Let’s Dish about my faves this week!

Hola, chickadees, and welcome to Valentine’s week! With Cupid’s big day on the horizon, I thought it’d be a perfect time to highlight the things I adore! This week, I’ll showcase products, people and places that make me happy, make me swoon or just put a smile on my face. And there will be giveaways. Oh, yes.

To kick off the week, I’d like to discuss a spot I recently revisited that has maintained its perch in the Dallas dining-hotspot firmament for a while, and for good reason — great food and a super-hot atmosphere.

I recently was invited to take a bite out of chef Garreth Dickey‘s cuisine at New American stalwart, DISH. Dickey’s been transforming the menu there for the last year on the DL, and I was curious about what he’d bring to the table, as outside of a gadozen parties I’ve been to at the Cedar Springs resto, I hadn’t eaten there since, oh … maybe its first year of operation. Happily, some of my faves endure on the current menu, and the newbies bring a fresh wave of deliciousness to DISH.

Probably my favorite starter — because it reminds me of a wine tour in Tuscany — is the chicken liver toasts (below). A mound of creamy organ meat is spread over crisp bread and adorned with a crisp leaf of fried sage.

Luxuriant richness, thy name is chicken liver. I’m going to go ahead and nickname it meat butter. Yeah, I like that. The other starter I really enjoyed was the truffle and smoked trout deviled egg (below).

It was a flavor-sensation Bermuda triangle: creamy, eggy, fishy, earthy. All of it melded into one bite of incomparable tastiness. Get you some of this.

Have to give a shout-out to my cocktail, the savory-sweet Cucumber Cilantro Martini … you go, girl. On to the mains …

The signature diver sea scallop dish, served with pearl couscous and a poached egg, was as succulent as I recall, with the shellfish’s sweet tenderness mingling satisfyingly with yolk. Glad this is still on the menu!

I picked a couple of chef Garreth’s specials of the week, and of them, the skate was my favorite. Pan-roasted and served in a Japanese-style broth with green onion-studded brown rice, this flaky cut of seafood, although a tad salty, was irresistible. Wish I had a glass of fine sake to go with it!

My other selection, a spatchcocked game hen, was fine but a bit too smoky for my palate. At this point, however, I was stuffed from back-and-forthing between the scallops and the skate — seafood heaven! All in a cosmopolitan setting that makes going to DISH really feel like a night OUT.

As for the aforementioned sizzling vibe at DISH? It’s still smoking; very recently, a friend celebrated his birthday there in a corner of the patio and it was faboosh — Dish still makes you feel every bit the celeb and in the midst of the see-and-be-seen scene, when you’re up for that. And the noshes we had (pizza, lamb meatballs, cheeses) were every bit as good as I remember. Keep it up, DISH — because this Diva hearts you.

Tags: Chefs, Cocktails, Product, Restaurants