Caviar is the lusty ghost hovering around Marty’s Bistro, the full-service restaurant that grew out of the 59-year-old wine and gourmet food shop. And a rare ghost it must be. The left flap of the menu is riddled with explicit, blown-up color glossies of the stuff: a piece of toast…
Italian cuisine has had a rough row to hoe in Dallas. Either it’s mostly mediocre, or it’s so expensive that it’s hard to digest more than on a monthly basis without rupturing something valuable. That means there’s a culinary niche for the daring to exploit, a ripe market for someone…
Beau Nash is a Crescent Court bauble, a patinated little room enclosed in glass and attached to a stylish bar planked with marble and squirted with brass. Tightly arranged works of art embroider the walls. Requisite white cloths hang from the tables. The main dining room, walled on one side…
For a while, it was kingfish. The Dallas Morning News drooled. D magazine ogled. Esquire magazine named it the best seafood restaurant in the country in 1997. When chef Chris Svalesen and businessman Steven Upright opened Fish (tagged “an upscale seafood restaurant”) in the Paramount Hotel in late 1996, they…
Geode is a restaurant I wanted to like. It’s got guts and lineage, after all. The interior is clean and crisp, with modifications that only slightly deviate from the innards it inherited from Bistral, the casual American bistro that was installed in this McKinney Avenue space by Dallas-based Richmont Corp…
There’s a sight at Lobster Ranch I can’t seem to get out of my head. It’s in the lobster tank, which is behind a display case where other live lobsters crawl tentatively around crushed ice like Raid-misted mantises and huge North Atlantic salmon–silvery with tails that curl like scissors-scraped ribbon–are…
You wonder how long it can last. It’s tempting to put bets on it. But Paris Vendôme is a scene–a scene in a way that only Dallas can precipitate, one swollen from steroids or at least creatine. Its West Village quarters are perpetually surrounded by Lexuses, Beemers, Mercedes, Porsches and…
It feels like an old neighborhood nightclub in an aging industrial city or maybe New York, one hollowed out of the ground like a gopher den. The ceilings are low. The light is scant. And while it doesn’t have much in the way of coffin-nail clouds on account of political…
9 Fish is difficult. Not because the food isn’t good–it’s great–but because this esoteric restaurant is so infuriatingly remote, hidden deep in the monotonous bedroom community wilderness. Shoved way up in Frisco, on the leading edge of North Texas’ metastasizing strip-mall incursion, 9 Fish demands you traverse Dallas’ most notoriously…
The brothel burgundy that drenched everything–including the sagging velvet curtains–has been stripped away. The acoustical ceiling has been blown out and replaced by a glossy surface, recessed lighting and crystal chandeliers. Plus, there’s more window real estate now, so you can actually see the Dallas skyline instead of just a…
Chef Joseph Maher insists the color that drenches his North Dallas restaurant is not orange. “Actually, it’s papaya,” he corrects. “Papaya is my favorite fruit.” Whatever the hue, the textured color soaks Mirabelle’s walls, trim and, clumsily, the ceiling acoustical tiles. There’s a novel relationship between color and fruit swirling…
It’s difficult to approach a restaurant transplant like Roy’s with a whole lot of hope and without a whole lot of suspicion. From the press kit, Roy’s kind of seems like a Hawaiian vacation exhibit in the Palace of Wax, one with a toque-wearing Roy Yamaguchi facsimile tossing leis around…
The interior of The Old Monk is outfitted in woods of varying degrees of wear and significance. Tables come in diverse shapes: from rectangular to square to circular, most of them deeply scuffed. Wooden stools hug little table rims wrapped around building posts and hugging exposed brick walls. Other barstools…
What’s not to like about Ethiopian cuisine? It takes on different attractive personas, registering searing intensity (with jalapeño peppers and mitmita, a hot Ethiopian chili powder), manliness (lots of beef and lamb chunks) and familiarity (collard greens). But its most endearing quality is that it must be eaten with fingers…
Chef Jean La Font says he doesn’t fiddle much with the food at Le Rendezvous. He eschews twists and mergings. He shrugs off plate landscapes framed in sauce dribble and herb dustings. Everything is seeded from safe, comfortable classic structures. And from that track Le Rendezvous rarely stumbles. On those…
It’s futile eating spaghetti with chopsticks. The procedure might seem doable at first. After all, there are countless examples of Asian noodles that have a striking resemblance to spaghetti. Yet these Asian noodle specimens, often made from rice or egg, seem tackier, so they adhere to the sticks more readily…
Noodles Ave. has a slightly ratty feel to it. Not that this counter-order-deliver-by-number-table-service is actually a ragamuffin dressed up in colorful ethnic garb. It’s just that there are little things that lead to head-scratching. On one visit, a brood of Noodles Ave. counter workers and kitchen jockeys–presumably on a break…
Greenville Bar & Grill owner Terri Russo recoils when it’s suggested that her refurbished old bar (established in 1933) borders on upscale. Yet with its clean looks, white-tablecloth demeanor and 51-bottle wine list (called GBG Juice), it would be hard to call it anything else but a stab at a…
Margarita Ranch serves margaritas in more weird incarnations than congressmen come in. You can have them prepped with any tequila you want from a huge list, or you can try one of the Ranch’s special margaritas, which range from the cactus flower (tequila, lime and Tabasco) to the Cuba libre-impersonating…
It’s always risky hunting down Asian restaurants in strip malls. Either they’re bad, or more often, they’re so mind-numbingly inoffensive that you worry about falling asleep facedown in a puddle of panang curry. Much less often a killer Asian restaurant is discovered, in all of its searingly honest ethnicity, leaving…
Bistro Latino is a cave. The long narrow space is a hostel of darkness and a bungalow of noise. The dense carpet of diner gibberish and the impenetrable curtain of clangs and tinkles from flatware, glassware, dinnerware and tabletop spanks makes it impossible to tease out the background music in…
It’s hard to get a sense of what The Gulf Coast is trying to be. Maybe it’s a consignment store that serves free étouffée with the purchase of two pink flamingos. Or maybe it’s a fried seafood hutch that lets you leave behind all the stuff that was refused on…
