If this is the year of anything in Chinese zodiac parlance, it is the year of the disruptive tech rat, the upheaving cyber-pig, the transfiguring digital serpent commanding banks of fire-breathing servers. IPods and illicit file-sharing are pulverizing the recording industry. Google wire feeds and digital headline bundlers have transformed…
At one particular Thai restaurant in my neighborhood, I have endeavored for close to a decade to earn the approval of the hostess/waitress. The food is stellar and the seating cozy, but the lady (I’ll call her Thai Waitress) has officially written me off as a medium-spice wimp. Doesn’t help…
Dinner jazz. Tasty thought. Yet it never seems to take hold. Sure, there are the pianos in the steakhouses, the crooners in the bars gone smokeless, the odd guy on Wednesdays with the keyboard and the microchip section that spools out drum and bass emulations like so much warm Velveeta…
Don Ho is dead. He was laid low in mid-April by heart failure. He was 76. He was called Hawaii’s best ambassador. He was a Waikiki showroom headliner for 43 years. He hosted The Don Ho Show on ABC for two seasons. He sang “Tiny Bubbles.” Does Don Imus dare…
“Frisco’s first 4-star restaurant with a 3-star rating.” Chris Gangi says that’s a jab at The Dallas Morning News and its new restaurant rating system, which recently dispensed with awarding restaurants fractions of stars in favor of whole stars. The line appears on his Web site. Gangi thinks more of…
Jacket required. Tie recommended. No jeans. No shorts. No tennis shoes. The Mansion is not casual, not even the smart kind. But what’s this? “Y’all look at these at y’all’s convenience. Is this y’all’s first debut with our new chef?” The waiter is passing out menus. There’s been lots of…
When you stop by McCarty’s in Richardson—and you should—ask one of the regulars at the bar about the time a guy tried to make off with the stuffed and mounted wild boar’s head. There are two of the heads hung high in the back room of this wood-paneled Irish-themed restaurant/pub…
I would like to introduce you to a very special lady… What you’ll notice first—besides the menacing rebar in a support post near the man slicing grooves into a concrete slab with a huge saw outside Isabella’s French doors—is that the waiters don’t pretend to know more than they do…
Everyone says it’s the beef. It’s the cut. It’s the animal. It’s the grade. Sometimes it’s the broiler: all 1,800 degrees worth. At N9NE Steak House, the broiler is 1,200 degrees: “1200öF: We proudly serve prime aged steaks and chops,” reads the menu. From there the choices unravel: filet mignon…
Seafood is brain food” says the motto on the menu at Fish Express. Given the name of the place, an expectation of good fish served quickly would seem to be a no-brainer. Here, however, they have adopted the Amtrak model of “express.” Place an order at the walk-up counter on…
Grace Jones’ voice spills from the lounge and hovers over the table. These are the hazards of placing a loft lounge over your dining room. The rhythms of one hijack the cadence of the other, stirring up discordant stew. On another occasion it was even more explicit. Thumps from the…
What about the dinosaurs? This is often the question posed when science wrestles with God, when empirical evidence scrums with Scripture. The big bones are clearly in the ground, but Tyrannosaurus Rex is absent from the Bible—a huge reptilian omission for a book with a reptile clearly playing a starring…
Beau’s is like a temporarily rearranged living room, the kind you’d disassemble and neatly refit to absorb extras guests. Sure, its setting in a quarter of the Crescent Court lobby is elegant. The glass tables are thick, with an opaque appliqué on the bottom giving them a sandblasted look. There’s…
To say the service and pacing of courses at Le Rendezvous is leisurely is to make them sound too rushed. This newly reopened French place on the southwest corner of Royal Lane at Preston Road adheres to the classic continental style, meaning continents could shift a smidge in the time…
What’s most amazing about Little Katana, the Travis Street edition, isn’t the food, though some of it is astounding. The Asian bouillabaisse for instance, is as orange as a road hazard cone and hot enough to jiggle tonsils (more on this later). No, what’s most amazing is the Little Katana…
Indian cuisine is an unruly knot of temperaments. It’s not easy to tame. It’s even harder to unravel and understand once it is tamed. Take curry. It’s a simple word that has multiple meanings. It’s a fragrant leafy herb. It’s a paste composed of clarified butter and powerful spices. It’s…
Gourmands make their graves with their teeth. —French proverb Bijoux is for those who hate food—hate to be away from it, hate it when it’s irresistibly beautiful, hate the poisons it sends coursing through the veins, hate the scourge of its addiction and, most of all, hate themselves for loving…
Hearing that Deep Ellum Café is back in business in its original location at 2706 Elm St. is like finding out that a good old friend has moved back to the neighborhood. This was one of our favorite haunts in the late 1980s, back when Deep Ellum was coming into…
Behind the Geisha Steak and Sushi Lounge sushi bar is a sushi clock: ticktock, ticktock. Shrimp is two, octopus is three, salmon eggs (ikura) are five and so on. Behind the Geisha lounge bar are high-definition flat screens. The first quarter unwinds: ticktock, ticktock. “I’d be better if the Cowboys…
Hotel Lumen bills itself as an enlightened hotel. It “illuminates its sophisticated setting” with “light-themed” artwork and a “vibrant retro feel.” Enlightened. Illuminates. Lumen. A pattern blooms. Suddenly, a contrarian element cuts through the glow racket. Social, the “swanky” restaurant tucked in the bowels of the enlightened Lumen, is dark…
We would like CHIC from Barcelona to become a welcoming oasis in Dallas. We want people to think of Chic when they think of Barcelona. We want people to think of Barcelona when they think of CHIC. Thus reads the Chic from Barcelona “vision” statement, a piece of circular thinking…
They’re relics: Stephan Pyles’ bone-in cowboy rib eye and Dean Fearing’s lobster tacos. They cling to evolving menus like vestiges from a bygone era when Texas mattered. Southwestern cuisine is dead. It went out with a wheezy whimper. The city’s SW power trio—Dean Fearing, Stephan Pyles and Avner Samuel—who were…
