Monday, September 14, 2009

Loopland taquería situation update

The quest for decent tacos in Loopland continues. Since my earlier posting (August 18) I've tried five or six more places, but have still found nothing that compares with the best tacos in town.

The closest thing to acceptable breakfast tacos I've found so far, in that dreary stretch of suburbia between the Loops, is Ruthie's Mexican Restaurant, 11423 West Avenue, near Churchill High School. There used to be a Las Palapas restaurant in that location. The ambience of the place is formica with a soupçon of inefficient air conditioning, but it's clean, at least; the service was good, as was the coffee. The chilaquile tacos were unusual in their seasoning, interesting and tasty without being what I consider authentic (and I think that, after some 20 years as an aficionado of chilaquiles, I know something about what it should taste like). The worst sin in a chilaquile taco is to make it dry. These were definitely not dry; in fact, they sort of went too far in being moist. But the ingredients were all there, and reasonably well prepared.

The filling of potato, egg and cheese taco was slightly better than your average breakfast taco. There was, again, some kind of seasoning in the mix that I did not try to identify but simply enjoyed. Again, not mainstream authentic, but good. The filling of the bean and cheese taco was also correctly done, as was that of the potato, bacon and cheese taco.

What keeps these tacos from being in the top half of the class is the flour tortillas. They were just a little too dry, too chewy, too thick, as though they'd been prepared much earlier and had been sitting wrapped in a towel for an hour in a warm oven. I can understand that if I'd been there during the breakfast rush, but this was at about 10 AM, when there's time to prepare fresh tortillas to order.

Ruthie's

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Quasimodo in an apron: Flap Jacks and Trattoria Lisina, and a day in the Hills

Now that it's cooled off enough to go riding in the Hills with the top down -- it didn't hit 100 degrees today until nearly 2pm -- my friend Rick and I decided to head up to Wimberley. He's looking for a new light fixture for his dining room, and I happened to know of just the place to find something as far out of the ordinary as he can get his wife to go along with. In all honesty, if the place was here in town I'd've just told him where it was and let him go on his own; but I didn't want to pass up an excuse for driving along the winding roads west of Interstate 35.

Along the way we stopped for breakfast at a place in Sattler called Flap Jack's. Normally, breakfast tacos would have been the preferred cuisine, but we'd already tried the one place we knew of around there; and while it was good, it wasn't one of those places we were willing to make Our Own. Plus, Rick wanted a bathroom, and I wasn't sure the taco place had one. It's more a taco stand than a restaurant; if memory serves, they have a porta-potty out front. That, I think, helps keep the place from being over-run with tourists. That, and it's location just a few miles from the Middle of Nowhere.

Flap Jacks looks like a respectable place from the outside. Inside, it looks like a modernish restaurant destined for that exalted status of Local Dive within my son's lifetime. I expect it'll make it that long. The menu was clearly assembled by someone with a phenomenal sweet tooth, or someone who expects their clientele to have one. I finally gave up trying to choose between the Snickers Flap Jacks, the Almond Joy Flap Jacks, the Peanut Butter Cup Flap Jacks and the Double Chocolate Flap Jacks -- and 30 or 40 other choices offered on the first two pages of the menu. By the time I'd read through the list, I'd decided I'd had enough sugar for a morning. So I went Mainstream, and ordered The Skillet, which isn't Flap Jacks at all. (You understand that I don't normally call them Flap Jacks; they're pancakes to me, and calling them Flap Jacks makes the whole experience seem just a tad contrived, kind of like watching Breaking News on Fox.) It's eggs scrambled up with bacon or sausage, hash browns and I forget what else, and served with toast ... and a flap jack.

Rick also ordered the Skillet, but I don't know what his thought process was. He got his with sausage, I chose bacon. Both were very good, but the star of the meal was, surprise, the flap jack.

I don't normally consider a short stack of two pancakes a meal. That's a side dish, in lieu of bread. I don't normally get pancakes at a restaurant anyway, because toast is so much more convenient with eggs. But this pancake -- okay, this flap jack -- was fantastic. For starters, it was cooked perfectly: just a hint of crust starting to form along the edges, top and bottom, but still moist inside, the fine edge of done-ness. And it was more than half an inch thick. It's cooked in a ring on the griddle to keep the batter from running out and thinning the eventual pancake, but it's also unusually light and fluffy. I'm sure they must have an illegal alien (pardon me, an undocumented worker) chained to some large piece of equipment in the kitchen, forced to whip air into the batter day and night, and maybe they use some ingredient to help that process along. I don't know; if they do, it doesn't affect the taste, which had just the right hint of sweetness to it. And they offer a choice of maple syrup, which was good, and butter-pecan syrup, which was really good.

Even the coffee (fresh ground right on top of the brewing machine) was excellent at this place. And the waitress managed to hit just the right balance between down-home friendly and get-it-your-own-damn-self efficiency. We felt like she must already have known us.

That was a good start to the day. It got better, though.

We went to Wimberley, to Star Antiques on River Road, which seems to be lighting's equivalent of a no-kill animal shelter. Two smallish rooms contain hundreds of lamps and chandeliers and bric-a-brac, and the back room, where air conditioning doesn't go, has three or four aisles of unrefinished stuff. My wife and I found chandeliers here for the porches of our house, after 15 years of searching; that's why I was pretty sure Rick would find something of interest.

He left there with photographs of a dozen or so fixtures to show the wife, and an anniversary present; I took possession of some of the bric-a-brac, in the name of Christmas Shopping and Something For the Back Yard; not having an Occasion coming up to justify my shopping needs. Well, Cup Day, but I've already got something for that.

Then a quick stop at the town square, where nothing really interesting was, for a change, and on to lunch, which turned out to be the high point of the day.

I had come across Trattoria Lisina while putting together a winery tour for my car club; it stands on the grounds of Mandola Winery, a fish-out-of-water Tuscan building put up a few years ago by a group of people backing Damian Mandola, who made a fortune (it appears) in the restaurant business, notably with Carraba's, a chain of Italian restaurants. I'm sure he's a nice guy; I'm sure all the people involved in the business are nice people. But, what can I say, I'm jealous of people who make a lot of money with something as basse-classe as a chain restaurant, which is to dining what Target is to shopping: I loathe it, and wish I'd thought of doing it.

Anyway, so it appears that wife Trina and the distaff part of the investment group decided they needed their own business, and so they opened Trattoria Lisina in an adjacent building. Having heard good things about the place from people whose opinions mean nothing to me, I went with low expectations.

I come away impressed. The meal for the two of us was about $70 with tip and a bottle of Mandola wine. (We both ordered the same, glasses of pinot grigio, and the waiter pointed out that for the same money we could have a bottle of the stuff. I don't care about wine -- pour some rubbing alcohol in a bottle of water and throw in a little food coloring, and I'm satisfied; but I know a bargain when I see it.) My cannelloni were very good -- not excellent; I won't go that far, but very good: stuffed with a tasty mix of ingredients, cooked to the right texture, and covered in a finely-tuned blend of cheeses. Rick went with a panini of Berkshire pork, which was good but not great, but who would notice when it shared the plate with a salad that he enjoyed so much that I had to ask: "So, is it really better than sex?" (It wasn't, but it was a question he had to think about for a worrisome length of time before he could answer with any assurance at all.)

Dessert is not something I normally do at lunch, but cannoli was on the menu. I can't pass up cannoli. Rick went with some too-chocolaty mousse cake that really should have been allowed to sit a few minutes to warm up. The cannoli shells are made at Mandola's Market, a sister-business 30 or so miles away in Austin. They were the only imperfection of the piece, as they lack the freshness that is essential to a truly exquisite cannoli. But the innards made up for that. Our waiter, Jett, thought it might have too much orange zest, and I admit that one bite at each end had surprising orange flavor to it, but I can't complain. It is the best cannoli I've had since Ciao Lavanderia dropped it from their menu, and easily the third-best I've ever had (after Ciao, and that place in New York that I can never remember the name of but can always find, on Mulberry Street, or maybe it's Mott Street, in Little Italy).

Even the decor of the place offers little for a curmudgeon to latch onto. Oh, sure, it's too-new and too-clean, but a few years will take care of that, and let's face it, there's really no way to age a restaurant that will pass muster for even the most half-hearted curmudgeon. The claret-coloured acoustic cieling was actually a nice touch, and all the place needs is a deft smattering of artfully-done and understated leaded glass in some of the higher windows (Trina, and Lisa: if you're reading this, let me know; I may be able to throw something perfect together for you.) In designing the place, the ladies gave appropriate thought, it seems, even to the bathrooms; the baby-changing table is lined and all eventualities are anticipated. The fixtures are a little on the Home-Depot side, but still a few cuts above the franchise-restaurant level.

It was while Rick and I were critiquing the place after lunch that I learned something new. He was ticking off the positive attributes of the place, based on his years of experience in the food business, and one of them was that "the staff are fairly attractive." This took me by surprise, but he swears that appearance is the first criteria in hiring wait staff at upscale restaurants. "Oh, sure," he said, "at Denny's you hire anybody who'll show up to work, but at places like this, it's appearance first, ability second."

I hadn't give that idea a thought before. I admitted that, yes, one very seldom encounters Quasimodo in an apron at any restaurant that has any pretension at all; and even Timo's, the too-cool-to-be-trendy coffee shop down the street from me seems to have pretty waitresses and one undeniably pretty young man in the kitchen. But a cursory survey of my dining experience indicates that Rick speaks right on: ugly people are not hired to wait tables at nice restaurants.

Well: so. I have only one complaint about the place, and that is with their placemats. They are attractive, made of a good quality paper with a nicely printed picture of the place on the left-hand side, but on the right-hand side they have a mistranslation of the lyrics to Deep In the Heart of Texas. It's intended to say, in Italian, "The stars at night are big and bright deep in the heart of Texas," an accurate and appealing sentiment; but what it actually says is, "The stars at night are big and bright in the deep heart of Texas." Also an accurate and appealing sentiment, but not quite the same thing. (I initially assumed that they must've translated it on line, but I checked before I wrote this, and found that Babel Fish translated the line correctly. So I guess they just did it off the cuff, without really thinking about what they were doing.)
Le stelle alla notte sono grandi e luminose in profondità nel cuore del Texas.