Restaurant review extravaganza 45

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

Broward-Palm Beach

LOLA Restaurant and Ultra Lounge

“There she is! Do you see her?” shot my mother, motioning behind my head toward the glass-encased wine rack by LOLA’s foyer. I spun around slyly to try to catch a glimpse of the crazy woman in the purple tutu my family kept going on about. But I missed her yet again — this time she had ducked behind a gaggle of chatty party girls downing bottles of wine. Damn that purple tutu. It was becoming my white whale. More >>

Dallas

Grace

Some people insist a diet of fatty foods not only rounds out the waistline, it also invites a series of almost certain future ills. If they’re right, then Blaine Staniford must want to kill us–although with his arsenal of bacon, butter, cream and slabs of richly marbled red meat, ours will be a long, slow and very happy death. More >>

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Denver

Ondo’s

We parked the car in the snow and walked gingerly down the icy ramp. The wind was bitter, and Cherry Creek lived inside a snow globe of swirling flakes glittering like chips of diamond as the gusts whipped them, scarving from rooftops and frozen iron railings. Laura slipped and I caught her hand. I slipped and she caught mine. This is what we’ve done for all of our years together — caught each other as we were about to fall. In the end, we toddled like children, holding tight to each other and ducking our heads against the biting cold. More >>

Houston

Juan Mon’s International Sandwiches

Item #17 on the menu at Juan Mon’s International Sandwiches is the “Venice,” a fresh baguette stuffed with spaghetti, salami, provolone cheese, grilled onions and sour cream. To be honest, I ordered it because it sounded goofy. But after my first bite, I put the ridicule on hold. Shockingly, the pasta-filled #17 was very good. Then my dining companions tasted it, and I found myself in an unlikely tug of war over a spaghetti sandwich. More >>

Kansas City

Jack Gage American Tavern

Let’s not confuse the namesake of the new Jack Gage American Tavern at 50th Street and Main with an American Jack Gage, such as the late film and TV director of the 1940s and ’50s or the boyish-looking New York-based writer for forbes.com. No, restaurateur Blair Hurst named his clubby pub after the British Jack Gage, a scrappy fight promoter — a carny, really — who set up a traveling “stadium” at English fairgrounds in the days before and after World War II. Hurst doesn’t know very much about Gage, but he does own a fine piece of memorabilia. More >>

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Los Angeles

Mantee

Whatever sort of Lebanese restaurant you may be thinking of at the moment, Mantee is the other kind, a tiny, stuffy café near the eastern end of Ventura Boulevard, not too far from the studios but a million miles from the brash good cheer of places like Carnival and Skaf’s. Mantee isn’t where you come for a falafel plate or roasted chicken; it’s where you go to watch a stunningly beautiful waitress set a plate of sausage aflame. More >>

Miami

Wok Town

The front page of Wok Town’s menu touts downtown’s new dining addition as “an Asian take-out concept” — as if it’s already being marketed for franchising opportunities. In fact, everything about the place seems to suggest a starting-small, thinking-big strategy. More >>