Ernie’s is a trip. But to where? Is it a trip back to a Dean Martin-Charo roast skit where the main attractions bob like anchovy-stuffed buoys in a gin lagoon? Or is it a timeless Vegas burp, skillfully outfitted with a Liberace henchwoman tinkling spent pop syrup on a stunted…
Restaurant concept development is difficult for diners to comprehend. People like Phil Romano appear to function solely from gut instinct followed by blunt execution. Then there’s Henderson Avenue czar Tristan Simon, who seems to germinate his concepts on a bed of meticulously plowed spreadsheets fertilized by heaps of financial and…
Orson Welles has managed to resuscitate his badly decomposed reputation and promise from the grave. Since etching himself in our collective memory as the butt of fat jokes and the intoner of the unforgettable line “we will serve no wine before its time” in television commercials for jug wines by…
Ernest Hemingway cut his adventurer’s teeth as a teen-age Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. The cut went deep. Just six days before his 19th birthday on July 8, 1918, Hemingway was hit by Austrian artillery fire, sustaining injuries to his knee and foot that led…
Restaurants burst from lots of divergent structures: old houses, offices, warehouses, dry cleaners, even factories. Sometimes the theme of the restaurant takes cues from its environment. The Old Mill Inn in Fair Park–built for the 1936 Texas Centennial and World’s Fair as an example of a modern flour mill–comes to…
Myths and legends are scattered with hybrids. They’re designed to frighten, fill with awe and serve as jobs programs for cinematic special effects artists. Freakish, these beasts. There’s the centaur, with the lower body of a horse and torso of a man. The Minotaur, the bastard child of King Minos…
It’s hard to arouse taste buds in a restaurant named after a bug, especially a large prehistoric specimen that incessantly engorges itself with mosquitoes that may or may not be swollen with human blood. Yet somehow this swift, darting fly fascinates. Is it its elegance, the deft darts it employs…
It’s hard to believe this downtown street-level dining room was once a seafood restaurant hailed by Esquire magazine as one of the nation’s best. This ringing praise occurred at a time when most Dallasites thought “Downtown” was the song that made Mrs. Miller famous. (No, not that Mrs. Miller; we…
Red glamour is baffling. The restaurant Citizen sports a portrait of Chairman Mao, that lovable Chinese leader whose four-year orgy of state-sponsored terror, rape, cannibalism, torture and starvation, known as the “Great Leap Forward,” left untold millions dead. How is it that a Warhol portrait of Mao is considered cutting-edge…
Chef David Burdett and Cameron Morris have been around for a while, creating little catering hybrids founded on comfort food with upscale touches. At Rooster, they carved a pioneering “new Southern” patch in the Dallas landscape. Then they took over Brent Place at Old City Park, crafting food in the…
Like virtually every Dallas restaurant that doesn’t deploy a platoon of white-coated servers who can say “excellent choice, sir” in 14 different languages including legalese, bureaucratese and NFL huddle-grunt, Maguire’s M Grill & Tap is riddled with televisions. It’s fortunate that we live in an age of relentless CNBC stock…
Though it was conceptually groundbreaking as it ushered in a fusion of tastes from Thailand, Korea, China, Laos, Malaysia, Vietnam and India under one roof, the orginal Liberty Noodles was mostly a bore. From the start the food was plodding, sloppy, indistinct and unworthy of a second glance. It didn’t…
Almost everything that can be done has been done to the sandwich, an innovation named after the fourth Earl of Sandwich from the town of Sandwich, a municipality in southeast England. It’s been injected with special sauce, prodded with deviled this and that, smeared with Jiff and fruit, frilled with…
Indian food has had a tough time here. The land of steaks as thick as phone books and spuds the size of VW Beetles is inhospitable to cuisine more complex than a T-bone. Stripped down to its basics, Indian grub incorporates some two dozen herbs and spices, including coconut, chilies,…
The really profound thing about 36 Degrees, longtime Dallas chef Chris Svalesen’s newest venture, is the appropriateness of the name. Not simply that the name represents the optimal holding temperature for fish, but also that it perhaps describes the number of stages Svalesen’s vision will pass through before it is…
Brewpubs have had a hard row in Dallas. When a measure passed the Texas Legislature in 1993 permitting the brewing and sale of beer at the same site, some 40 brewpubs popped up in Texas within just a few years, eight in Dallas alone. The corpses–Coppertank Brewing Co., Moon Under…
The numbers are startling, but maybe it’s only because of where we live. Judging by our contemporary fetishes of steak palaces, prime beef, Kobe beef burgers (who will be the first restaurateur to introduce a dry-aged prime sloppy joe?), pork chops that could fill a men’s club cleavage and rib…
In August, Voltaire closed. And that pretty much sums up the Dallas restaurant complexion for 2002. Voltaire’s death rattle served as a worn metaphor, a symbol of what was expected to happen but didn’t–the big bang that rattled the windows and agitated the lava lamp but left the infrastructure unfazed…
Why do the munchies that are served with belts of booze have to possess culinary panache? They don’t, or maybe shouldn’t. After all, such craft is ultimately pulverized into an alimentary ooze mere moments after creation and hustled through yards of plumbing. Sure, the same thing happens during a fine…
There’s a lot of indignant rant in the culture these days over the knee-jerk, Glock-click tendency of many of us to associate anything Italian with mobster chic–and maybe baked ziti. In April 2001, the American Italian Defense Association filed a lawsuit against the producers of the popular HBO series The…
Like the burger and onion ring, Tex-Mex has become a tavern staple, and it’s no surprise why. It’s salty, which generates the thirst that generates the cash from drink sales. This cuisine is highly absorptive, which means it serves as a stomach-lining hurdle: a bean-cheese-tortilla-salsa speed bump that keeps your…
Like most contemporary Asian outlets, Green Pepper is replete with high-tech touches, subtle though they are. Plastic chairs in black and yellow surround dark tables. Walls washed in subdued yellow hover over dark wallpaper wainscoting imbedded with Chinese characters. And Green Pepper has a motto: “We are a BYOB restaurant…and…
