D’S DOZEN

FINDING a good restaurant in Dallas can be exponentially more difficult than that old needle/haystack search we’ve heard about all our lives. At least needles look bright and shiny, and hay straws don’t have big-budget advertising campaigns designed to make them appear to be something they are not. Unfortunately, honesty is not the house policy in many Dallas restaurants. If it were against the law to impersonate a restaurateur, most Dallas food handlers would be in jail. The odds are against you when you walk into any of the 4,000-odd restaurants in the Dallas area expecting to sit down to a satisfying and rewarding dining experience.

The search for a good restaurant is made even more difficult by the fact that most restaurateurs are attuned to Dallas diners’ tendency to equate price – and sometimes pomposity – with culinary excellence. It is one of the central components of the Dallas psyche that you get what you pay for; therefore, a meal that costs more than your wristwatch has to be good. This notion has spawned a legion of restaurants that might best be called “pseudo-continental,” usually run by counterfeit Gallics whose cooking skills have yet to equal their self-esteem. These fakers create culinary camouflage that hides the real thing, the genuine item: good cooking.

We would be as pretentious and fraudulent as some of the kitchen spoofs we write about if we claimed to be better-qualified than our readers as to what constitutes good food. The only way to tell if a restaurant is truly worthwhile is to go there, sample the food and answer a few simple questions for yourself: Was this really a good meal? Did I get my money’s worth? Would I recommend this place to my friends? That is precisely what we do each time we write a dining review. We make it our business to sample virtually every new restaurant in Dallas and to continually revisit the established restaurants we include in our monthly dining listings. Our collective dining experience covers everything from haute cuisine to that which is simply haughty. We’ve eaten in restaurants that catered to such a raunchy clientele that we wondered if we could make it through our meals without getting killed; we’ve also eaten in fancy restaurants in which the chef should have been.

This unending dining vigil has jaded our reviewers. They are harder to impress, and harder to please, than the average diner. When we say a restaurant is good, it is a pronouncement being made by a group of reviewers predisposed to be very picky about what is put on a plate before them. It is the results of this collective dining experience, hundreds upon hundreds of trials and errors, that have yielded us a small but reliable list of sure things: genuinely good restaurants. Our list covers every type of restaurant, from the posh to the proletarian. We subscribe to the concept that there is nothing that makes foie gras inherently better than frijoles. It is easy for an inept cook to mishandle either. And conversely, either item, when prepared by an artisan, can take your taste buds to sensory summits. Cost is not a factor in determining whether a meal is worthwhile – unless it is overpriced. Sometimes, a diner is getting taken when he plunks down $10 for a steak dinner. At other restaurants, a $50 lunch might be a bargain.

The only central element in each of the eateries listed in D’s Dozen is what goes on in the kitchen. The chefs role is paramount. It is vital, but unfortunately not commonplace in Dallas area restaurants, that the chef knows what he is doing and why he is doing it. The chefs at each of our 12 listed restaurants satisfy that basic requisite. The chefs at the restaurants our reviewers consider the best in Dallas and Fort Worth take their craft one step further, however: They care about what they are doing in the kitchen, and the meals they serve show they take pride in what they serve.

1 THE FRENCH ROOM

The fine restaurants in Dallas can be placed into two categories: There are truly excellent, almost perfect restaurants. And then, on a higher plateau, there is The French Room. This dining establishment outclasses other Dallas restaurants by such a wide margin that the only way to accurately describe the situation is to use a threadbare cliche that heretofore has been reserved for advertising slogans: The French Room is in a class by itself. If we rated restaurants with a star system, The French Room would get six stars; its closest competitor would receive four.

The French Room is one place in which the corollary between spending big bucks and getting a quality product actually works. (The concept fails miserably in a number of restaurants.) When the new owners of the 70-year-old Adolphus Hotel made the massive monetary commitment ($45 million) to refurbish the hotel in royal style, they also made a commitment to set off the grand hotel with a grand dining room, a restaurant that would make a name for itself worldwide. The extent of that commitment became obvious when they joined forces with Jean Banchet, whose Chicago-area restaurant, Le Fran-cais, has been called “America’s greatest restaurant” in Bon Appetit. Banchet is the darling of the national food critics, receiving lavish praise from Mimi Sheraton, Craig Claiborne and numerous others.

Banchet agreed to become the absentee chef for the Adolphus, planning the French Room menu, making periodic inspection visits and turning the daily operations of the restaurant over to his young countryman and understudy, 26-year-old Roland Passot.

We’ve sampled the lobster sausage with sea urchins, the langoustine and crawfish bisque, the bisque de Saint-Jacques (a scallop bisque with saffron), the foie eras, the veal pat坢 and assorted other appetizers and didn’t find a bad bite among them.

Passot has a penchant for seafood, and some of the excellent fish entrees at The French Room show that he is good at cooking what he likes to eat. (Passot samples every new dish before it goes on the menu.) Roasted lobster with thyme and caviar sauce is doubtless the best version of lobster you’ll find in Dallas, and the braised turbot with oysters and leeks leaves nothing to be desired. There is also a lengthy list of beef and fowl, including saut坢ed breast of duck with red wine sauce and duck liver, roasted pigeon with liver and garlic cloves, roasted quail with honey and vinegar sauce (available as part of an appetizer plate) and rack of lamb with mustard and parsley.

Competitors with The French Room for the number one spot in the expensive continental category would be Caf坢 Royal at the Plaza of the Americas Hotel and The Mansion, both of which are good restaurants. At this point The French Room has the edge on both, however, being more imaginative with its menu and having a larger number of dishes that provide consistently good eating. The French Room. The Adolphus Hotel, 1321 Commerce.



2 JEAN LAUDE



What began five years ago in a match-box-size house on Cedar Springs is now a venerable Dallas institution, with a four-week waiting list and a plush new building providing testimony to its overwhelming success. This type of culinary Horatio Alger story could happen in Dallas dozens of times, and it has. But what sets Jean Claude Pr坢vot apart from other restaurateurs is that he has not let success go to his head.

His souffl坢s are just as light, his pate just as tasty as they were when he opened his doors five years ago. Pr坢vot, now something of a celebrity in Dallas, is still at his restaurant every night, not just supervising his staff, but cooking meals himself. And for a fixed price of $29.50, you can get an exquisite, four-course French meal if you have the time and perseverance to secure a reservation for one of the 13 tables at Jean Claude.

On recent visits, we’ve sampled entr坢es like swordfish with grapefruit sauce and poached trout wrapped in lettuce. Appetizers include offerings like scallops in cream and garlic sauce, salmon mousse, and crab meat and lobster salad. Jean Claude. 2404 Cedar Springs.



3 BUGATTI

Bugatti is the best Italian restaurant in Dallas. It is that simple. Bugatti outshines its competitors in numerous ways, but the two most important are the homemade pasta and the veal, both of which are the best in town. Bugatti is one of several restaurants that might be accurately labeled “son of Lombardi’s,” since owners Mario Perez and Franco Fabbri are both former employees of the old Lombardi’s restaurant on McKinney. (Lombardi’s alumni also run Sergio’s and, of course, the new La Trattoria Lombardi on Hall Street.) Of the descendants of Lom-bardi’s, Bugatti is the best re-creation of the original.

Standouts include the fettucine della casa (tender pasta with lush cream sauce, thin slices of mushroom and bits of ham), tortellini alla crema (a cream sauce worth dying for, engulfing little rounds of pasta stuffed with veal) and the incredible mushroom soup. Bugatti. 2574 Walnut Hill.



4 L’AMBIANCE



Morris Robbins won’t try to convince you that he is a Frenchman, but in many ways he is today what Jean Claude Pr坢vot was five years ago. L’Ambiance is a small, humble restaurant on Cedar Springs, located in a converted Shell station. It serves a limited menu but the chefs are doing quite well with what they serve. The food is nouvelle cuisine at its best, served with great attention to detail. (The china, for instance, is Villeroy and Bach, the trademark of nouvelle cuisine in France.) Entrees include excellent versions of duckling with fruit sauce, veal with puree of mushrooms and roast chicken with tarragon sauce. We recommend the entrecote with shallot cream sauce on the merits of the sauce alone. Vegetables with entrees are the best in town; imaginative and perfectly prepared. We loved the saut坢ed snow peas, terrine of carrots and souffl坢ed potatoes. L’Ambiance. 2408 Cedar Springs.



5 YUNNAN DYNASTY

It might be surprising that a relative newcomer has become the best Chinese restaurant in Dallas, but it’s true. Yunnan Dynasty’s offerings are consistently superior, from the delicate egg roll appetizers to the tangy honey-glazed apples served for dessert. We’re partial to the hot and spicy entr坢es like the boneless duckling with ginger root in hot pepper sauce, or the shrimp with hot pepper, sauce. And no one who loves authentic Chinese food should make too many visits to this place without trying the steamed fish (served whole) with garlic and black bean sauce. It’s not only lovely, it’s low-cal. One of the marks of a really good Chinese restaurant is the way it performs with its soups, and Yunnan Dynasty passes the soup test with flying colors. The hot and sour is excellent, as is the hot and sour fish broth, although our favorite is the velvet corn soup with crab meat. Yunnan Dynasty. 9100 N. Central Expressway.



6 CAFE CANCUN



In recent years, El Chico has become the perennial bad joke with insiders who have become chauvinistic about knowing where to find real quality Mexican food. And while it’s true that the giant chain has become largely an overmarketed, over-computerized wasteland that mainly caters to Yankees who don’t know any better, El Chico was, at one time, a cornerstone to Mexican food. It introduced Mexican food served to Anglos in pleasant surroundings, and the restaurant chain is as responsible as any single institution can be for the rise in popularity of Mexican food in Dallas. It also served as a training ground for people like Emilio Rodriguez, co-owner of what has become the best Mexican restaurant in Dallas, Cafe Can-cun. His restaurant is basically just a spruced-up, repackaged, Eighties version of what El Chico was 15 years ago in its heyday. Rodriguez and his partner, Ed Murph, serve high-style, Mexico City dishes instead of the ubiquitous Tex-Mex. And the food is dispensed in chic surroundings, complete with pastel table-cloths and a jungle mural on the wall.

Our recommended items include the nachos Cancun, made with black beans, Chihuahua cheese, sour cream and jala-peftos; and the chicken mole, chicken in fresh tortillas covered with dark, spicy mole sauce and topped with sesame seeds. We also like the enchiladas verdes, made with chicken or cheese and topped with green tomatillo sauce, and the tacos Lupita, pork in Chile ancho sauce wrapped in fresh tortillas. Caf坢 Cancun. 4131 Lomo Alto.



7 TURTLE CO



It’s tough to operate a good seafood restaurant in an inland city like Dallas. The fish has to be flown in on ice, and as a result it is frequently frostbitten and almost always overpriced for the portion you get. Restaurants like Ratcliffe’s, for instance, which try to be San Francisco-class seafood restaurants, seem to hit as often as they miss, charging top prices for the good, the bad and the mediocre. The restaurant that seems to have best overcome the hazards of serving seafood is Turtle Cove, which smokes all its fish over mes-quite wood. The results are phenomenal.

We’d never found an acceptable version of swordfish, which tends to be tasteless, until now. Something about the smoke makes swordfish an entirely different entity at Turtle Cove. Ditto for the trout amandine, even though on a recent visit, ours was slightly overcooked. Turtle Cove makes maximum use of the smoked fish idea, offering smoked salmon sandwiches, smoked salmon salads, smoked halibut and smoked trout, both as an entree and as an appetizer. But the smoker is not the only appeal of this restaurant. We found the Alaskan king crab legs to be the real thing: delicious and fun to break into. There is also a credible gumbo (not the best in the city, but extremely good) and a respectable seafood quiche.

In addition to serving up first-class food, Turtle Cove made our list of best for two reasons: For one thing, the prices for these succulent morsels are lower than you’d find at Turtle Cove’s less-tasty competitors and, secondly, Turtle Cove doesn’t bore you with all those fake oars, nets and other pseudo-nautical garbage that restaurateurs often display. Turtle Cove. 2731 W. Northwest Highway.



8 SIA



No list of the best dining in Dallas would be complete without the inclusion of Siam, the splendid Thai restaurant with a most unlikely location (next to the Denmark Adult Bookstore). For starters, we recommend the moo-sar tey (number 103 on the menu), which consists of char-broiled pork strips on bamboo skewers, served with a curried peanut sauce and slices of cucumber and hot pepper. Thai purists might opt for the plar mooke pin (105), which is the same as moo-sar tey, except the meat is squid instead of pork. Our favorite entry is the gang ped (127), a special curry with bamboo shoots, coconut milk, mint leaves and your choice of chicken, beef or pork. (We recommend the chicken.) Another selection on which Siam excels is the pard Thai (121), a rice noodle dish with shrimp, pork, eggs, hot chili peppers, bean sprouts and green onions. One word of warning: When the waiter tells you “be careful for the peppers,” he is not being condescending; they’re hot enough to be nearly lethal. The spring rolls are an excellent variant on the egg roll theme. Siam. 1730 W. Mockingbird.



9 L’OUSTA U



For years, Fort Worth diners with a craving for continental cuisine had to heighten their appetites with a 30-mile drive to the east. Now all that’s changed, thanks to the arrival of L’Oustau, a quiet, comfortable but relatively formal little restaurant tucked into the corner of Sundance Square, a renovated shopping area in the middle of downtown Cowtown. Some of the selections at this dining room compare with anything in Dallas. On a recent visit, for instance, we had scallops in tomato-based garlic sauce and found the sauce to be tangy and the scallops to be as tender as we’ve sampled anywhere. (Our experience with scallops is that rubbery ones are generally the rule rather than the exception.) On another visit, the coq au vin was as delicious as what our reviewer had sampled in the mother country. The chef does wonderful things with tomatoes – our tomato bisque at a recent lunch was clearly extraordinary. Is Fort Worth ready for chi-chi continental? We’re not sure. We noticed recently that the pate had been dropped from the menu. At least the chef has resisted the temptation to substitute chicken-fried steak. Doubtless Fort Worth is where Dallas was five years ago; its appetite for French cooking has still not been cultivated. But with restaurants like L’Oustau around, it’s only a matter of time till Fort Worth residents will be dipping croissants in their coffee instead of doughnuts. L’Oustau. 300 Main, Fort Worth.



10 GONZALE



Don’t let this little family-owned restaurant’s to-go window and computerized cash register fool you. This is currently the best Tex-Mex in town, beating out a host of competitors. This is the only cabrito we’ve ever been happy with (Mariano’s Cabrito Caf坢 has a dismal version), and the mainline Tex-Mex dishes are consistently good. Given a choice of this place and Raphael’s, for instance, we’d take Gonzalez. Reason: Both have quality Tex-Mex, but Gonzalez is still trying to build its reputation rather than resting on it; consequently, you get quick service and good prices. We recommend the nachos, tacos al carbon and the chile rellenos. And, of course, the frijoles are excellent. One of the beauties of this place is that it is open for breakfast (7 a.m.), and a drive-through egg and bacon burrito or chorizo and egg burrito makes an excellent alternative to the infamous Egg McMuf-fin. Don’t go expecting atmosphere; the inside of the place looks like a Del Taco (the building is actually a converted chicken stand). Gonzalez. 4333 Maple.



11 KINCAID’S



You can start with a list of what Kincaid’s doesn’t have. No reservations. No waiters. No seating. No fountain soft drinks. If you want something to drink, you can darn well get it out of the Coke machine. And you will, if you are familiar with Kincaid’s, because this humble west Fort Worth grocery store serves, almost as an afterthought, the best hamburger in the state of Texas. Kincaid’s cooks more than 1,200 a day, but each seems to taste as if your mother toiled over a skillet preparing it. Greasy? Of course. They are also the best-tasting, juiciest, meatiest burgers you ever wrapped your hands around. That’s why businessmen in three-piece suits are more than willing to stand in line at the noon hour for a chance to grab one of these delightful burgers, a bag of potato chips and a Dr Pepper to consume while standing at the plywood counter. Kincaid’s. 4901 Camp Bowie, Fort Worth.

12 THE PITA PLACE



This Middle-Eastern restaurant is a departure from the classic story in which the place is good because the owner spends 18 hours a day in the kitchen. Mike Jacobs, owner of the Pita Place, is a scrap-metal dealer who spends very little time in his restaurant. The reason he can get away with this and still have one of the best restaurants in the city is because of the husband-wife management team of Jacob and Cookie Ben-Ami. Jacob doubles as maitre d’ and head-waiter, while Cookie, a cosmetologist by trade, handles things in the kitchen. We recommend what has been mis-labeled as a “combination salad,” which is actually a sampler of all the appetizers, including tabouli, hoummus and tahina. For the uninitiated, tabouli is a mixture of cucumbers, tomatoes, mint, cracked wheat, parsley and olive oil with lemon. Hoummus, which makes a great dip, is a mixture of ground chickpeas and sesame seeds seasoned with lemon and garlic. And tahina is a mixture of ground sesame seeds, lemon and garlic. For an entree, try either the kabob (ground sirloin with chopped onions, parsley and spices) or the shishlik (steak cubes grilled on a skewer). Both are can’t-miss items. The Pita Place. 9820 N. Central Expressway.