Restaurant review extravaganza 24 page 1

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

Broward-Palm Beach

Taurus Steakhouse

The Peruvian street food anticuchos is a dish with magnetic properties — you’re either instantly attracted to or completely repelled by it. The grilled chunks of meat are actually beef hearts. But if they’re rendered properly — like the ones at Taurus Steakhouse in Tamarac — they taste more like fine tenderloin than gamey offal. More >>

Dallas

Lumi Empanada and Dumpling Kitchen

Too bad no one can make it to Lumi.

The restaurant is far more interesting than its immediate neighbors, although I say that with some hesitation. Just to the south sits Patio Bar & Grill. And there’s nothing wrong with Hook, Line & Sinker, on the other side. Sometimes you crave fried fish, fried cornmeal and fried potatoes, after all. In fact, enough of Dallas feels the occasional Deep South pang to require loads of additional parking. So the longstanding dive rents out a lot adjacent to Lumi. More >>

Sara Kerens

“Lumi beckons with bits of Asia, Brazil and Texas.”

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Denver

Karma

I have no use for fusion cuisine, for the deliberate fuckery that comes of trying to jam two or three or five culinary traditions together on one plate, for the dumb manhandling of food — torturing it and forcing it into unnatural configurations of time or flavor or place. More >>

Houston

Chinese Halal Cuisine

The fungus salad from Chinese Halal Cuisine on Bellaire was made from triangle-cut carrot slices and the wood ear mushrooms known as black fungus in Chinese cooking. The flavor was mild, but the texture was wild. Each bite made an audible squeaky noise, like a deflated balloon. We ate the mushrooms with an oddly simple potato salad. It was made from shredded potatoes that seemed to be uncooked and pickled. We also shared some hot and sour soup. More >>

Kansas City

Flo’s Cabaret

Anyone who has ever worked the front of the house in a busy dining room knows that the restaurant business is a form of theater — sometimes high drama, sometimes opéra bouffe. And staff and customers alike are part of the show. More >>

Los Angeles

Officina della Bistecca

Any food person who has passed through Chianti in the past decade has run across Dario Cecchini. It has become almost mandatory to stop by his family butcher shop in Panzano to pick up a fiorentina to grill in the courtyard of a rental villa, to listen to recorded opera and to try a spoonful of his famous whipped lardo before accepting a glass or two of homemade Chianti poured from an open magnum on the counter. There is olive oil to be tasted, involtini to be sampled, bits of beef tongue to be tried. After a while, you may realize that you have spent most of an afternoon there, dragging bread through Cecchini’s olive oil, or snacking on slices of soppressata, or maybe the tonno di Chianti, oil-preserved pork that does in fact resemble an elevated version of StarKist. More >>

“More than meats the eye” at Officina della Bistecca

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Miami

Red the Steakhouse

Red the Steakhouse comes to us from Cleveland, where it has been known as a reputable and popular restaurant since 2004. For its first foray outside that lakeside city, Red’s heads chose South Beach, a neighborhood already beefed up by Kobe Club, Fogo de Chão, La Parilla Liberty, Meat Market, Outback Steakhouse, Prime 112, Smith & Wollensky, Texas de Brazil, and Tuscan Steak; the last was replaced by BLT Steak shortly after Red arrived. And STK Steak is on the way. What is it they say about location, location, location? More >>