Grand fusses are often made of restaurant makeovers. It doesn’t matter if improvements are little more than a splash of fresh paint and a reconfigured french fry, or a new karaoke salon and a whole new chicken-fried menu, the operator will squeeze all the publicity out of if he can,…
Sambuca is dark and narrow. This apparently is a requirement of jazz clubs. Jazz clubs must also be sultry, smoky and have the smell of stale spilled beer on concrete. Sambuca didn’t have much smoke, but it did have an aroma suspiciously similar to urinal deodorant cakes, which, when you…
It’s been going strong in Dallas since its inception in 1984. After 17 years of critical acclaim–and a kitchen run at various times by chefs David Holben and Lombardi Mare’s Tom Fleming, and now by former Hotel St. Germain chef Michael Marshall–The Riviera has successfully thrived in Dallas’ mercilessly competitive…
Sunday is the big day at Italian Cowboy, a sort of steak and pasta dojo dressed in operatic cowboy gear. On the Sabbath, Italian Cowboy holds what it calls lasagna mania, an all-you-can-eat flat-noodle frenzy that is perhaps the Italian version of the stampede. This mania kind of reminded me…
Felton is a tiny town in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, right in the thick of the redwoods. There’s little there to attract visitors except for the scenery and perhaps a secret spot known as the Garden of Eden Nude Beach on the banks of the San Lorenzo River. But a…
“Some individuals may have an allergic reaction to shellfish,” the Hurricane Grill menu warns. “The Hurricane is not responsible.” So puff up, blister, itch and swallow your medicine. But is the Hurricane responsible for the hurricane? Hurricanes are terrifyingly furtive beverages, unleashing their rum pestilence long after you’ve lost count…
That spot on McKinney Avenue and Monticello, the one that sizzled and popped with Dallas couture before someone pulled the plug on the glitterati frier, the one that elevated chef Gilbert Garza to prominence before he stepped down and escaped to a little neighborhood spot called Suze, has risen from…
Patrick Esquerré compares himself to God. Not in a megalomaniacal way but in an almost self-deprecating sense. Back in 1983, Esquerré successfully took an idea for a French bakery and café and multiplied it into more than 60 offspring sloughing off revenues topping $100 million. That first Le Madeleine was…
Arcodoro & Pomodoro is really little more than a Sardinian set of Siamese twins that provides elegant fine dining and casual but lustful meat-picking with pizza under one valet awning. Yet this genetic aberration’s dual personalities are as striking as they are similar. Everything on the menu is available in…
Sapristi! is Italian slang for surprise, or something like that. But what surprised me at this bistro and wine bar were the posters hanging on the wall. “They’re lithographs of the originals,” a manager said. And they don’t have much to do with bistro culture, at least not as far…
City Café is one of those Dallas institutions that is perpetually in danger of laurel-resting, of desperately clinging to the vigor for which it was known in an earlier time. Back then, its reputation was established simply by serving up new American cuisine with the edges tweaked just a bit,…
Puffs of acrid smoke plume from Teppo’s yakatori grill, a narrow metal cookery box covered with a bent and loose mesh grate. If you’re seated at the sushi bar near the grill, you get to watch the chef brush a diverse assortment of skewered animal parts with sauce and turn…
It isn’t hard to see why Tom Ruggeri sought to move his 15-year-old restaurant from the nook on Routh Street and Cedar Springs to across the street in the Quadrangle. After all, now he has a circular drive for Mercedes Benzes, BMWs and Cadillacs to be parked in perpetuity. Under…
Somewhere in the dark corridors, behind the wood paneling, beyond the rows of mirrors framed in wood or brass, Bob’s Steak and Chop House must have hidden a couple of barrels of dining room testosterone. You can see the effects of hormonal excess everywhere. Bob’s reeks of culinary rutting gone…
It looks like a stage-prop fish market instead of something designed to dress up a restaurant. One whole corner of the bar at Sea Grill is a sloping bin filled with crushed ice. Imbedded in the ice is an assortment of sea life. Paving one slope is a batch of…
Steel is the super-hard result of a hellish fusion of iron with carbon. It’s a curious name for a restaurant that seeks to stand out from the crowd of “Asian fusion” offerings popping up like Rogaine fuzz across the Dallas area. But then again, the name wasn’t selected to serve…
The word that invades the mind after visiting The Silver Room is disparity–or maybe it’s dissonance. This dynamic starts with the room itself, which started out as the defunct 8.0 in the Quadrangle and ended up as 8.0 bereft of charm, or maybe interior decorating. The Silver Room simultaneously flirts…
Somehow, it’s incongruous to call a place serving American bulk cuisine levitated with Southwestern brushes The Abbey Texas Café. After all, abbeys were monasteries, and monasticism entails asceticism, or the practice of disciplined self-denial. This torment may include silence, a prohibition against private property, an embracing of bodily discomfort, poverty,…
If there is one thing Suze is about, it’s romance. Not the frilly, why-does- everything-smell- like-a- lady’s-underwear- drawer kind of romance, but the quaint, cozy, Bob Villa rusticity kind. Suze is a quietly austere, softly lit, thoughtful sort of love story, the kind that lets you fill in the blanks…
Carson’s Palace is literally a megaplex: a huge adult entertainment game room with enough television screens (between 28 and 32, depending on which part of the press kit you read) to mush the brains of the entire population of Flower Mound. Carson’s not only sports a coat of arms with…
You gotta love a dish that includes wet naps as dessert. Ribs are that kind of food, one that permits decent, churchgoing folks such as ourselves to behave like uncouth culinary heretics; a food that permits polite people to converse with brown rings around their mouths while spluttering chaw-hued spittle…
Perhaps the best thing to do when visiting Gershwin’s is have a drink. Actually, this is the best thing to do when visiting any restaurant, but it is particularly important at Gershwin’s because the bar is spacious, warm, and well-stocked. Plus, it has a big fish tank with fish that…
