Restaurant review extravaganza 25

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

Broward-Palm Beach

Brother Tuckers

Three of us were several pints deep on a Friday night at Brother Tuckers in Pompano Beach when Brandon brought up a theological discussion. We were in a bit of a beer haze at the time, but I remember it went something like: “Is indoctrinating your children into religion from an early and therefore unthinking age a form of child abuse?” More >>

Dallas

Hula Hotties

They don’t mind telling you their story, the basic outline of which involves a graying couple moving from Hawaii to Oak Cliff and setting up a tiny café.

Yeah, I know–doesn’t make much sense. She baked for 12 restaurants and two hotels, including the Kona Village Resort, and he’s a musician. Together they ran a hot sauce company turning out bottles of a chipotle and habanero combination called Hula Girl, so things were going pretty well on the big island. Now the couple operates a narrow room on the very fringe of Bishop Arts, scattered apparently with second-hand furnishings. More >>

​

Denver

Organixx

Sustainable, eco-friendly, reusable, recyclable, fair trade, natural, energy efficient, organic, local, green, low-impact, fresh. These are words that inspire us at Organixx. From the building materials that surround you in our dining room, to our food product choices, culinary procedures and sanitation practices, we strive to have those words define our actions.

I read this and I’m thinking, “Oh, crap. Not again.” I’m thinking, “Not one word in there means ‘delicious’.” I’m thinking how it sounds like a pitch for a new laminate flooring material or, perhaps, the impossibly chipper drivel generally spouted by some company that just invented a new chemical to inject into Chicken McNuggets. It doesn’t sound like they’re talking about a restaurant at all. Or at least not one that I’d ever want to go to. More >>

Houston

Tacos La Bala #2

The stupendous cochinita pibil tacos are a buck and a half apiece at Tacos La Bala #2 on Bellaire, across the street from Pico’s Mex-Mex. The shreds of fall-apart tender, slow-cooked pork are topped with raw onions and chopped cilantro (by request) and swimming in a spicy orange broth that runs out of the taco when you bite it. It’s like a taco filled with pork and chile soup. More >>

Kansas City

Oak 63

I love independently owned restaurants. I loved working in them, and I certainly prefer eating in them. At big chains, the food is uniformly consistent and often less expensive than at small, chef-owned establishments — it’s just never quite as tasty or interesting. But the little restaurants can have eccentricities, good and bad, that their big rivals don’t. More >>

Emily Henson

“Megan Riley has a wineglass ready for you at Oak 63.”

​

Los Angeles

Feng Mao

Koreatown may be best known as a land of fresh tofu, bibimbap and flowing soju, but the neighborhood is also famous for its embrace of foreign cuisines, from the proliferation of Vietnamese noodle shops to the pizza parlors, sushi bars, rathskellers and fried-chicken joints, all given a small but distinctive Korean spin. It is easier to find hand-pulled Chinese noodles here than it is in the Chinese San Gabriel Valley. The Korean take on the Viennese coffeehouse is rigorous. More >>

Miami

Shiso Miami

If every South Beach sushi joint were laid side by side, the resultant restaurant row would stretch from one end of the district to the other. These sushi spots all have a lot in common. For one thing, sushi — and a sushi bar. Also, sashimi, creative rolls, sophisticated sake selections, lots of black lacquer, Japanese symbols, and paper lanterns and screens. More >>