Il Mulino is the General George S. Patton of restaurants. Not because it is violently audacious or prances through Palermo and Messina–although it does flaunt langoustines from Sardinia–but because it is rife with a paradoxical snarl of highly calculated mannerisms and crudely whittled elegance bordering on caricature. Patton could be…
This is what former New York Times food editor Raymond Sokolov has to say about meat loaf: Meat loaf…is a kind of joke. In fact, I can think of two funny things about meat loaf right off the top of my head. One is an off-color parting wish you have…
It used to be the Lighthouse Supper Club. The Lighthouse was a restaurant and bar on the shores of Lake Ray Hubbard. It aspired to be an old San Francisco-style dinner house. To that end, the restaurant included a lounge called “Club She.” Our Club She adventure included black hot…
Southlake has a big sky. There doesn’t seem to be much of a lake if you don’t count the water hazards at Timarron Country Club. And it isn’t really all that much south, at least from Dallas vantage points. But it does have a big sky. It also has intriguing…
Fusion, whether it’s in musical, culinary or thermonuclear idioms, is a tedious term. It’s a sigh stimulant, a drowse inducer, a word that was forged in a quest for succinctness but instead plopped us into the middle of a muddy mealy mouth. Think of how many menus, in one way…
It’s like Oz’s wizard before the curtain is pulled: This picture, anchored at the end of a foggy-gray arching hallway, is a huge head glowing bright green, floating on a wall, tufts of hair reaching up into the air manically like flames stoked with ether. In another room rests an…
“I consider myself a tequila connoisseur,” says Agave Azul founder Zotico Reyes. “It’s the spirit of Mexico…the myth of it, the taste itself.” Reyes, a longtime Dallas-Fort Worth restaurant pro (La Margarita, Mi Cocina, Cozymel’s), has both Greek and Mexican heritage, which might explain his attraction to both the “spirit”…
It’s disconcerting to stroll into a shabby diner and be confronted by a Soviet military uniform near the kitchen. Disconcerting and, somehow, appetizing. This is how Taste of Europe whets. After all, there’s little in the scope of human history more fascinating than Russia, from its tyrannical tsars to its…
There has never been a more cumbersome union than the matrimony between municipalities and sushi rolls. Yet the latter spread with bunny-like vigor, despite the mismatches. Sushi Boom in San Francisco has its San Francisco roll (spicy tuna and avocado). SuShi Ya in Chicago has its Chicago roll (shrimp tempura,…
“Are you a G.I.?” asks the woman behind the counter after an order is put in for Rhine River’s currywurst. Currywurst is knackwurst with a mild curry-ketchup sauce slobbered over it. It’s impossible to take this description too literally. After depositing a knackwurst on the plate dusted with dried parsley,…
Here’s an experience worth its weight in foie gras: gnawing on bloody-as-hell steak in a garishly masculine steak house and not hearing a single note sung by Frank Sinatra. Or Tony Bennett. Or Nat King Cole. Skip Harry Connick Jr., too. Delete any croons from other packed rats as well,…
There are two ways to digest Django on the Parkway: with music or without music. Django must be consumed this way because Django entwines two personalities that come into relief only when the music is sifted out. This Addison venue, now thoroughly washed in burnt brick-red stucco substance on the…
Convenience is the crack of modern culture. It’s why the remote is the power metaphor of the tract castle and the mobile phone has displaced indoor plumbing as the critical necessity of existence. It’s why cash flows through the air (billions, watch your head) instead of going postal. It’s why…
New York magazine proclaimed it the new hanger. Is this a compliment? Hard to tell, especially when you consider ancestry. The hanger steak, a grainy beef cut that a flock of clever chefs nudged into tender meat with intense flavor, quickly landed on bistro menus. But its pedigree is not…
In the auto industry, dipping into the past for design cues has become a mania. Examples form a long string of oval headlights and fenders rounded into ripe hips or etched with sharp creases lifted from bygone eras: PT Cruiser, Ford GT, Mustang GT, Thunderbird, Chevy SSR, MINI Cooper. But…
Cars and dining go together like Botox and TV news anchors. Whole restaurant segments and a rash of clever inventions have been spawned from the marriage of food and motoring: diners, drive-ins, cup lids, drive-up windows, talking Jack heads, cup holders, probably even disposable diaper wipes (keep a tub in…
In a February article in the online magazine Slate, Columbia University Professor Duncan Watts exhumed the work of the late Princeton social psychologist Solomon Asch to explain what Watts called the Kerry cascade. The phenomenon, Watts says, is the strange dynamic by which Massachusetts Senator John Kerry rapidly swept to…
Forty-nine hundred McKinney Avenue has always had an identity problem. Does it really want to be Italian? Or more accurately, will we let it be Italian if it really is? Or is this spot next to a dry cleaner really never meant to be more than a hoagie deli with…
Spike is a dwelling of odd contrasts, ones so striking that it’s a good bet they were unintentional, which makes them all the more delicious. On the surface, Spike is another in the long line of Dallas’ shallow nightclubs with pulsing music, lighting that requires bat sonar and shopworn chic…
The main concern was bones. Carp bones. Scrolling down the prolific menu at Shanghai Restaurant (brief menus and fortune cookies never appear at the same restaurant), I became curious about the red-cooked buffalo carp tail. A few menus here feature things like flounder cheeks. Monkfish liver is a popular entrant…
It’s hard to dine in a blur. Eating in a buzz is easy, and it’s not impossible to feed in a fluster. Chewing in a din can be annoying. But dining in a blur is a trudge. Dining in a blur is different from eating in the dark, where you…
Ten years ago Mediterraneo slipped into the ground level of a bank building in the farthest northern reaches of Dallas. My first visit was in 1996. It was for the birds. I gnawed on a dry-cured duck breast and avocado salad with mixed greens, shaved parmesan and Provençal vinaigrette. That…
