What the film Pulp Fiction is to tersely cogent dialogue, Big Night is to food. Big food. Great food. Food assembled with painstaking and uncompromising joy. Big Night is a film where food stars as lyrical verse, the kind that seduces, inspires and casts off potent metaphors as it warms…
One of the most fascinating bits of Venezuelan trivia floating in cyberspace concerns ice cream. It seems an ice cream parlor in Merida, a semitropical city wedged between the highest peaks in the Venezuelan Andes, holds the world record for offering the most ice cream flavors. The shop serves some…
Big Shucks is a shack of torture. Not only do they make you stand in line to order food and beverages at the counter, they force you to remember every single item, from the gumbo to the full pound of steamed snow crab legs to the number of wine margaritas…
Perhaps the modern measure of a city’s evolution, its maturity, its spastic lunges into sophistication, is the distinctiveness of its shopping mall food courts. Perhaps the days of greasy hung chow, fried chicken parts and bulletproof pizzas served in plastic baskets are waning. At least they are waning here, if…
Often, but not always, Indian food assumes the shades of warning signs and traffic cones. At Sitar Indian Cuisine, it’s the tandoori dishes that come out this way. Lamb chunks and chicken parts are bright orange, as if spray painted by some graffiti vandal. The tandoori is an Indian oven…
Damn. It’s frustrating to discover a restaurant’s signature dish spelled out on the front of the menu after you’ve trolled through a half-dozen or so mediocre dishes. But there it is, right on the plastic menu cover: “Half Shells Seafood Grill, Home of the Oyster Nacho.” Not that I know…
Pastazios bills itself as a parlor steeped in New York breeding. The menu boasts authentic Big Apple pies. The inside of the restaurant, dressed in diner-ish duds, doesn’t give anything away, but there are lots of New York profile photos, one of which prominently features the World Trade Center towers,…
It’s hard eating pasta with rippled Arnold’s thick Austrian accent warping “hasta la vista, baby” through your head. It’s hard to focus on the pasta, the crepes, the shrimp, the scaloppine, the one wall with wine bottles imbedded haphazardly into the plaster. It’s even hard to reconcile that wall with…
Mongo Man is a 9-foot “warrior mascot” who has the thankless job of traveling around to the various restaurants in the BD’s Mongolian Barbecue chain. That means Mongo Man has the unenviable task of frolicking around some 26 locations from Texas (Las Colinas, Plano) to Colorado, Illinois and Florida. Mongo…
The Bay Leaf could easily be just another one of those dark, strenuously hip Deep Ellum joints fashioned out of aging warehouse brick and smoky oil paintings. On certain nights it even has live jazz, tucked up front by the door. During non-live-music times, though, Bay Leaf jazz is like…
It’s hard to not think of Arthur’s as an icon of perseverance amid the unforgiving brutality of the Dallas restaurant scene. Owner Mohsen Heidari, in addition to grappling with the constant and typical tortures of employee turnover, spoilage, government inspectors, taxes and critics, has had to deal with asbestos, bad…
Chez Gerard is a crotchety old cottage born some 17 years ago on McKinney Avenue at a time when French cuisine spelled sophistication. The restaurant has changed little since then, and a French kiss might not smack of the sophistication it once did, but that doesn’t mean Chez Gerard fumbles…
Richard Chamberlain is the type of food pro who has a history studded with jewels. Starting with proletariat food training at El Centro College, Chamberlain went on to apprentice at the Mansion on Turtle Creek. He was credited with developing a cuisine christened American alpine cooking while in Aspen, was…
Zen den is a big deal. On a Monday evening when it isn’t even open for dining, a manager escorts groups of people through the passageway into the dimly lit room generously draped in gauzy curtains. “This was AquaKnox?” asks one zen den tourist in amazement. It’s hard to believe…
It didn’t take more than a couple of bites before dining at York St. got me thinking about Lloyd’s of London. Lloyd’s, founded in 1680, is the venerable insurer that was brought to the brink of ruin by asbestos litigation, among other things. It’s also the company that famously wrote…
It wasn’t too long ago that Frankie Carabetta was set to operate a McKinney Avenue sports bar with his name on it. That was when Tracie Barthlow, owner of Bridges Gourmet Coffee, was his business partner. But a bitter rift and a lawsuit forced an end to that partnership. Now…
That Rocco’s was once Highland Park Cleaners is not hard to imagine. This tiny hut could have been little else, save for a hotdog stand or one of those mailbox places that charges you double to ship fruitcakes at Christmas. It’s easy to imagine plastic bags stuffed with suits and…
It’s funny how people in Dallas refer to everything north of LBJ as some kind of untamed wilderness. They call it “way up north,” or “Oklahoma,” even the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But that’s just silly. Plano and its less civilized siblings Frisco and Allen aren’t populated simply with feral…
It’s not hard to stare across the turbid ripples of Lake Ray Hubbard and imagine romance. Lake Ray Hubbard spans 22,745 acres, so it looks like an ocean through a slightly sozzled night squint. And though Lake Ray reaches a maximum depth of only 40 feet, there is still plenty…
Sometimes Big Bowl isn’t big enough to fit all of the corn flakes that want to get in. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, they give you one of those flashing, vibrating duck calls that always seem to go off the second you get the bartender’s attention. This is unfortunate,…
If you’re a member of Dallas’ mildly xenophobic and snooty downtown demimonde, then the last thing you ever say when fishing for something to do is, “Let’s go to Frisco.” We’re not talking about the city by the bay, but the 33,000-strong and growing ‘burb in north, north Dallas, where…
I like Las Colinas. Some may think it sterile and static, but these are the shallow ones. How could you not love a 12,000-acre master-planned community that among other things is home to the world’s largest equestrian sculpture: a herd of bronze mustangs galloping across a granite stream? Las Colinas…
