Best of Flower Mound #3: Restaurants

In many of my previous restaurant reviews, I've said I'm no professional food critic. I'm just a Flower Mounder who likes to eat out. Same goes for the rest of my family.

It's hard to pick just one restaurant to call the best in Flower Mound. So I'll leave you with four opinions from the four people in our family. So here's the Flower Mound Road official "Best of Flower Mound Road Restaurants Survey":

My 6-year-old daughter's favorite: McDonalds (I presume it's the one closest to our house, but she didn't specify)

My 11-year-old son favors Culver's.

My wife loves the casual atmosphere and the good food at Alforno's.

And my favorite -- out of all the restaurants in Flower Mound ... it's a close call, but I'm going with Pazzo. Lately I've been getting more pizza from Palio's, but over the long haul of the time I've lived here, Pazzo's been at the top of the list for a longer period of time.

Free custard at Culvers Thursday

Culver's (FM2499 at FM3040, near Chili's) is advertising free custard tomorrow, Thursday June 21. I saw their ad emblazoned on the baggie that my Star-Telegram came in this morning. No strings, no buy-one-get-one-free, just free custard. If you haven't been to Culver's, they have a wide variety of food on their menu, including their signature custard (think soft-serve ice cream). They have two house flavors (vanilla is one, is chocolate the other?) and then they run a flavor-of-the-day, which is always advertised on their electronic marquee on FM3040.

From finger-lickin good to an eyesore

Worse than not having a neighborhood KFC is having a closed KFC building that looks like this, behind Walgreens at FM2499 and FM3040.

Saturday AM update: Road opening

Little Pete's now hopes to be available for automobile traffic later today. The Corps expects to have their road open sometime this afternoon.

Update on Little Pete's: Bring Your Oars

This is pretty interesting -- the latest e-mail today from Little Pete's:

Hello Everyone! Okay, the road is shut down for the next few days, but we (and the marina) are getting creative!

Little Pete’s is going to OPEN for business today (June 8th), Saturday, and Sunday, with regular business hours! So, we will open today at 11:30 a.m. for LUNCH and will open at 8 a.m. on Sat. & Sun. We will still have Karaoke tonight (we went ahead and cancelled Filet of Soul for tonight), Dear John will play tomorrow, and Bob & Frank will be back on Sunday!

Having said that…you must go to TWIN COVES PARK for a FREE SHUTTLE to Little Pete’s & the marina by boat. The marina will be running a shuttle during the day, and Duckriders will take over at night. All you have to do is get to TWIN COVES PARK, park your car, and take the shuttle over. It’s only a 6 minute boat ride and will run all day & night, until about 1 a.m. We even heard that there might be some refreshments on the shuttle boat!

When it sucks to be at the end of the road

Greetings from your Nation's Capitol, where I'm officing for a couple of days. This breaking news dispatch came in the e-mail tonight from the folks at Little Pete's:

Hey Everybody – we got the call tonight around 8 p.m. that the corp. is shutting down the windy road for 7 days. Apparently, it was worse than they thought. Once they caved in the road to repair it, they found another huge hole on the other side of the road underneath, and therefore, have shut the entire road down for a week.

We are going to try to stay open for business, but we won’t know anything until the morning. We are truly sorry for the inconvenience. We just wanted to give you a heads up, and we will keep you posted. More details to follow as we know them. I hope we can answer more questions in the morning.

Until the hole in the road is fixed, I hope you have a boat to get to Little Pete's. Or perhaps a helicopter. We'll keep you posted.

In a related story, a friend of mine here in DC just flew in from Cincinnati. He said his flight had to be suddenly rerouted off of one Cincy runway, because it cratered too!

Speaking of restaurants...

... let's you and me start a Restaurant Customer Bill of Rights. I've heard reported that we here in the greater DFW area eat out more often, as a whole, more often than people in any other city in the world. (I think Paris France is a close second.) Indeed, there are lots of restaurants born here that grow into chains elsewhere. We love our eatin' out, don't we?

So let's start this Bill of Rights. I'll pitch the first one.

1. Any restaurant that doesn't take reservations should immediately adopt "call-ahead seating". The new Life's a Beach does it. It saved us a 60-minute wait a couple of weeks ago on a Saturday night. Every restaurant should do this.
   

Your turn. Post a comment, and I'll promote the best ones to this space on the blog.

The Anamia's seating bluff

Last night the Mrs and I were looking for a dinner venue, and we settled quickly on the always-popular Anamia's, just across FM2499 from our neighborhood. During rush hour, Anamia's usually requires a wait in the small foyer before seating. But what happened last night was a first.

We pull into Anamia's around 6:15pm and we ask for a table on their patio. (Last night was beautiful, perfect for outdoor dining.) The hostess tells us it will be 25-30 minutes. No problem tonight, so we decide to wait. We have to stand at first because there's no available seating, but a moment later, a couple of chairs open up, so we take them. Within 2 minutes, the entire waiting area is cleared, and within another minute after that, we're seated at our table. So while we were promised (threatened?) a 25-30 minute wait, we were seated within 4 minutes. It's certainly better than the other way around, but what's up with that?

Life's a Beach, if you can get a table

I'm usually up on new restaurant openings, but this one slipped through the 5-hole (hockey talk). Thankfully, my apparently-better-informed wife recommended we check out the hottest new restaurant to open in/near Flower Mound since Salerno's opened and it was about the only thing in Town..

Life's a Beach Grill & Sports Bar has opened up on FM407 just west of Morriss, in Highland Village. Lots of fancy TV's and a huge outdoor patio with misters in the summer and a fire pit for winter use.

Sounds great, right! Not so fast. We pulled up Friday night at 8pm (thinking the crowd might have gone down a bit), and found there was a 1-hour wait for indoor seating and a 2.5-hour wait for outdoor seating.

So we punted, and went down to the new Friday's. Beach, no worries, we'll be back.

More restaurant news

Also coming to The Pines (Morriss at FM3040) is Pollo Salsa, a growing local Mexican chain. They promise a healthier, fresher approach to Mexican food. According to their website, their Flower Mound store will be their fifth, with other locations in Carrollton, Garland, Grand Prairie and Oak Cliff. This looks like their first store that isn't located in space formerly occupied by another type of store (ie Taco Bell, 7-Eleven, etc). The Pines will certainly be real-estate upgrade for Pollo Salsa.

What's a Prince Bistro?

Good question, perhaps you know the answer. Here's what I know:

The Town's P&Z case log shows an application for a new "Prince Bistro" restaurant that wants to open shop in the Pines of Flower Mound restaurant. I believe they're looking at the very prominent front-corner of that center, right at the SW corner of FM3040 and Morriss. There's a fountain right next to one of the front outbuildings, which sound like a perfect place for an outdoor patio adjacent to an indoor dining area.

I don't think there are any Prince Bistro restaurants in operation. But a quick Google search turned up this Craigslist ad for the company which is looking for restaurant managers for this new "casual American restaurant". Further searching turned up this site for the parent company, Prince and Associates and this page with a reference to their new Prince Bistro project (scroll to the bottom).

I overheard that the broker for the Pines is hoping to have the center full in just a few months. LePeep is still going in to another space there. It's taking a couple months longer than usual, I hear, to get businesses through the permitting stages, due to the rush of applications across Town.

Has anyone been to the sushi restaurant at The Pines? Sushi's not my thing, but perhaps someone else can opine about this new restaurant.

LaNella - good food, but will it be here long?

You know by now if there's a new pizza/Italian place in town, you're going to read about it here. Like I've written before, our family is not very adventerous on the menu. My wife will order spaghetti and meat sauce, the kids will get cheese pizza, and I'll either get a pizza or a stromboli. Nothing fancy. We've visited many times to old favorites Pazzo (still my favorite), Bari's, Alforno's (the definition of "comfort food"), Nick & Willy's take-and-bake, and more recently the venerable Salerno's. We also like Roma in Highland Village (cheap prices, great food, and a big-screen TV) and Parma in Lewisville (crowded and tight, but the food is a cut above).

Now comes LaNella, which is oddly hard to find even though it's in the center of Town. LaNella occupies sits right behind (or to the side of) the Z Grill on 1171. If you're coming out of Sprouts, look to your left. It's in the satellite building right in front of Sprouts. You'd think this would be a good location, but at least two other restaurants I can think of (one a hamburger joint, the other some sort of Mexican variation) have both come and gone in that spot. It's right on 1171, but you can't see it unless you're coming in from the east. It's close to Morriss, but you can't see it well from Morriss. I'm no real estate expert, but I think the location will make it difficult for LaNella to build business quickly.

LaNella occupies a couple of smaller stalls in the shopping-center, and there are about 20 tables in the one-room dining area. I've been there twice now, once with the family and once for pickup. In both visits (one a cold/rainy Sunday night, the other Sunday after-church lunch), I've seen only one other customer. The food is very comparable in quality and taste to Bari's -- the New York-style pizza is quite similar, in fact. It's very good, and we'll go back. The question is, will enough of you get there soon enough, or are LaNella's owner's pockets deep enough, to keep this new restaurant open? There are coupons in the Clipper magazine. Check it out.

China Palace - gone!

You read it here first, unless like me you read the news on the front door of what used to be China Palace. Effective January 8, the mainstay of Cross Timbers Road is no longer in business. The owners are taking a couple of months off to retool and redesign. When they reopen in the spring, they'll be a Japanese restaurant, "Asahi Teppenyaki" if I recall the name correctly. It's a shame for us. My 11-year-old son loved some of the buffet items at China Palace. They had a wide variety of foods on the buffet, which gave all the picky eaters at our table the chance to go home happy.

With the closing of Beijing Wok a few months ago, this leaves Flower Mound with only two Chinese restaurants. One is Panda Express fast food on FM3040 across from the southside Tom Thumb. Not bad food, but the menu is very limited. Your other choice is the Empress of China, an upscale Chinese eatery on FM407 just east of the Albertsons, just east of Morriss. Empress is very good, but alas there's no buffet.

There's no problem finding Thai food in this town, but unless you live up near Highland Village, you're going to have to hoof it to get traditional sit-down Chinese. This is not a good development.

Is that a "Le Peep" I'm hearing?

Saw a sign posted in the window of a building at the new Kroger shopping center (FM3040 and Morriss) that said "LePeep" was coming there soon.

This is great news to those of us who could eat breakfast 24 hours a day. There's nothing wrong with IHOP, and from the looks of the crowds there on FM2499, many of you agree. And we've got the new Cracker Barrel opening next to Grapevine Mills. But I think LePeep is better than both of those mainstays, and I'm glad they're coming here.

Missing Beijing Wok

We were driving home from church yesterday morning, and wanting something good to take home to eat. A lot of times like this we'd stop in at Beijing Wok to get our favorite Chinese dishes. But as previously reported here, the Wok has rolled away. That's left a Chinese food void on the south side of Town. Yeah sure, there's Panda Express on FM3040, but their menu is very limited.

Salernos: What is it that draws the crowds?

A few Friday nights ago the family and I were looking for a place to dine. The rules were the same as they usually are -- some place close (in Flower Mound), relatively quiet, good food for grown-ups and kids, reasonable price. We could only narrow the choices down to three -- Christina's (1171/Shiloh), Baris (2499/Churchill), and Salerno's (across the street from Baris). So we decided to call each restaurant to find out the waiting time. Christina's -- 10-minute wait. Bari's -- no wait. Salerno's -- a 30-minute wait. That night we took the easy way out and went to Bari's. Had a nice meal, in fact, and of course we got right in.

So what is it about Salerno's that keeps this place packed when restaurants with comparable food and surroundings aren't nearly as much so?

We had been to Salerno's twice before, but not once since 1999. The last time we went there was for a Sunday School class party where the menu (Lasagna, as I recall) was set in advance. We didn't much like that lasagna, and we hadn't been back there since.

The night before Thanksgiving, we packed up the kids, and my mother-in-law, and pulled into the Salerno's parking lot. With everyone else either travelling to Grandma's or pre-cooking the family feast, Salerno's was a walk-in-and-be-seated kind of place on this night. We got a booth-table in the center room, in between the kitchen and the bar, and we enjoyed peeking at the TV sets that were showing a Mavs game.

But what about the food? Keep in mind my usual disclaimer -- we are not gourmet eaters, and we don't go very deep into the menu. We loved the cheese sticks, and they tasted totally homemade, which is different from most places. My son and I shared a pizza. The crust is medium-weight (not thin, not thick). The pizza was pretty good, though I think I like Bari's thin-crust and Alforno's medium-crust pizza better. My wife's dish (and now I can't remember what she had) was terrific, so she says. My mother-in-law, same thing.

Despite the fact we all enjoyed our food, I wouldn't put Salerno's in a different class from Alfornos or Bari's. All three are very good local restaurants. So why is Salerno's such a hot spot? Tradition, I suppose. The name, I suppose. Here's another reason. When we were leaving the restaurant, there was a nice crowd of people hanging out in the bar. The way they acted in there, they seemed like regulars. I guess if a restaurant has a "family" of loyal customers, then the family can carry a restaurant for years and years. That perhaps is the reason why Salerno's is so popular and loved by so many Flower Mounders.

Coming next on this site: The FMRoad restaurant review: Salerno's