The most significant challenge in restaurateuring has little to do with fortunes big or small, lost or stolen. That comes later, maybe after décor. Café San Miguel has a deep blue marine bar with a porthole housing a metal star. Christmas lights are strung from the ceiling. The barstools look…
Kenny’s Wood Fired Grill is designed to resemble a 1940s Chicago-style chophouse serving New England-style seafood, pumping Uptown’s favorite mind-numbing spirit (Grey Goose) from frozen taps in a suburban location, pouring wine with French fries, hiding elegance behind self-promoting “artwork” and 30-something patrons wiggling through the room in low-rise jeans…
Deep Ellum in bright sunlight can be a downright alarming sight. There’s no hint of lurid, neon-streaked discord. Only silent brick structures, pitted by age, and a few lonely cars headed somewhere else. It looks like a small town in Illinois. Sitting down for lunch at Tarantino’s Deep Ellum, my…
Perhaps this is not intentional, but Cosmo Rouge Bistro & Lounge feels like The Black Lodge. You remember the Black Lodge? It was tucked in thick Pacific Northwest woods in a dream tucked in Twin Peaks. You remember Twin Peaks? Twin Peaks was the surreal David Lynch murder mystery television…
The opening act was almost comic. The setup: waiting at the sparsely attended bar for a dinner companion to arrive, ordering vodka martini up with a twist, “a martini, please.” The improv take: After searching for a couple minutes the bartender decides they’ve run out of Monopolowa. How ’bout Stoli?…
Sitting in Steve Fields Lobster Lounge is like being in a lava lamp. Not because of blobs floating and bumping to the muffled sounds of Jefferson Airplane, The Troggs or a Floyd fugue. (Right now a bar pianist is tinkling a rendition of Coldplay’s “The Scientist”–a solid entry in the…
“Do you think Dallas is ready for this?” Imagine Dallas’ most successful chef–an icon firmly embedded in television, cookbookery and Dallas cultural history–mulling such a question. But Stephan Pyles looks worried. His ceviche is languishing. It’s hard to discern the reasons, except that perhaps culinary adventurism hibernates during the holidays,…
If bound to commit one of the seven deadly sins, a trespasser might as well have a bit of fun while engaged in the act. Lust should be directed at, say, the Victoria’s Secret catalog, not the Sears girdle section. Best to spend sloth in front of a TV on…
To discover the essence of a restaurant, you often must probe beneath the covers and mine for subtexts. Do this with Café Japon, and what do you discover? A carnival of lips. Lips grace publicity materials. Lips part and loll on the Café Japon Web site. There they are, dabbed…
The demands of life force little trade-offs every day. Burgers and fries are far more appealing than a simple green salad, for example, but a constant diet of the all-American combo may transform those once-healthy arteries into grease traps. Even worse, it could turn you into a documentary film director…
Back in the day, after restaurants were ravaged by bursting equity market bubbles and brutal terrorists kicking in New York City’s architectural teeth, wine drinkers went downscale. Go-go ’90s expense accounts were pinched. Travel slowed to the speed of Web conferencing. Wine lists sloughed off the perpetually allocated cult cabs…
The focal point in Salum is a circa 1940s buffet captured at auction in New York. It is both an obstacle and a hem loosely defining a spacious portal spilling into the kitchen. This is not an open kitchen in the ordinary sense, where chefs can only be observed from…
Culinary terminology has slipped through the looking glass into that ambiguous place where a word means just what someone intends it to mean. For instance, some restaurants advertise “new American” cuisine, an imprecise catchall phrase referring to menus featuring, oh, French, Italian, Southwestern and whatever else the chef wishes to…
The Bronx is divided into wings. Walk into the vestibule and notice the bistro-ish dining nook off to the left with simple chairs and wooden tables that look like they absconded from the flea market in Canton. To the right is the bar. This is where booth benches are fashioned…
Near the end of our second visit to Randy White’s Hall of Fame Barbeque a guest at our table asked a pointed question: Why would a local football legend lend his name to such a place, and shouldn’t every hall of fame across the country write a stern “cease and…
It’s early in The French Room. It’s filled not with diners but with music plucked and bowed from a string quartet. A harpsichord joins the jam. Later, “Musette” by J.S. Bach is played. On a harp. The music does much to craft the rarefied ambiance. The music sets the pace…
Don’t call Vickery Park. It’s just a neighborhood tavern tucked alongside dressier venues on Henderson Avenue, after all. No need for reservations and, besides, the phone’s hidden in some back office. Hmmm–if a phone rings in an empty room, does it make a sound? “We never hear it,” staff members…
Sushi is a commodity, one with a vigor that shows no signs of dissipating. It has conquered strip malls, fast food and grocery stores. Sushi has come a long way since the days when eating raw fish and crunching the glass bead roe of smelt and flying fish seemed the…
On an October evening, James Winkler works a crowd of some two dozen mostly young, attractive professionals. The group sits in rapt attention as he evangelizes for a substance that is as intimidating and inscrutable as it is coveted: wine. They laugh at his anecdotes, such as the one involving…
There’s a scene in the football-bashing film North Dallas Forty in which a doltish offensive lineman sets out to meet some investors who plan to use his name on a chain of restaurants. Before leaving the clubhouse, he’s confronted by the comparatively brainy Nick Nolte, who christens the place “Joe…
t’s Thursday, October 13. Thank God it’s not Friday, because as luck would have it, we find ourselves in the Richardson Hotel. Richardson has beached itself on hard luck–the victim of popping tech bubbles. Instead of buzz, the Telecom Corridor is a hall of echoes. But help is coming. Accounting…
Food is the new whatever used to occupy the portion of our minds devoted to culture. Unfortunately, that implies a certain amount of the old “wine snob” mentality. Diners flashing authority in culinary matters expect to learn arcane details when scanning menus, and woe to chefs who fail to identify…
