ENTERTAINMENT

10/22/2008

Bill Addison lists his 10 favorite Fort Worth restaurants

Michael Ainsworth / DMN

Donatella Trotti of Nonna Tata

Like the city itself, Fort Worth's restaurants defy hasty categorization. If you want dining options that reinforce its country-when-country-wasn't-cool stereotypes, you'll find them easily enough. But it's nearly as effortless to discover restaurants that transcend typecasting. A sophisticated burger joint, an award-winning vegan eatery, a tiny paean to true Italian cooking, a fine-dining pillar serving a unique blend of Mexican and American cooking that reflects place and family: Some work with long-held conventions and mold them to a chef's fresh culinary inclinations, some break from the pack altogether. The following is by no means a comprehensive list of Fort Worth restaurants, but rather a roll call of current personal favorites.
Eats blog: Tell us your Fort Worth faves

09/16/2008

Changes add up successfully at Abacus

Mike Stone / Special to DMN

"Bacon and eggs" includes Niman Ranch chipotle bacon, scrambled duck egg on toast and black truffle.

It is the rare restaurant, in Dallas or any city, that achieves enduring popularity and critical praise but decides to pause at the crest of its success to regroup and make itself even better. But Abacus, which has maintained a five-star rating from The Dallas Morning News since 2002, just recalibrated itself brilliantly. An interior renovation in April sparked a considerable rethinking of the restaurant's food and wine program as well.

Doughmonkey owners shift their focus to gourmet chocolates

Natalie Caudill / DMN

For the educated palate, Doughmonkey's chocolates are in a class of their own.

Ask Park City residents about Doughmonkey and, if they know the place, the cookies will probably be the creations most sighed and exclaimed over. But the bakery with the playfully goofy name may soon acquire a local, and eventually national, reputation for the latest efforts of its fanatical owners, Rhonda Ruckman and Michael Lima: They're creating lavish chocolates the likes of which even many serious connoisseurs have never experienced.

Restaurant Critic Bill Addison's report on nearly 30 restaurants' fried chicken

William DeShazer / DMN

Plus One Chicken's Korean fried chicken

Over the last month, Bill Addison visited nearly 30 Dallas-Fort Worth area restaurants that serve fried chicken. The range of styles and settings in many ways reflects national trends and attitudes toward the browned bird. Chicken-fried steak will always be the king of battered proteins in Texas, but the diversity of local fried chicken reveals an enduring love for this dish, past and present. It also offers a taste of its multicultural future.
Blog: Discuss fried chicken on Eats

Hot sake deserves the cold shoulder

Courtney Perry / Special to DMN

One of Kenichi's nearly 80 sakes.

Riding the crest of the sushi and sashimi craze has pushed sake into an unprecedented limelight. And the more I've tried, the more I've come to appreciate sake's pristine crispness as an organic complement to the more refined styles of Japanese cooking. The question should be addressed, though: Just what the heck is sake? Most of us could identify it as a clear beverage made in some way from rice, but, beyond that, sake largely remains a thing of mystery. Here's a crash course on sake basics, along with some advice on finding the right one for you.

Dry-aged steaks are rare in these parts
Wet-aged. Dry-aged. These terms, applied to steaks, are frequently bandied about in chophouse parlance. But what do they really mean?

Year in Review 2007: Restaurants
Read and see a slideshow of the top 10 new restaurants of 2007, and read lists of Restaurant Critic Bill Addison's 10 personal favorite upscale places, new restaurants and notable closings.

Deep in the heart of Tex-Mex

Rex C. Curry / Special to DMN

The Avila Special at Avila's Mexican Restaurant includes three enchiladas.

It took less than a month of living in Dallas to realize that the subject of Tex-Mex restaurants is a briar patch of regional history, family dynasties, slight but endless variations on idiosyncratic recipes, and civic pride. Throw in people's immovable opinions on and almost brutish loyalty to a favorite Tex-Mex spot, and you've got an eternally ripe topic that can elicit passionate discussion at best and incite violent mob mentality at worst. So, what's a guy to do but start chowing?

The dollars and sense of dining out
When restaurant reviewers wrestle with the weekly and ever-sticky conundrum of assigning star ratings, one major factor we take into account is this: Does the price of the meal feel fair in relation to its quality? In a town where entrees in the more ambitious eateries often cost $30 and up, do the ingredients and combinations and skill of preparation reap a few sublime moments worthy of such a considerable sum?

Wherefore art thou, my dreamy cupcake?

Natalie Caudill / DMN

Cupcakes from Spinkles' bakery

After cooling his heels in line at the new Sprinkles bakery, restaurant critic Bill Addison considers a question: Are they worth the wait? After two batches from the Beverly Hills-based bakery had our cupcake seeker and his tasters scratching their heads, a larger question loomed: Where in Dallas could they go to quell an immediate yearning for a transcendent cupcake? No confection of an answer easily presented itself.
• Slideshow: See some of the cupcakes available at Dallas bakeries

How does your salad stack up?

Evans Caglage / DMN

Elis Droubi, senior manager, prepares a custom salad at Eatzi's.

The salad bowl in America has become a symbol of (and vessel for) many of our cultural body issues. Behind the request for a salad is often a thought such as, "I need to stick to my diet" or "I'm getting fat." Certainly, some days we simply want food that sits lightly in our stomachs, particularly in the summer. But psychological implications in the vein of "you are what you eat" seem to lurk closer to the surface in association with salads. And if that's the case, I'm not sure if I like what I see in myself: I'm High Maintenance Salad Guy.

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