Over the last few years, regional cuisine has evolved beyond mere food. Today, the focus is less about what’s on the plate and more on “theme.” A cuisine is developed, primped, tweaked, tested, and cross-dressed with other regionally influenced grub until it becomes the basis for a restaurant concept. Then…
Dining at Hotel St. Germain is odd in a haunting, Ross Perot sort of way. While the space is rich and says all of the right things–historic elegance with an engaging personality derived from comfortable turn-of-the-century furnishings–little crazy-aunt-in-the-basement details and daughter’s-wedding-disrupted-by-Republican-operatives missteps crop up, making you wonder what the heck…
My first foray into Vietnamese cuisine was memorable not for the meal, but for the weather. The evening I visited a run-down storefront Vietnamese restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, it was 15 below zero, and sheets of ice covered the city with a hair-gel luster. And this restaurant’s idea of central…
As a representative for a New York book publisher several years ago, I spent a good deal of time traversing a few of the more scenically challenged states such as Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Illinois. Until I got my “Super 8 V.I.P. Club” card, I stayed in motels that…
There’s something about Joey’s that’s just slightly out of kilter, even a little manic. And in the two years since 24-year-old Joey Vallone–son of Houston restaurateur Tony Vallone–opened the place after raising an estimated $1.5 million in start-up capital on his own, the balance remains skewed. It’s not the round…
I don’t know what it takes to create perfect dining atmospherics. Something homey, perhaps, with lots of rich wood, rough-hewn stone, a roaring fire, fresh flowers, gauzy window treatments, and tables with thick padding so your elbows don’t get sore between courses. I do know, however, what it takes to…
“I’m going to have to get into this horse-racing thing,” an elderly woman chirped as she made her way from the betting window back to her table at Silks. “If for no other reason than to come here and enjoy all of this.” And that’s what you’ll find at Lone…
Aside from being situated at opposite ends of the hemisphere, it’s hard to imagine what Brazil and Texas have in common. All attempts to uncover harmonious congruence seem to put a gasket-blowing strain on credulity. Brazil is a geologically integrated nation with a web of rivers and tributaries spread over…
The thing I like most about Americans–about being an American–is that we alone among the world’s cultures really know how and what to eat. We consume food with speed, gusto, and purposeful inattention. For us, eating is nothing more than scheduled maintenance to be performed while immersed in other things…
Maybe grazing is best left to zebras or buffalo or $32 filets that were once West Texas cud chewers. I don’t know. But I remember in the mid-’80s when grazing became the hip way for the young and trendy to eat as well as label themselves gastronomically eclectic. And labeling…
California cuisine was first out of the chute. Then came New Orleans, Southwestern, and Florida. Florida? Yes. The Sunshine State, noted nationally for its European tourist eradication program, has entered the regional cuisine big leagues. Actually, it’s been there since the early ’90s, when it burst onto the scene with…
“Why not?” he fires back. Why not indeed? When you think about it, this response makes a lot of sense. But a lot of us still want to know why Avner Samuel moves around so doggone much. I mean, is he an insufferable prima donna who packs his sauce pans…
Value. It’s become a buzzword–True Value, Value Pac, value-added, Valujet, family values. What the heck does it mean, anyway? Going to a warehouse grocer and buying a pallet of off-brand “Cheerios?” Hocking your diamond navel ring to get a Lexus instead of a Chevy Cavalier? Does it mean cheap, good,…
“I like this place,” said a dining companion on one of my visits to Jungle Red. “It looks like, at the end of the day, you could just hose everything off and let it dry overnight. Don’t you wish you could do that in your house?” I’ve never actually thought…
You have to admit, the French are a pretty daffy bunch. Just when you thought socialism had gone the way of Pia Zadora feature films, the French gleefully gave it political mouth-to-mouth this June, filling the National Assembly and the prime minister’s post with Socialist driftwood. And don’t get me…
My first salmon-fishing expedition in the Pacific Ocean may never have happened if it weren’t for a black-market guide named Jeb. After hearing me and my friend reject a $100-per-person fee from a guide at a local bait shop, Jeb followed us to our car. “I’ll do it for fifty…
One thing you won’t find at Hedary’s Lebanese Oven & Grill is a self-conscious striving for minimalist assemblages of ingredients. Nor will you encounter “breakthrough” juxtapositions of native flavors from, say, El Paso and Uranus. What you will find is a menu that unapologetically adheres to Lebanese culinary traditions reaching…
Editor’s note: Mark Stuertz debuts this week as the Dallas Observer’s restaurant critic. He’s previously written for D magazine and several national wine publications. The question was meant to be a joke. I thought my server would notice the wink, detect the smugness. I thought he’d get it. Instead, he…
Everyone should have a failure strategy, and I believe I’ve developed a good one. In the event of a total professional and personal meltdown, I plan to survive by hanging out at La Madeleine eating mass quantities of their free bread and jam while reading this free publication. Dressed in…
When I was a kid, two events were truly special for my sister and me–eating at a steakhouse and staying overnight at a hotel. Often these situations coincided. When our family vacationed, my father might celebrate the occasion with that working-class ’70s emblem of aristocratic indulgence–the steak. And we kids,…
Pity the poor suburbanite, adrift in a sea of asphalt from which chain restaurants rise like barren islands. Though he has eateries aplenty to choose from, why bother, when the food they serve is manufactured somewhere in the Midwest and shipped to Plano, Carrollton, or Flower Mound in plastic baggies?…
An abbreviated version of a famous joke goes like this: After you die, how do you know whether you’ve gone to heaven or hell? When you go to the great banquet hall of the afterlife, if you’re greeted by the English while the French cook for you, it’s heaven; if…
