Two days before Casa Del Lago opened in February 1999, chef-owner Hector Angeles was looking for something Italian to slip onto his menu, but he didn’t want pasta. He wanted something divergent, maybe twisted. He was stuck. “I saw a contest in a magazine about what you can create with…
A shokado is a type of bento box, a high-sided black container divided into four equal compartments into which tiny portions of meticulously crafted food are placed. Ino Japanese Bistro mimics the shokado bento, taking its minimal elegance to engaging extremes. Walls are bare and white, trimmed with dark dusty…
As a rescue effort, Fishbowl isn’t bad. In fact, this retro lounge fitted from the stuck-up bar affixed to the Stephan Pyles and Michael Cox’s AquaKnox would be a swell place to nibble and sip even if it weren’t next door to the hyper-upscale restaurant. What Fishbowl proves is that…
“You speak Hindi?” asked our server. Our eyes were glued to the television screen. Our mouths were chewing bits of lamb samosa ($3.95), delicious flaky fried pastry pockets jammed with ground lamb, cashews, cilantro, and onion. “No,” I said. “Then how you know?” he asked, waving his hand toward the…
Machu Picchu is Dallas’ first Peruvian restaurant. It’s named for a mysterious ancient Inca town set on a spectacular precipice nearly 8,000 feet above sea level on the eastern slopes of the Andes. The place was essentially unknown until an American archaeologist stumbled across it in 1911 under a blanket…
Maybe this is an evolution of some sort, the kind where the mutations and variations creep at such a slow pace that you barely notice. But Tramontana, a cozy little restaurant in Preston Center with the walls painted to look like the poster-infested bedroom of a café-cultured Francophile, is changing…
Make no mistake. A captivating veranda is a big deal in Dallas, not something to be sniffed at or choked on in the wake of Mercedes Benz exhaust. When you think about it, Dallas is perhaps the most unfriendly patio town in the world, outside of Grozny in Chechnya, or…
It’s hard not to like Z Café. Then again, like the sleepy forward coast of a comfortable marriage, it’s hard to like it without working at it. But you will put forth the effort, because Z, with its sloppily stained black tables, azure trim, black Zs plastered on the walls,…
Every now and then life hands you a perfect moment, one of those spaces of time when everything stops, turns beautifully epiphanic, and suddenly you find yourself babbling the goofy prose found in that Shirley MacLaine tree-climbing book. I have had a few perfect moments: watching the sun set in…
Thai food in Dallas is typically lumbering and uninteresting. The sauces are flabby, the textures tired, the flavors muddled. In this city, Thai cuisine lacks searingly distinct flavors or exotic subtlety. Tucked amid Addison’s swath of strip malls, Thai Orchid is one of the precious few Thai restaurants that skirts…
It’s hard to know what to make of Via Real, a restaurant that’s been around for roughly 15 years, including 10 years in Las Colinas. But it sure makes a lot of its “Mexican cuisine with Santa Fe style.” Santa Fe is known for its fiery food, torched with lots…
It’s hard to pinpoint the birth of the first chain theme or “eatertainment” restaurant. Was it Chuck E. Cheese or T.G.I. Friday’s? Maybe it was Bennigan’s. But this would only be possible if ferns and old signs could be considered objects of compelling amusement. No, it was Hard Rock Café,…
Voltaire is verbose — not the witty 18th-century writer and philosopher who penned Candide, but the restaurant dreamed up by radio mogul Scott Ginsburg after his original plans to build a hamburger joint for his kids were derailed. The servers like to talk. “Your chef tonight is a gentleman by…
I’m swearing off restaurant prognostication. Other than accurately predicting that Chuck Norris’ stogie lounge, Lone Wolf, symbolized the death knell of the cigar craze, every other prediction has been a bust. Last year, I confidently predicted (though, of course, not on the record) that the restaurant business in Dallas would…
Maybe it’s not surprising that gifted chef Avner Samuel, the man who single-handedly turned the word “peripatetic” into a cliché in Dallas, adopted the name he did for his global tapas restaurant. For Samuel, a compact and volatile Israeli, had the habit of never staying in one place for more…
What makes Thai cuisine such a tongue festival is the electrical intensity of the flavors, the stark textural contrasts, and the laser-like leanness of the ingredients. Sadly, far too few Thai or Thai-influenced restaurants pull this off. Most metroplex Thai excursions descend into plodding, viscous potpourris with only the occasional…
If you do one thing at Mel’s on Main, go to the restroom. Not that you may have a choice in the matter, especially after plunging headfirst into the horrid menu of “continental cuisine with an American flair.” Even if you don’t need to “go,” visit the john anyway, just…
Back in the early ’90s, Buick began a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to lure younger motorists into its fold of stodgy sedans. The bait was the newly revamped Skylark. One television ad featured California artist Ed Lister, who composed an abstract painting before the camera, inspired by the car’s odd sloping…
There were no sushi rolls on our table, and this drew attention. Well, maybe there was one: an untouched California roll stiffening on a small dish. It was ordered for the 4-year-old at our table, but she was more interested in the tuna sashimi, plucking thick strips from a bowl…
Exposure to a horny toad must make you garrulous. How else can you explain the incessant chatter of the servers at Horny Toad’s Cantina? They want to know what you think of the menu, how your food looks, how it tastes, if it’s still good after 30 minutes, whether you’re…
I’m not sure I understand the thinking behind Citizen, the new preciously hip Asian restaurant launched by the M Crowd Restaurant Group, the same folks who birthed Mi Cocina, The Mercury, Taco Diner, and Mainstream Fish House. The menu, another one of those Pan-Asian blends glued together with a little…
Question one: Why Abacus? Why name a cutting-edge restaurant for an ancient calculator made of wood, wire, and beads? Longtime Dallas chef Kent Rathbun says he and partner Robert Hoffman, a former Coca-Cola distributor, ruminated over and ran trademark searches on a long list of names before arriving at two…
