A Nice Option in Balcones Heights

Queen's Cottage
4535 Fredericksburg Road, Suite 223-B

(across from Crossroads Mall, soi-disant Wonderland of the Americas)

You can get a giant burger of reasonable quality at Babe's; a few doors down from that, you can pig out for lunch at Simi's excellent Indian buffet. But if you're looking for a meal that won't bust your belt or your budget, you have another choice in this old-fashioned strip center.

This shop is half cutesy gift boutique, half 50s-style malt shop. Fortunately, the menu is fairly up-to-date, so the décor comes across as retro-chic instead of heavy-handed homage. Sparkling clean and bright, my only complaint about the ambience of the place is that the seats of the vinyl-covered chairs seem to lean back like a bucket seat. Not really a problem, but kind of a weird feel when you're eating lunch.

We were alone in the place one day last week, and it looked like the young man behind the counter was in the middle of his lunchtime set-up work. The menu consists of wraps, sandwiches and salads, plus a few breakfast items, drinks, soups, sides and sweets. Rick chose the chicken salad sandwich, while I went for the day's special, a meatloaf sandwich. We both added a cup of one of the day's soup choices, tomato-basil. Roland went for a plain salad.

Balcones Heights doesn't publish restaurant
inspection results

All the food was tasty, but mostly unremarkable: fresh, good quality ingredients prepared according to very traditional recipes. I'd really have liked to have more of the soup, even if it wasn't in an elite category; but the chicken salad was a little heavy on the mayo, and the meatloaf was slightly bland and much too moist for sandwiches. Still, over all, the food deserves a slightly better-than-average rating.

Prices were reasonable. The only real failing of this place was the length of time it took between our orders and the delivery. There seemed to be some issue in the kitchen that I tried my best to ignore, but was just at the point of inquiring about the delay when the plates came out. This is most likely a one-time occurrence that shouldn't greatly influence readers in their decision about where to have lunch.