Saturday, February 9, 2008

Restaurant Review: Medina Oven & Bar

By The Law Reviewers of The Law Reviewers

DALLAS — Like many of you out there, we haven’t spent much quality time hanging out at the new Victory development. Sure, we watched a seemingly blitzed Dale Hanson and an apparently tasered Gordon Keith hog the camera during Channel 8’s coverage of "Big D NYE" (Big Deny?), but we haven’t hung out there since it was an abandoned grain elevator and power sub-station. At the end of the day, Victory doesn’t appear to be much more than Mockingbird Station-meets-Blade Runner with $10-15 parking (and it needs a lot more grass before we’ll call it a park!). It’s the kind of development where you would expect to find stores with deliberately misspelled names that have underlines over their vowel to accentuate their Euro-eccentricity. Just when we thought that the world was letting go of terms like "metrosexual," "price points," and "$30,000 millionaire," the Chris-Chrises of the world have been handed the keys to another glittering castle.

However, with a few tweaks and some community support, Medina Oven & Bar could help to put Victory back on the right track and make it a destination for the rest of us.

Medina, between a Luna de Noche and a clothing store called “Klād” (told ya!) in the far southeast corner of the Victory experience, lies in the shadow of its big brothers in Victory Plaza, which is a good thing. Free parking is scarce along the construction-choked side streets so you’re likely to end up paying either $10 for the nearest lot or $10 plus tip for valet (and they wonder why no one’s going here?). Medina has a small outdoor seating space, overlooking a pretty fountain with some actual real grass (from Kntǜkŷ?) and a couple of apartment buildings-in-progress to mar the view. We opted for the quiet interior of Medina on our lunch visit and, boy, was it quiet. All together now: how quiet was it?! It was so quiet, we went to look up a "quiet joke" on the Internet and came away with this gem from Wikipedia: A joke is a short story or ironic depiction of a situation communicated with the intent of being humorous.

Annnnyway, at 12:15 on a Thursday, we were the only people in the place for a good 15 minutes. Even though the interior is fairly small, it’s inviting, with warm colors, artsy Moroccan-style tiling and sturdy wrought iron chairs and benches with cushions. The staff was eager to please on our first visit, although service was a little more indifferent when we returned for dinner and weren’t the sole diners. The atmosphere is more relaxed and inviting at dinner hours, though, with soft lighting and lots of mellow Middle Eastern music playing over the sound system.

We started our lunch with the exotically named "Mixed Plate to Share" ($15). This amounted to four small ceramic squares filled with hummus, smoked eggplant dip, roasted pepper-tomato dip, and a sour cream-sun dried tomato dip called Harissa with olives and warm pita bread. All of the dips were fresh and tasty but, at $15, we thought we’d get a little more than four small ramekins worth. Hey, when dining in Victory, it's required that you use words like "ramekin," OK?

The Med-Rim Chicken Salad ($11) was fresh and full of contrasting flavors, but was not enough on its own to serve as a proper lunch for a growing baby lawyer. Fresh spinach leaves are topped with a few (but not enough) poached figs, almonds, cinnamon-spiced orange slices, feta, and honey vinaigrette. The figs and spiced oranges separate this salad from the ordinary, and it could have used much more of both ingredients. We also sampled the Oregano-Fennel Lamb Sausage Pizza ($13) and the Rosemary Chicken Pizza ($12) on separate visits. Both were good and featured more interesting ingredients than your average pizza.

The Medina Burger ($8) didn’t come medium-rare like we ordered, but it was nicely seasoned and accompanied by some large, juicy slices of tomato and grilled onions as well as some zesty mayo that put it a notch above your average restaurant burger. The Za’atar Grilled Lamb Chops ($19) were attractively served in a white clay pot and the potato-goat cheese side was a tasty accompaniment. The lamb itself was succulent, but the portion was a little skimpy for the price.

We tried a couple of the desserts on our dinner visit. The Chocolate Marquise ($7), which was sort of chocolate/hazelnut mousse, didn’t make much of an impression, but the Orange Blossom Crème Brulee ($6) was creamy with a nice, subtlety aromatic taste to it.

Victory clearly needs someone to save it from its high-falutin’ self. Medina probably can’t accomplish that feat all by its lonesome, but it’s at least a step in the right direction. It offers something that’s exotic enough to bring in the curious but not so much that it will scare off the Paper City Bar Yellers. So, on our Alan Peppard-celebrity-sighting fivel gavel scale, where five gavels is seeing Jessica Alba at the Ghost Bar and one gavel is seeing Jessica Simpson anywhere (yep, we’re still bitter about her Romo-hex), Medina rates three and a quarter gavel, or seeing Jessica Lange at Klād.

Related stories

• Week-in-view: World domination edition (Feb. 14, 2008)

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• Food and Drink > Dining / Restaurants
• Downtown Dallas > Victory

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