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We Will Not Use “You Will Be ‘Amuse’-ed” As A Headline
By Anthony Lowenberg and Michael Anderson
This month’s review is of Amuse, which is quite possibly the safest restaurant in Dallas. Located directly across the street from the Dallas Police Department headquarters building and surrounded on two sides by an iron-spiked fence, we expect Amuse to make a cameo on a future episode of Dallas SWAT, which by the way, is the official police-based reality show of The Law Reviewers. In one episode, some of the SWAT officers took a late lunch at Campisi’s on Mockingbird. It was awesome.
This area, dubbed the South Side Development, is the hot new area for restaurants and entertainment venues, with the new Gilley's across the street and two other new restaurants – Nellie's Sports Bar and Tryst – opening nearby. Since we’re all about “hot” and “new” (as well as “food” and “bad jokes”), we knew we’d have to give this place a try.
Fuse, er, Amuse, has a fancy schmancy dinner menu, but this review will center on lunch, which falls in between breakfast and dinner. They also have a catering menu and a tapas menu offering "A series of whimsical little bites," making it the ideal place for you and your leprechaun friends to satisfy your tapas cravings. While deciding what to order, diners are treated to complimentary wedges of a foccacia-type toast marinated in oil, and some sort of tomato salsa tapenade. We say marinated, because it tasted like toasted butter. We say tomato salsa tapenade because it was kind of bland. But you know what? It was free, and free always tastes good, especially when it’s mostly butter.
Portions at Amuse are large, and we recommend either a soup ($4) and starter salad ($4-$5) for lunch, or a sandwich (most are $8). A salad and a sandwich will make you so full that you will fall asleep at your desk earlier than usual upon returning to the office, and, unless you have a Costanza desk, that will definitely end badly. A starter salad of endive, dried apples, blue cheese and walnuts was a hit. You have to be into endive to dig this salad though, but fans will enjoy the play between the bitter greens and the candied walnuts. The “home made” chicken soup was light and earthy with plenty of corn, rice and bacon. It was very fresh and healthy tasting, but it lacked a little zing. There are also entr?e salads for lunch, but who wants a salad for lunch? Pfft.
The shaved turkey sandwich was loaded with thick slices of melted brie, more walnuts, cranberries and more dried apples. It was hearty and filling, although it was also a little on the bland side. We wished fresh apples could have been used instead of dried ones, for example. The accompanying steak fries were pretty dang good – thick and greasy, they exemplified the perfect fry. The “ham and cheese” sandwich had loads of shaved proscuitto, tomato, basil and gruyere cheese but tasted surprisingly sweet, as if some type of jam, rather than tomatoes, had been added and the gruyere wasn’t very noticeable. On the other hand, the side of vegetables was a nice healthy alternative to the steak fries.
The outside of Amuse is fairly monolithic and a little uninviting, it took us a few minutes to figure out where the entrance was, but the interior is all Ikea-meets-Hollywood Hills. Scraggly types who are probably playing at Gilley’s that night sit next to the suits, who never go to Gilley’s and would never be caught dead there unless it was their office holiday party. We are not suits. We are not scraggly types either, and we hope we never meet any. The service was friendly but a little on the leisurely side. They failed the one-hour-attorney-power-lunch test by about twenty minutes, but there is some good news – we just saved a ton on car insurance with Geico!
Overall, the food at Amuse, while creative and relatively healthy, could still use a healthy dose of zip. We’d recommend incorporating ingredients from the police headquarters, like the pepper spray. Mmm, incapacitating! On our flash-bang, knock-and-announce five gavel scale, with one gavel being a hostage stand-off that lasts through dinner, and five gavels being an armored personnel carrier pulling the door off a crack house at 5:00 a.m. to help serve five federal warrants simultaneously, we give Amuse two and three-quarter gavels. We’re not heroes, we’re just doing our jobs.
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