The front door of Samui Thai Cuisine is a fascinating contraption. This is a good sign for a restaurant, because if the front door is compelling enough to stop you and invite you to fiddle with it, think of what the food must be like. The huge 500-pound red oak…
Ajiya manager and sushi chef Ray Lin stands behind the sushi bar and slaps a flounder down onto the cutting board. It’s an ugly fish, like a mutant beetle that impels itself via belly flops, the kind of insect you might find under a rock or a pile of rotten…
Mignon postures as a Yankee’s notion of Paris during the ’60s: Audrey Hepburn, Catherine Deneuve, hip American jazz, and pill-bug Citrons that would look way cool in 21st-century Plano if they didn’t have the reliability and durability of communist-bloc concrete. Just portside of the hostess stand, above a cabinet that…
The best thing about India Palace, aside from some of the food, is that the press kit contains a sheet of “frequently asked questions,” or FAQs in contemporary parlance. No fooling. There’s this question about owner Pardeep Sharma: Q: Is Mr. Sharma from India? A: Mr. Pardeep Sharma is an…
Maybe I’m dim, but I recently found myself doing endless Central Expressway service-road laps–not to outrun the white Ford pickup I cut off exiting onto Campbell, but to find Rasoi, an Indian restaurant hugging Central Expressway. It’s not that the preparations weren’t in place. I had the address. I had…
If there’s one thing Caribbean Red does with exhausting ardor, it’s play with its name, at least the latter part of it. Stroll into the place, under the blazing scarlet neon sign, past the little vestibule strewn with litter, and you’ll enter an expansive bar-lounge-dining-room hybrid so saturated in hues…
Will it slump or bump? Will we be dining on caviar and burping through silk hankies, or chewing Velveeta sandwiches and picking our incisors with plastic straws? The pessimists are getting delirious. The heralds are all there. Alan Greenspan failed to cut interest rates. Gas costs more than a pound…
Taqueria Cañonita’s publicity propaganda makes a lot of the fact that this superstar taqueria was hatched by Dallas star chef Stephan Pyles and his younger sister Alena. The blurbs tell how the pair developed the restaurant over the course of 10 or so years during many trips to Mexico, where…
If nothing else, Rear Window is a view or, rather, a collection of little views tucked away in portals wrought into the interior architecture. The effect is handsome, cozy, plush, and off-center. Rear Window is neatly divided into two sections–restaurant and bar–separated by a wood-paneled wall harboring a number of…
What does a daringly beautiful and sleek lounge do when it wants to evolve beyond watering-hole food? It sautés quail. We ordered Zúbar’s sautéed quail with new potatoes and asparagus, and we threw the kitchen off its footing. The chef made an emergency visit to our table and explained the…
It’s difficult to decide what to like best about Big Buck Brewery & Steakhouse. Is it the 360-degree jet-black audio speakers that look like charred beehives hanging from the ceiling? Or is it the Big Buck urinals? The latter, a steakhouse innovation soon to be copied in every segment of…
Ten minutes since arrival. Chips. We are swimming in chips. Two large baskets. And it’s taken 10 minutes to get these. They are crisp, well salted, and without that pubescent facial sheen that makes you feel as though you’re about to eat scraps of Southwestern-style no-wax flooring. Each basket is…
One good thing about The Ranch House is that if it weren’t for Interstate 30 just a few yards away and Lake Ray Hubbard (which is really just a gully with big hips) nearby, you’d think you really were on a ranch. And I’m not necessarily talking about the décor,…
Whit Meyers says the last thing he wanted was a shiny new penny, and he didn’t get it. Jeroboam, the new dining spot he and his partners in the Entertainment Collaborative developed in the Kirby Building, is a little clumsy, a bold portrayal of frays. Yet this is perhaps the…
It’s cold on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, but it’s sunny. It’s only a few days before the holiday season kicks in for real, before the busiest travel weekend chokes the freeways and confounds Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, before retailers grin and brace themselves for the certain onslaught of prosperity-induced holiday…
Frankie’s Sports Bar and Grill is a typical picture-tube-studded suds dispenser with a pool table, a smattering of video games, a few gruff bartenders, and a rec-room-like atmosphere with a sunken dining area. What isn’t so typical about this sports bar is that it has valet service (which is just…
I’m assuming the thing that is so thrilling about opening a Mongolian grill is that it’s dirt cheap to operate and has fat margins. There’s a specified roster of ingredients to stock and prep, labor is limited to drink-fetchers, a busboy, and a spatula swashbuckler who hovers over a griddle…
The interesting thing about Baja California Grill is that it was never meant to be named after that tendril of Mexican desert jutting out of the end of California. It was supposed to be called Hotel California Grill. But this got the panties of the band The Eagles in an…
What’s most surprising about Thai Tango is not the food, or the décor, or how snazzy the logo looks in lights illuminating its own little corner of a strip mall still under construction. It’s how far the place is from Dallas. Compost heaps and dung berms aside, when I think…
Sugarcane is rampant in Cuba. The primary agricultural commodity in that country has, over the years, pushed other vegetation out of existence. Land once covered with palm and banana trees is devoted to the succulent grass. Sugarcane is the basis of that most Caribbean of spirits, rum, which in turn…
A piece inserted into the trifold menu at The Prison in McKinney says that the circa-1880, three-story building was designed by architect F.E. Ruffini, crafter of numerous late 19th century public buildings in Texas. The blurb describes the Collin County prison as a “high Victorian Italianate structure with bracketed cornices…
Noodles are invading Dallas. Finally. Sort of. Since Liberty opened a couple of years ago, those in the know were expecting noodle houses–spots plying hybrid noodle dishes from all over Asia–to limply blanket the city with their tasty, cheap, and allegedly healthy culinary fibers. It didn’t happen. Perhaps it’s because…
