Restaurant review extravaganza 34 page 1

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

Broward-Palm Beach

Mustard Seed Bistro

Make no mistake; Tim Boyd is a lady’s man.

There’s something about Boyd, the 42-year-old chef and owner of the Mustard Seed Bistro in Cooper City, that seems to attract women. Maybe it’s his amber brown hair and his deep, pronounced cheekbones or his lanky, boyish gait. Because when Boyd emerges from the kitchen of his French-inspired bistro, his largely female customer base grows breathless and starry-eyed, like they’re witnessing George Clooney strut his way down the red carpet. More >>

Dallas

Dragonfly

Batman is suspended over the ocean waves with a shark clinging to his leg. Beating the beast on its nose fails to knock the 6-foot monster loose, so the Caped Crusader takes a desperate, last-gasp course of action. “Quick, Robin,” he yells up to the Boy Wonder, strapping himself safely into the hovering Bat Copter, “hand me the shark repellant spray.” More >>

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Denver

Silver Creek Diner

Back in the day — and I’m talking way back in the day — there was only one word to describe a place where a stranger could stop, sit down and, for two bits or so, get something to eat. That word was “restaurant” — based on the word restaurer and taken, like everything else would be forever after, from the French. More >>

Houston

Casa Grande

On Fridays at Casa Grande, the wacky Tex-Mex joint on North Main at I-45, most of the lunch specials are seafood dishes. I liked the big, juicy, grilled shrimp on my tablemate’s shrimp-and-fajitas combo. The chunky-looking fajitas on his plate were made with some kind of enzyme-marinated beef, but I have no idea what cut it was. In fact, I’m not even sure the fajitas were all the same cut — some of the meat chunks tasted tougher than others. More >>

Troy Fields

“The nachos make a great entrée item.”

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Kansas City

Ra Sushi

There’s a scene in The Hunger in which David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve — playing two of the most elegant, seductive vampires ever — prowl a New York nightclub that’s shadowy, loud, lurid and sinister. I couldn’t get that image out of my head during my visits to Ra Sushi, Leawood’s new installment of the Arizona-based bar-and-restaurant chain. Done in sleek tones of deep black and blood red, with a staff of extraordinarily pretty servers, the place has loads of sex appeal, that’s for sure. It has the potential for inspiring all kinds of hunger. What I worry about is its soul. More >>

Los Angeles

BP Oysterette

When people ask about my favorite restaurant in New York, after the ritual banter about the game birds at Daniel and a bread-crumb soup I once had at Jean-Georges, it eventually comes down to the Pearl Oyster Bar, a lunch counter down in Greenwich Village that channels San Francisco’s ancient Swan Oyster Depot by way of coastal Maine. As at Swan, the impression is of worn surfaces and brusque big-city cheeriness, and the press of a hundred people staring holes into the back of your head so that they can take your place at the bar. It is easy enough to find a great $300 dinner in New York, which is a city that after all specializes in such things, but the cheap yet thorough satisfaction afforded by a half-dozen perfect Wellfleet oysters, a bowl of bacon-rich clam chowder and a proper lobster roll is pretty hard to beat. More >>

Miami

Botequim Carioca

“It is Brazil’s time,” an exuberant President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva exclaimed when his country won the bid to host the 2016 Olympics. A rowdy crowd at Botequim Carioca Brazilian Bar & Grill agreed, hoisting caipirinhas and cold drafts while celebrating news of Latin America’s first Summer Games. More >>