Restaurant review extravaganza 29

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

Broward-Palm Beach

Basilic Vietnamese Grill

I have a friend who is obsessed with seasoning her own food. When she sits down at a restaurant, the first thing she’ll do is look for the saltshaker. If it’s missing, she figures, “Any chef that makes me ask for salt is too full of himself.” I shrug whenever she brings it up, mostly because Americans’ salt obsession is ruining our ability to taste things properly. But she’ll go on to say her food is ostensibly underseasoned and that the chef must be a pompous windbag to insist that he knows how she wants her food better than she does. Mind you, this is before she’s tasted a single thing. More >>

Dallas

Carolina’s Mexican Cuisine

There we were, sipping drinks on a lush patio behind some sketchy 7-Eleven when a sudden, sharp spurt of maniacal laughter interrupted our spell. More >>

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Denver

Jaya Asian Grill

Chile cannot kill you. I have been assured of that. No matter how much your dumb, careless, looking-in-the-other-direction ass might’ve accidentally ingested, it can not do you any severe or lasting harm. More >>

Houston

Mama’s Cajun Cuisine

The quarter roast beef poor boy at Mama’s Cajun Cuisine on Barker Cypress is piled so high with falling-apart roast beef, I can barely get my mouth around it. The meat chunks in gravy look like the stuff you get on a “debris” poor boy at Mother’s in New Orleans. At Mother’s, debris is what they call the scraps of meat that fall off when the roast beef is sliced. At Mama’s Cajun Cuisine, there aren’t any slices — the cook braises the entire roast in mushroom gravy until the whole thing turns into exquisite mush. More >>

Kansas City

Zest

Zest opened just nine months ago, and I reviewed it in February (“Zest to a T,” February 3, 2009). Why, then, would I return so soon? More >>

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Los Angeles

Street

When the first Bush was in the White House, gas was cheap and many of us hadn’t yet figured out how to turn on our ovens, my friends and I used to treat our parties almost as ethnographic excursions, afternoons spent driving through distant neighborhoods followed by evenings of communal feasting lubricated by cases of whatever Jon’s Market had been bringing in from Slovenia or Yerevan. More >>

Miami

Sang’s Chinese Food

Every evening, thousands of local foodies head to their respective rooftops and issue a plaintive wail that resounds and echoes forth into the dark and balmy Miami sky: God is great, but the same can’t be said of our Chinese restaurants! Actually, most of these people are obnoxious New Yorkers. And it’s not exactly thousands of them. Well, all right, it’s just me, and I did it only a couple of times — but that doesn’t take away from the validity of the sentiment. More >>