t’s hard to know what to make of Jimmy Lu’s, so shrouded are its subtleties, so disguised are its flavors. Maybe disguised isn’t the right word, but I’m at a loss. I consulted the press kit, a stylish collection of tightly focused propaganda slipped into the sleeves of a glossy…
Thai Bistro’s maxim is “a true dining experience”; at least that’s what’s italicized on the front of the menu. I’m not sure what a true dining experience is, or even a false one. Perhaps the latter would include wax fruit, Velveeta, and veggie venison served in a karaoke bistro on…
It’s like a corral or a Ponderosa steakhouse. At Village Grill, you walk through the door and are immediately channeled down a walkway, like cattle, toward the ordering counter. Behind the counter is a large poster of the menu. There’s also a little decorative collage of wagon wheels and hay…
Tacky misses the point. The outside of the restaurant is painted red, the kind of crimson that occurs when you leave tomato sauce on top of a flame too long. Positioned at various points along the wall are Romanesque statues brushed with antiquing stain or maybe old clam sauce. Strings…
Maybe eating raw fish and raw sea-critter eggs is extreme, or at least it used to be in Dallas before sushi restaurants started popping up on the face of the metroplex like little red Clearasil targets. But what about fish? They have some pretty extreme dining habits too. Case in…
The warning sign came in the form of a beige Melmac plate with a floral design nuzzling the edge. It was hard to look at the faded hamachi (yellowtail), smoked salmon, and red maguro (tuna) stitched with milky strands of something and arranged over the plate, because it seemed so…
Spaghetti and meatballs. It’s the stereotypical Italian dish, and it’s ubiquitous. You can find it frozen, in cans made by chefs with names that sound like bathtub toys, or freeze-dried for hikers so that people who commune with horseflies, skip bathing for days on end, and dine in the dirt,…
Up north, where Coit performs thoroughfare intercourse with Arapaho, where dwarf trees are bred because shade trees would create a pool-clogging crisis, a huge banner flaps in the wind. It’s tethered to Ziziki’s, a little dining room with black and white ceramic floor tiles and teal awnings that look like…
There’s little that’s special or notable about PoPoLos Café. And that’s why it’s so special. The food isn’t particularly imaginative, but it’s mostly well prepared, and this is accomplished without pretension. The atmosphere is simple and clean without a hint of hauteur. That this restaurant could get back on its…
The thing you don’t want to do in a restaurant called We Oui is default to crass mode by playing double entendre with the name, especially in a Dallas brasserie with a menu that’s an American-French mutt. No. That would be like serving pork n’ beans at a wine tasting…
It’s like an Indo-Chinese revolving door, that space. Back in 1996 it was Saigon Savor. Then it was Saigon Bistro. As Saigon Bistro is how I remember the space. It seemed more elegant back then. That’s because it was. Carpet — or maybe it was big throw rugs — hugged…
The slapping pitter-patter thump of the tabla is contemplative. It’s soothing and eerie. And this is what they pipe through the sound system at Udipi Café, a restaurant in Richardson serving South Indian vegetarian cuisine. The tabla is coupled with flutes that rise and fall with the intensity of the…
It’s Saturday night, and Shelly Dowdy is gliding across the floor of her restaurant in a tight-fitting gown that envelops her Rubenesque form like an iguana skin. An animal-print wrap is slung around her waist. She looks scared. Venus Steakhouse & Supper Club is packed, and the American Cancer Society…
EuroTex Café is a racquetball court of a restaurant that echoes with Elgar instead of slaps of spherical rubber. Trickles of sound bounce off the walls too, from a fountain with four frogs leaking water from various orifices. EuroTex Café is a clean, fresh downtown lunch and breakfast spot serving…
It’s a hard thing, dining in an Ethiopian restaurant while armed only with cocktail napkins, because no matter how hard you try, sauce drippings and food tailings always manage to smudge your palms and clog the spaces between your fingers. Ethiopian food isn’t eaten with utensils. It’s pinched with torn…
La Valentina was by far the best eating experience we’d had in Cancun, though you might be thinking that isn’t saying much, as pirate ships are rarely repositories of culinary excellence.
It’s hard to gauge what kind of a mind would turn a restaurant rooftop into a forest. But Carrabba’s Italian Grill has done it, transforming the roofs on 16 of its restaurants into sloped gardens. Engineers brace the roof with steel beams and concrete slabs, dump roughly 90 tons of…
If there’s anything that can be said about Addison Circle, that fabricated suburban urban village that sprang up like a tax shelter around a huge blue metal sculpture composed of supine spindles, it’s that it breeds restaurants with a gerbil-like prolificacy. There’s Antonio Ristorante, Kampai Sushi & Grill, Avanti Euro…
There’s a banner outside of Red Onion Bistro in Denton making note of its “adventurous wine and beer list.” This is like pulling up to a men’s boutique and seeing an unfurled banner that says “adventurous leisure suits.” If you have to call out your daring sensibilities, you ain’t got…
You see the red horse everywhere, and not only on gas pumps. It’s on buildings. In parks. In shopping malls. And now it’s become a restaurant: one each in Dallas and Fort Worth. Folks rattle on with painful seriousness about this bit of iconography, about how it symbolizes Dallas and…
Excellent Seafood & Grill is an exercise in suburban utility. It’s Spartan, efficient, and loaded with functionality, the primary example being the $5.49 lunch specials. For a fin and four bits you can get blackened snapper with baked potato, teriyaki chicken on rice, or fried clam strips with French fries…
After tasting Pyramid Grill’s steak tartare, a huge mound of milky pink pulp shaped like a loaf of rye bread, I began to wonder: Why does so much of the tartare served in Dallas, no matter what its species, taste like something plumbed from a bedeviled little Underwood can? So…
