Restaurant Review: Luqa

For an Expense Account Lunch, Luqa Here

by The Law Reviewers of The Law Reviewers

For sale: NordicTrack stationary bike, barely used and in excellent condition. Digital controls, cushioned seat, built-in fan. Compact & an excellent addition to a home gym or master suite. $125 o/b/o, buyer must pick up in Dallas. Email alowenberg@yahoo.com if interested.

One of the great things about having a free-form column is the ability to treat it like a free classified section. The other is the freedom to write as follows, without fear of censorship: Luqa to the corner of Main and Field Streets, where a new building has gone up. It’s quite a Luqa, what with the roof garden, the banquet space, the art gallery, and most notably, a restaurant and a lounge where you can get Luqa’d up. Our enthusiasm for this new, hip space in the middle of downtown was great at first, but by the time we got the check, it was somewhat Luqawarm.

Having sufficiently beat that joke into the ground, let’s get down to business: The business of reviewing Luqa as a lunch destination (Dallas Roof Gardens Building, 1217 Main Street, at Field); the business for which we do not get paid. Or reimbursed. Please buy the stationary bike. Luqa is just one of a handful of new, hip, and urban pioneer restaurants popping up in and around downtown. Its intentions are like a microcosm of north Dallas et les environs as a whole these days – well-intentioned and fancy, but also showy and generally overpriced. We wanted to like Luqa a lot and gave it a lot of chances, but alas, like a law clerk from Yale, its appearance of brilliance impressed us, but ultimately it showed us that it knew nothing about the biz. The space is handsome (heh – “handsome”), with lots of chrome, leather, and odd angles. The blue tinted windows cast a pretty bluewash over the downtown streetscape, and we enjoyed watching the semi-open kitchen (glass separated the artisans from the unwashed). Appearances are everything at Luqa – nearly every entrée was served on a different style of stark white modern porcelain flatware or bowl – and it appears they want you to think, hey look, its modern art you can eat! Initial service was attentive and friendly, and we’d like to think the service complaints below weren’t the result of our accommodating waiter, but because of the kitchen. Of course, we’d also like to think the billable hour fairy will grant our wishes for a 1,000 hour credit toward next year, but he moved to Austin to play in a band.

A review of the appetizers will be as short as the portions were small: hummus ($6) was okay but not great; duck spring rolls with cranberry-apple chutney were good, but c’mon, for $7 let’s make them more than a couple of bites worth; fried calamari with jalapeño lime dipping sauce ($9) was above par in one bite and had a strong fishy taste in the next. This portion of the review is brought to you by Fishy Joe’s. Fishy Joe’s: Ride the Walrus.TM

The entrées were more satisfying, but still flawed. The best of the lunch entrées was the “Big D” bison burger ($12), which was a half-pound of juicy tatonka, on a wheat bun and topped with gouda cheese. Our table ordered two – medium rare and medium well – and both were slightly overcooked, but dangit, if that tatonka didn’t hold up well nonetheless. The burger comes with a small portion of sweet potato fries and “marinated pickles” (as opposed to un-marinated pickles, a/k/a cucumbers?). Butternut squash ravioli ($14) came in a lavender honey and truffle sauce, which sounded appealing but came off a little too sweet for a pasta dish. Again, the portion was miniscule, even for ravioli. The roasted eggplant and garlic soup ($7) was served in a deep bowl inside of another dish in which our waiter poured what was described as rosemary aroma and garlic herb lavash. We're not quite sure why a soup needs a moat, but it (the soup) did have a smooth texture and subtly pleasing taste. The moat was also successful in keeping the Rosemary Knight at bay. A daily special, shrimp tacos, was disappointing. The corn tortillas were dry and the shrimp and pineapple chutney/salsa filling was fairly bland.

Desserts included an espresso parfait, sweet potato crème brulee and a chocolate explosion cake (KABOOM!). All of them were deconstructed, meaning that the elements of each dessert were separated for individual appreciation. While this is becoming all the rage at new American-type places, we're don't see how it makes sense to pay more to ultimately end up putting your dessert back together yourself. Given the long period of time between the first two courses, we should have known not to order dessert, which added at least 15-20 minutes to the lunch. After a while, we became worried that our firms thought we were never going to return from lunch, and, alas, when we exited onto Main, all the buildings were gone, gorillas ruled whatever planet we were on, and … wait a minute… Reunion Tower… Neiman Marcus… a Sewell Hummer dealership… It was our planet all along! You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! Damn you all to H-E-L-L!

Oh yeah, and the restaurant had no record of the online reservation we made at OpenTable.com.

Pretensions and high price points are a lot to live up to for a power lunch and, unfortunately, Luqa left us feeling as disappointed as Charlton Heston when he realized that he was he standing next to the Statute of Liberty on the middle of a deserted beach (but not as upset as when he realized that Soylent Green is people!). So, on our filthy human five gavel rating scale, where five gavels is the original Planet of the Apes, and one gavel is that time one of us wandered into the closed-for-renovation gorilla habitat at the zoo, we give Luqa two gavels, or Ed, starring Matt LeBlanc as Jack "Deuce" Cooper, a hayseed baseball pitcher who befriends a chimpanzee and learns the meaning of life.

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