divots carved from an adolescent scourge. These flat, fried lentil flour discs from Southern India…
It’s rare that you see buffet spreads this enormous outside of places where slot bells provide the background music. But Osaka Steak & Grill’s all-you-can-eat Japanese terminal is big–aircraft carrier big. Get in there early before the dinner rush reaches its fever point, and you’ll discover a din of world…
Wine bars and Dallas don’t mix well, at least not as seamlessly as silicone and trial lawyers. A sweep through Dallas’ wine-bar experiments–Tony’s, Cork, Cru, the flight deck near the vestibule in Nick & Sam’s–reveals half-hearted execution or an emphasis on wine as fashion accessory. Maybe that’s why Mercy is…
Southlake is one of those formerly odd communities that had restrictive liquor laws. Now that they’ve been relaxed, some entrepreneurs are taking advantage in the new Town Square development in the heart of the town, a kind of shake-and-bake downtown for the bedroom community. Into the Glass is one of…
At first, veteran restaurateur Charlie Venis says Opa! is the Greek equivalent expression of hee-haw. “Well,” he corrects, “what it really means is ‘let’s enjoy life.’ Get excited.” The latter is what we did when our server shouted “Opa!” as he flicked his Bic above the saganaki, setting it ablaze…
Eat at Café Danielle and you’re forced to shop, or at least urged to browse. The space is divided into settings that come across like tradeshow booths. One nook is a hovel of Buddhas: heads, lotus seatings, fat jolly postures. There’s a case with Faberge egg replicas and a couple…
Authenticity is hard to acquire. The acquisition is especially difficult when the object of desire is a series of lush tropical volcanic bumps and coral atolls pimpling the South Pacific and you’re landlocked on a stretch of concrete and bricks near an overpass on the North Texas prairie. But never…
