Restaurant review extravaganza 17 page 1

Here are a few of last week’s more noteworthy restaurant reviews:

Broward-Palm Beach

City Fish Market

Fish has become the food issue of the decade, as contentious and controversial as farm-raised chicken or foie gras was in the ’90s. The doomsayers claim world fisheries are collapsing; environmentalists wring their hands over the damage done to both the Earth and local economies by shrimp and salmon farms; Greenpeace stages activist pranks at Nobu to call attention to the plight of bluefin tuna. Trackers of a continent-sized swirling vortex of plastic in the Pacific Ocean tell us this vastly creepy phenomenon indicates that our marine fish are probably as full of polyethylene as your average recycling bin. More >>

Dallas

Central 214

Chef Blythe Beck likes things naughty–in the kitchen, on the plate, even at home, the tawdry cook can never say no when there’s some oil and a fine piece of meat. She’s even made naughtiness the heart of a new cooking series currently being videotaped at her restaurant. More >>

“Naughty is nice at Central 214”

Denver

Rioja

I’m sitting at Rioja on a Monday night. A full book Monday night — rare for the best restaurants in the best of times, bordering on miraculous for this day and age, this city. More >>

Houston

Poscol

Maybe the tender braised baby octopus in a light brown sauce with cannellini beans and carrot chunks was my favorite dish at Poscol. I had the stew of tiny tentacles and white beans with a Piedmonte Arneis, a white wine made with a rare Italian varietal. The wine was probably a little too delicate for the garlicky seafood. But I loved the pairing anyway, just because it was so offbeat. More >>

Kansas City

Café Augusta

I don’t know Micheline Burger or her daugh­ter, Mijanou Cackler — I’ve never spoken to them — but if they had come to me with their idea for opening a European-style bistro in a strip mall on the west side of Interstate 35, I would have done my best to talk them out of it. More >>

Los Angeles

The Nickel Diner

The motto of the Nickel Diner is probably Home of the Maple Glaze Bacon Donut, a slogan inscribed both on the home page of its Web site and in the arteries of its best customers. And it is a lovely thing, round and doughnutty, paved with crushed bacon, glistening with what Dr. Dean Ornish might interpret as pure evil. If you look at it in a certain light, or at least the hazy rays filtering in off Main Street on a cloudy morning in June, the doughnut even seems to glow; a soft, pulsing glow like the on button of late-’90s desktop computers, or possibly from the undersides of flying saucers in science-fiction movies. “Eat me,” it says. “Eat me and die.” More >>

Miami

Mi Rinconcito Mexicano / Pepper’s Burrito Grill

Among those who take their ethnic restaurants seriously, ambiance, service, and even taste of the food take back seats to how closely the meals hew to authenticity. This zeal for the real deal, however, manifests itself to different degrees according to genre of cuisine. Most foodies won’t fret that smoked salmon carpaccio isn’t exactly a staple of the traditional Italian dinner table, and few will quibble if their bouillabaise shows no trace of John Dory. But if the owner of a Mexican dining establishment dares to Americanize a taco, responses are apoplectic: “What a joke! The stuff they serve here is nothing like what people eat in Mexico!” More >>

Minneapolis

Cowboy Slim’s

The first time I drove up to Cowboy Slim’s, in the former home of Campiello on the corner of West Lake Street and Girard, my first instinct was to turn around. Slim’s back patio looked like a fraternity party, with its swarms of young people standing around smoking cigarettes and clutching plastic cups. I pulled into the lot and found a spot before realizing how much it cost: $9 for the privilege of parking in Uptown? Seriously? Where the McDonald’s across the street lets its customers park for free? (Turns out the Cowboy Slim’s folks don’t manage the lot, but still, it makes a poor impression of their hospitality.) As I crossed the lot, several steel-pony-riding hellions blasted past, revving their engines loud enough to create the sonic equivalent of a drive-by shooting. I hadn’t yet set foot in Cowboy Slim’s when I uttered the phrase, “I hate this place already.” More >>

Jana Freiband

All hat, no cattle: The crowd at Cowboy Slim’s