The burger meat at Hillstone are house-ground every morning. The Hillstone cheeseburger is a classic perfected inside of a toasted egg bun. (Photo courtesy of Penny De Los Santos)
Average meal price: $$$ (Main dinner courses $19 to $34, excluding market prices)
Service: Helpful, attentive.
Ambience: Loud, energetic.
Location: 8300 A Preston Road, Dallas; 214-691-8991; hillstone.com
Hours: Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Friday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Payment Information: Major credit cards accepted, except for Discover.
Walking in to this place on a Monday, you may feel the urge to ask the hostess how long the wait is for dinner. On a nice evening, the patio’s full of cocktail-sipping, thirty to forty-somethings dressed in business attire. A similar scene is in the bar, where a piano plays among the voices overfilling the restaurant.
Despite Hillstone’s buys entrance, on a weeknight, chances are you’ll be seated immediately. Since Hillstone Restaurant Group changed “Houston’s” to “Hillstone” last June, not much has changed in this Preston Center hot spot.
You’ll see the same items on the newer menu, with newer dishes like oysters St. Charles. One side of the two-sided menu features various wine options, both by the glass and by the bottle.
Commonly, your waiter or waitress will recommend the Chicago-style spinach dip—it’s worth taking up on the offer if you think a less-than generous serving of spinach dip is worth $13. This dip looks like creamed spinach until you pull your chip up and have to wind around the string of cheese stretching from your edge of the table to the dish. Small cups of salsa and sour cream come with the dip that are worth ignoring. If the chips weren’t thick, dense strips of corn tortillas, I might consider the price tag appropriate. The home-smoked salmon appetizer, however, is good enough (and large enough) to have for a simple meal.
One of the best items on the menu is probably a meal one could find for $1 elsewhere. But the first bite of this Hillstone cheeseburger makes you forget about the price. Really, it’s simple. It doesn’t have odd condiments. It doesn’t have an enormously sized patty of meat. It doesn’t have a fried egg or chili. It’s just tomato, lettuce, onion and mayonnaise grilled chuck (house-ground that morning) beneath a melted layer of cheddar cheese. While the juice running down your hand may indicate cheeseburger-perfection, the toasted egg bun may be the best part of this over-sized sandwich. A choice of coleslaw or hand-cut French fries comes with any burger or sandwich. A small mound of creamy slaw is appropriately flavored with a copious amount of parsley, taking a simple approach to the homestyle side dish. The shoestring-cut fries, however, are equally a good choice.
The sashimi ahi tuna salad (which actually has pan-seared tuna) may sound tempting with avocado and mango on top of mixed greens tossed in a cilantro-ginger vinaigrette. However, a less insipid salad would be the club salad offered with bacon, avocado, egg and tomato. For a heartier and more enjoyable salad, the crab cake salad is the best choice. Grapefruit and avocado pair delicately with the champagne vinaigrette. But the lump of a crab cake on the plate can transform the mind of the average salad-hater.
Luckily, for those who choose a daintier appetizer, the crab cakes are farther down on the menu as an entrée, served on top of a Pommery mustard sauce paired with both coleslaw and French fries. Hillstone takes the first appropriate step in achieving the perfect crab cake: large chunks of crab, not a filling. While not as satisfying as crab cakes on Cape Cod, the crisp outside gives a contrast to the overly-creamy filling. If the crab were mixed with half the amount of sauce that it is, the two crab cakes on the plate wouldn’t be as overwhelming as they are.
Though it falls short of others in town, the key lime pie that’s classically paired with a graham cracker crust makes a lighter end to a meal at Hillstone. The warm five-nut brownie or the apple walnut cobbler is an alternate for the real dessert eater. The brownie is served warm, a la mode with a champagne custard, fairly typical of a brownie sundae decadence. Venturing to the apple cobbler, topped with vanilla ice cream, is a sweet dessert that disappears quickly if shared between two people. Heaps of chopped apples and walnuts in a perfect, copious amount of caramel sauce rest on top of the warm apple cobbler, which is barely able to uphold the melting scoop of vanilla on top of it.
Hillstone provides a good dinner or cocktail hour, overall. The hype about the restaurant has swollen to a disappointing level. Most of the food is above adequate; but the restaurant is overly-confident with its meal prices. However, while the final bill for a night may not be in every college student’s budget, it’s worth a splurge for the cheeseburger (or at least the cobbler).
