Restaurant review extravaganza 56

Here are some of this week’s most noteworthy restaurant reviews from across the country:

Broward-Palm Beach

Nu-Sushi

What most people know about Japanese food they could cram into a chopstick case, which isn’t to say it’s their fault. For a cuisine so rooted in tradition, restaurants that claim to serve it have strayed pretty far from the source material. Blame the ubiquitous strip-mall sushi joint — those nearly identical eateries slinging low-grade tuna by the caseload and farm-raised salmon the color of bad wallpaper. Or better yet, blame the California roll. If there’s a more appropriate summation of a cuisine stripped of its value than a rice-smothered tube of imitation crab meat made from pulverized, colored fish paste, then I’d hate to hear it. More >>

Dallas

Naga Thai

N9NE tried it. Now they’re no more. Nove Italiano tried it. Now they’re no more. Now Naga Thai is trying it, opening a restaurant in the overpriced abyss known as Victory Park. Einstein once said that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So, is Naga Thai insane, or does it have a restaurant plan so crazy it just might work? More >>

Sara Kerens

“Naga Thai rushes into Victory, where others fear to tread.”

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Houston

Bobbie Que’s Rib Shack

Rib tips and fries was one of the lunch specials at Bobbie Que’s Rib Shack on Scott Street the day I stopped by. I love the crispy, crunchy texture the little bits of rib meat trimmings get while they are smoking, so I ordered some. While I watched, the restaurant’s owner and head chef, Bobbie Patterson, put my rib tips in a microwave oven — so much for the crunchy texture. More >>

Los Angeles

Sunnin

Warren Avenue, as it streams through Dearborn, just west of downtown Detroit, is the Main Street of Arab America, mile after mile of Lebanese restaurants and Iraqi kebab houses, hookah parlors and halal supermarkets. The local mosque is as big as a sports arena. Even the McDonald’s is halal. And the heartbeat of Warren Avenue, even more than the enormous Arabic bakeries or the falafel parlors crowded with teenagers, is probably the big Lebanese coffee shops. More >>

Miami

The Morgans Restaurant

Morgans holds court in a renovated two-story 1930s house, freshly painted white, with black-and-white striped awnings and a wrap-around porch; it’s so very pretty and quaint. The block and neighborhood haven’t yet been gentrified, but the restaurant is just a few blocks south of the glittering Shops at Midtown Miami, so you’re not exactly in no man’s land — plus there’s a sizable parking lot that makes coming and going secure. Still, the bright country home looks incongruous, as if accidentally dropped onto a sparse urban side street. More >>

New York

The Meatball Shop

The world has never known a more perfect meatball hero. The bread is a demi-baguette from Il Forno Bakery in the Bronx, crusty without being so tough that the ingredients squirt out the sides. The cheese is excellent fresh mozzarella–not the packaged stuff that masquerades as mozzarella, smothering most of the city’s meatball heros like a vengeful heir with a pillow. More >>

Amelia Beamish

“Holden Caulfield would not have liked the phony salmon ball.”

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Orange County

Dosa Place

No hyperbole I can muster will ever quite capture how large Dosa Place’s paper dosa is. But I’ll try. It is the size and shape of a telescope powerful enough to see clear to the moon. And as soon as it arrives, no other food on earth can inspire the instant awe that this dosa will. It takes up the entire length of your table. Peer inside the cylinder, and you can imagine what the view is like for Hawaiian big-wave surfers as they skim a cresting tunnel of water. More >>

Phoenix

Fred’s

Dining in a department store is nothing new, but it’s no wonder the concept has such staying power. Keep shoppers on the premises to refuel, and hopefully they’ll go right back to spending their dough. More >>

San Francisco

Heart

A few hours before my visit last week, Heart — which puts the “bar” back in wine bar — tweeted that it was Corey Haim tribute night. A digital projector was screening the late actor in The Lost Boys 10 feet above the heads of the drinkers, and the room vibrated with the music Haim would have been smoking out to then — the Doors, Pink Floyd, Bowie. A dozen men in their early 30s had filled up the tables underneath the screen, though they didn’t seem to be License to Drive fans gathering in memoriam. Tacked up on the bar’s white gallery wall, large-format photos of naked pregnant women sneered at the grid of bottles pegged up on the other side. More >>

Jen Siska

“A mason-jar toast to a cheese-and-pear sandwich.”

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Seattle

Bai Tong Restaurant

There are restaurants that are like narrowing funnels of options, and there are restaurants that are like widening cones of potential experience. At the former, the chef, the crew, or the kitchen is known for doing one or two things really well, and once you have those things, the remainder of the menu is nothing but a wasteland of burgers, chili, and flan–nothing worth walking across the street for, let alone driving anywhere. More >>

St. Louis

Chez Leon

The walls of Chez Leon are shockingly dark, a shade that’s not quite jet black, but much deeper than the richest, most burnished wood. The color of Coca-Cola, say. Anchored on these walls are oil paintings, still lifes of food, mostly, that seem to float in space around you. It’s disorienting at first, like the first minutes of a 3-D movie, as your eyes struggle to adjust to the unexpected depths. Yet as you settle into your meal, the effect is weirdly successful: You’re set adrift from the petty concerns of more casual restaurants. You can lose yourself in the experience. More >>