Blanco Café #2: Should've Kept Going Down the Road

We were on our way to lunch, heading in on Blanco Road from Park North after a small Christmas Shopping binge, having the usual conversation. You've all had it; it goes like this:

Me: Where do you want to go for lunch?

You: Any place is fine with me.

We came upon Blanco Café, in a little shopping center just north of Jackson-Keller Road. I had never been there; my friend Rick hadn't been in years. So we stopped in.

Part of my reason for going on this occasion, in addition to its Right Place, Right Time quality, was that the mom and pop that started the Blanco Café years ago were good friends of my next-door neighbours. On every special occasion that I can think of -- quinceañeras, birthdays, graduations -- Blanco Cafe had been the venue for their celebrations. Then, if memory serves, mom and pop retired and split their culinary empire up among their children; sort of like Charlemagne, and I've heard, though had not investigated personally, that the results were, figuratively speaking, similar.

I can now attest to the truth of those rumours, at least as regards the Castle Hills location. (There are several others around town, and since, reportedly, they don't all share management or ownership, the others deserve their own investigation. We wouldn't want to paint with too broad a brush here.)

The place is not as big as it looks from the outside. It's tucked back in the part of the shopping center farthest off the road, through, shall we say, a decorative arch, with a large parking lot beyond. A couple of letters are missing from the sign on the arch, and yes, that is a clue to what you'll find inside. The place is something of a dump. By comparison, the Blanco Café nearer my neighbourhood, several miles south on Blanco, is also a dump, but it's a chic dump, in that it maintains its ancient charms in defiance of pointless progress. This place is just a dump, on its way to being really seedy. The décor is, in some ways, typical Tex-Mex: calendarios and icons and a few folk-art craft pieces mixed in with advertisements, witty signs ("Customers Wanted, No Experience Necessary"; I don't doubt it), unframed photographs and pictures taken from old calendars. There's soda-fountain seating along the wall by the entrance, and behind the counter are two large, well-lit but mostly empty soft drink cases, such as you might've seen at a Stop-&-Go back when they were around and were called ice houses. The tables are café-cheap, and pretty dinged up. Ours had a wad of paper towels under one leg to balance it, and the top looked like acid had splashed on it. The chair wobbled unsteadily, too.

The service was on the dour side. It took a while -- not a great while, but a while -- for anyone to bring us menus (laminated placemats, machine-folded while still warm so that they won't stay open), and by then we had both noticed that no one on the staff could spare a smile for anyone. Had they been swamped, I could understand if not excuse the sour looks, but while it was building up to the lunch rush, these people looked like they had just come from a union meeting where a strike had been voted. Finally a young woman came with menus and utensils, handed us these long menus, and took our drink orders. She returned a scant moment later ready to take our food orders, while I was still trying to get my menu to lie open. 

No one in the place had the customary chips and salsa I expect at Mexican restaurants. Not that I need chips and salsa, it's just expected at lunchtime. I suspect the absence of these is more related to cost than a concern for the clients' waistlines, and I do find that chips and salsa, like the sign, are a good indicator of what one can expect in the way of quality in the rest of the cuisine. 

Our waitress took our orders on her next visit to our table: cheese enchiladas with beef fajita for me, enchiladas verdes for Rick. A few minutes later she brought us tortillas; since we had nothing else to munch on while we waited, we could devote our full attention to the quality of the flour tortillas. (Someone once pointed out to me that, generally speaking, gringos want flour tortillas, while mejicanos want corn. It's not as uniformly true as it used to be, but I've observed it to be largely true. In my case, there's only one place in town where I routinely ask for corn tortillas; and I see more and more hispanics ordering flour tortillas these days than I used to. The waitress at Blanco Café didn't ask our preference; we got flour.) They were a good size, fairly heavy, a tad thicker than at most other places, but they had a good flavour, almost like naan. There were no survivors.

Rick's plate came out and was put before him. It was attractively done in the usual enchilada pattern: beans at one end of the oval plate, rice at the other, enchiladas down the middle with a lettuce-and-tomato salad for accent.

Eventually mine came out too, after just enough of a delay to start me wondering if I was going to be fed. Mine, too, had the traditional presentation, but with fajita meat in lieu of the salad.

The cheese enchiladas tasted exactly like what cheese enchiladas are supposed to taste like. I'm sure that when the first Spanish gobernador arrived to take up residence in his dusty little palace, now squatting behind City Hall, his cheese enchiladas tasted exactly like these, or he would have lopped off some heads, or done whatever gobernadors did to manifest displeasure. Had this been the only food I ate at Blanco Café, it would have rated five chili peppers.

The fajitas were pretty good too; maybe not five-chili-peppers good, but at least four. The seasoning was excellent, the meat was tender, there was no gristle (although there was a good deal of fat that should have been trimmed before cooking), and they were cooked perfectly well.

Sadly, though, we had other food to consider. Rick's enchiladas verdes were the right colour, but that's where the good news ends. They were tasteless. Not bad, just without flavour. And we both found the refried beans flavourless and runny, a sort of lumpy viscous bleagh. The rice was tastier, but it was too dry, probably from having sat around in the kitchen with the lid off the pot too long.

Quality Tex-Mex isn't all that hard to do. Like all cuisines, it depends on good ingredients, competent work in the kitchen, and some attention to details. It's on these last two criteria that Blanco Café #2 falters.