Best Chilaquiles? -- Marioli Meals To GOurmet

I was trolling through various blog posts by other foodies in San Antonio -- it's amazing how many of us there are -- when I came upon a comment that caught my eye. It was on a review of some Mexican, or maybe Tex-Mex, restaurant here in town, and a reader named Graciela had posted a comment that (after reciting as her bona fides that she was born and raised in Mexico City and has been in San Antonio for five years) included this statement: "Marioli in Stone Oak has the best chilaquiles you will ever eat." (I would provide a link to the comment, but now that I sit down to write this, I can't find it. I'm pretty sure it was on Under The [Dinner] Table, a blog I recommend, but a search came up empty.)

Well. I certainly cannot let that statement pass untested. And so, after a due amount of time, for reflection, and to gird myself for the venture waaaaaaaaaaay out into Ultra-Loopland, I set off, with my faithful sidekick Kato ... er, Rick ... to verify the report.

Marioli is actually Marioli Meals To GOurmet, a venture started by another Mexico City refugee, one Mariana Oliver, as a catering business with a deli shop on the ground floor. (The kitchen is upstairs.) Sadly, her dream of having a deli-slash-catering shop is fading, because her food is so good that the place is turning into a restaurant; customers insist, for some reason, on eating it, right there in the deli, and on doing so sitting down. So now the attractive interior has half a dozen tables, and half a dozen more adorn the entry plaza (on Tuscany Stone, just off Stone Oak Boulevard near 1604). 

On one side of the order station is a large case filled with ready-made entrées, all of which induce drool just to look at. I remember stuffed zucchini, cochinita pibil, enchiladas, and chiles rellenos, and there were at least as many others. On the other side are baked goods. Baked goods are my particular weakness, and I am trying to lose weight (I keep saying that, but nothing seems to happen), so I didn't look too closely; just enough to see cheesecake slices as big as Schilo's, three varieties of shortbread sandwich cookies, brownies cut in huge wedges, and a three-layered chocolate dessert the name of which escapes me at the moment. 

The menu is on boards hanging above the display cases. One refers to the prepared items available to go -- those in the first case, with prices by the pound or by the plate; a second gives prices and descriptions for the various sandwich options; another gives salad options; and the last, if I remember right, dealt with desserts. None of them offered chilaquiles. So I asked. Yes, they do make chilaquiles, but only on weekends. (This was on Thursday.) But since she had seen us waiting patiently outside for them to open, she said she would go ahead and make them for me. (It helped when I told her what I'd read on the internet and that I'd come to verify the statement.) Rick went for the club sandwich.

I think Rick is starting to regret going along with me on these epicurean quests, because whatever he gets, I insist he critique. He would be happy to say something is good, or bad, or in-between, but I want details. Details, damn it! What's the bread like? Are the ingredients fresh? How well are they prepared? What's the seasoning like? Usually he breaks down and offers me a sample, but sometimes my pestering him is ineffective. On this occasion, he finally did offer to let me try it, but by then I'd gathered sufficient information, so all I tried was the bread. On his report, the lettuce and tomato used were unusually fresh-tasting, the meats, particularly the ham, were excellent in both taste and texture, the mayonnaise was plentiful but not excessive, and the croissant on which the whole thing was served was buttery and fresh. I can attest to the last.

And my chilaquiles. 

As I've pointed out before in this blog, there are as many types of chilaquiles as there are distinct cuisines in Mexico. Most of the time, around here, "chilaquiles" means a dish made with scrambled eggs, onions, peppers, fried fragments of corn tortilla, and sometimes tomatoes. These chilaquiles were not of that type. These were chilaquiles in the style of Mexico City, and this is the first time I've found chilaquiles of this type outside Mexico City: tortillas cut in quarters and fried, heaped with shredded chicken, lushly covered in salsa verde and drizzled with sour cream. The entire plate was piled high with food, and I thought briefly that I should get a go-box for half of it. Couldn't bring myself to do that. (Which is why this place is becoming a restaurant: you just can't wait to get the food home.)

I'm not comparing these to chilaquiles of other sorts, most of which I love: they are alike only in name and in the eponymous ingredient (the pieces of fried corn tortilla). To say these are better or worse than a good taco of chilaquiles con huevo done in the bajía style would be like saying a perfect pork roast is better than a perfect salade niçoise; it'd be meaningless.

So, that said, are these the best chilaquiles I've ever eaten? Yes, they are. They are, easily, the best. My congratulations to Marioli's, and my thanks to Graciela, who wrote the comment that alerted me to this place. (And to Rick, who bought me a cookie before we left, a deliciously decadent chilled chocolate shortbread sandwich that I wish I'd let warm up before I ate it.)

Tacos Don Chente: The Same, Only Different

Tacos Don Chente isn't easy to get to from town. Located on the southwest corner of the 281/1604 intersection, where one-way frontage roads cross, you must either go across 1604, turn left twice, and then turn into the small, easy-to-miss driveway next to the large sign, and thread your way through a few unrelated parking lots; or you must go west on 1604 to the turnaround at Stone Oak, then drive all the way back to 281. If you take the turnaround on 281, as I tried about a month ago, you're put out onto the southbound access road too far south to get to that driveway.

Today, unusually, I happened to be at Stone Oak and 1604, in search of "the best chilaquiles you will ever eat," according to a comment on some restaurant review I saw -- but the place blessed with that praise doesn't open for breakfast. So I found myself with the chance to try Tacos Don Chente without elaborate maneuvers in the car.

From the outside, the place looks like any old fast-food restaurant. I'm pretty sure there used to be one in that space, and so right there we know that the world is a little bit better for seeing its demise. Inside, the place looks like some coherent effort has been made to make dining there a nice, slightly upscale experience. There was an unusually prominent bar, very nice colour schemes, some attractive if inexpensive artwork, and none of the tchatchkis folklóricos that so often substitute for a decorating theme in Mexican restaurants. From the moment I sat down, I felt comfortable. Strangely so, as if I'd been there before.

The waitress brought menus, and my friend Rick and I were both smitten with a wave of déjà vu. Except for the name on the front, the menu is exactly the same as the one at Potosino, where we had breakfast yesterday. The waitress confirmed that both restaurants share the same ownership.

Since I posted a review of Potosino just last month, it would seem, at first blush, pointless to spend any of my oh-so-valuable time writing about Tacos Don Chente. But there are some qualitative differences. The food, while still better than average, is not quite as good coming out of Don Chente's kitchen as Potosino's. This  likely just reflects a natural difference between two people doing the same job, but I found the chilaquile tacos at Don Chente to be a little less agreeable in seasoning; and Rick thought the beef fajita tacos, which we both thought were excellent at Potosino's, to be not quite as perfectly prepared. The flavour was slightly muted, the doneness not as on-the-mark.

Service at Don Chente was good. If I raised their rating by a half a chili pepper, I wouldn't think I was overselling them. The staff was cheerful, and worked well as a unit without making us feel like we'd stepped into a tag-team operation. Our food was brought promptly, and our coffee cups were kept filled. (Coffee here, by the way, is served in regular cups, with saucers, in keeping with the slightly tonier feel of the place; at Potosino's, they're served in large mugs. Normally I prefer mugs, but that's just because in most places the staff are not as diligent in their attentions.)

The tables at Potosino are stocked with a sugar dispenser of salsa verde; here, the server brings two salsas, a red and a green, with the food. This, too, is a nicer touch, and while I found the salsa verde somewhat less piquant than at the other restaurant, the salsa rojo was nicely spiced, right up to the edge of perfection.

The Beverage Bar

Just for a change of pace, we decided to forgo our usual taco run, and try out a new-ish coffee house in the 'burbs between the loops this morning. It was nearly noon by the time we got there, but technically it was still morning, and on some days that's close enough.

The place is called The Beverage Bar. It sits unobtrusively in a oak-tree-studded Suburban Modern strip center on Thousand Oaks, just east of Jones-Maltsberger Road. It has all the 21st-Century requisites: free Wi-Fi; flat-screen televisions, one tuned to a sports channel, another to something more estrogen-laced; Old-Fashioned games and puzzles (a young man brought his son in and played Connect Four at the next table; what memories that brought back!); and, reportedly, something called a Wii Station. Also "local roast" coffee, though why it should matter where coffee is roasted is a mystery to me. (Yes, I know all about carbon footprints, but am so tired of hearing about it from people who sit in drive-through lanes with the engines running in their gigantic SUVs, or sit home with their thermostats turned to environmentally unfriendly temperatures, that I get testy about it at times.) But there it is. 

The look of the place is impressive. The shopping center itself is attractive, which is saying a lot. All the buildings are stucco above limestone, with Hill Country-style metal rooves. Many of the live oaks that inhabited the property before development remain, and give the place a feel more of Comfort than Loopland. Inside the Beverage Bar, the decor was done by someone with a real flair for colour, and a minimalist sense that would do the Chinati Foundation proud. And I mean that in a good way, more Claes Oldenburg than Carl Andre. The room is large, spacious, and starkly furnished, yet comfortable. The lighting is good for those who wish to read as well as for those who are slaves to their Mac Books and smart phones. Outside is a large covered veranda area which, presumably, will be stocked with a few comfortable tables when the weather improves. (Even with the noise from the road, it'd be a shame to waste that space.)

The young women behind the counter when we visited were very good. They were friendly but not overbearing, knowledgeable but not garrulous, and pleasant to deal with. They were helpful and patient when we confronted the surprising difficulty of making a choice of what to order -- everything looked soooooo good in the case -- and they were attentive even after the bill was paid and the food and drink consumed. 

Our drinks were straightforward: a cup of coffee for me, a root beer for my friend. (I forget the brand of root beer, but noted that it was from a company in Mukilteo, Washington, which I visited just a few months ago. The Boeing factory tour is in Mukilteo, as is the Mukilteo Light.) The coffee was too strong for my liking, while the root beer possessed a full yet subtle flavour, with none of the flab of the major labels, nor any of the white-lightning brashness of the house brands. (Bet you didn't know it was possible to appreciate root beer like you do wine.)

The food was fascinating in concept but, sadly, disappointing in experience. I simply had to order a spaghetti taco (the little sign says "You've seen it on TV," but I never have; this was my first exposure to the idea). Well, okay, spaghetti in a fried corn tortilla shell. Nothing wrong with that. I'm sure it's very popular with the Lego-and-Barbie Doll set, but it left me cold.  I hesitate to describe it, because I honestly believe that this dish is not meant for discerning adults, and its target demographic could not care less about its qualities, but here goes: the spaghetti was overcooked, and the sauce on it was thin and watery. It would have been better, I think, in a soft taco, too -- more like the forbidden spaghetti sandwiches I used to make as a child, when I, too, gave not a hoot about seasonings or textures.

That taco, I ordered only out of curiosity; I didn't actually expect to really like it, and in fact I left half of it. (Yes! Me!) I also now put it aside in my mind as not being serious food. More like the cartoon before the movie, back in the days (before my time) when there actually were cartoons before the movies. It was more of a plaything, an amuse-bouche, if you will. My real breakfast was the guilelessly named Breakfast Sandwich: eggs, cheese, choice of meat (I went with bacon) and choice of bread (I went with flatbread). This I expected much more from.

It didn't quite hit the target. Eggs, by themselves, are not particularly tasty things; they need butter to give them richness or they end up tasting like egg substitute. These tasted like egg substitute. Bacon must be fried in an open skillet and allowed to crinkle and curl and soak in its own grease. This bacon looked like it had been pressed in a machine and tasted only vaguely bacon-like. The cheese -- cheddar -- was perfectly good but scanty in application, so it failed to make up for the shortcomings of the other ingredients. The flatbread was ... a little flat. Okay, bad pun, but it just seemed to lack something, flavour-wise; though it did have a good texture. Maybe it should have been heated up a little before serving. 

My friend's turkey-and-swiss sandwich, on the other hand, was outstanding. A generous but not excessive portion of thinly sliced turkey breast, paired with a good-quality swiss cheese, graced a perfectly wonderful  soft, tasty bread, and shared it with fresh-from-the-farm lettuce and tomato to make a sandwich that promised little and delivered much. The opposite of any politician. Really top-notch stuff, this.

This place also bills itself as a juice bar and, I'm thinking, does wine as well, which might have made an interesting pairing with that sandwich ... maybe a nice Jo'burg reisling. I'll have to try that, next time I'm there. Because I will be back. Just not for breakfast.

Say No More: Dough Pizzeria Napoletana

Lunch today was at Dough Pizzeria Napoletana, on Blanco Road, just inside Loop 410, in the shopping center across the road from Park North (what used to be Central Park Mall). The Curmudgeon is frustrated and perplexed, because he couldn't find anything significant to grouse about. Nothing. The place is damn near perfect.

It's a small place, and though it's located in an unremarkable strip center with unremarkable architecture of the purely functional variety, the owner has fixed up the inside with a sensitivity to Italian style that transports me back to the Old Country: a washed concrete floor that could live in any 18th Century Calabrian villa; walls painted a masculine red, accented with blond woods and black tables, black industrial-chic ceiling (except over the kitchen, where there's a gorgeous dropped ceiling of more blond wood). The kitchen takes up nearly half the space, and is right out in the open, surrounded by counter seating, yet the sounds of the kitchen create no distraction in the dining room -- a remarkable feat of auditory engineering that seems to be beyond the capability of every other restauateur in town. The place is gorgeous inside. And though the dining room is surprisingly small, and was fairly crowded, I couldn't overhear anything that was said at any of the other tables. A blessing, and a curse. Recorded music helped cover the ordinarily intrusive sounds of conversation and kitchen, yet was unobtrusive, and suited to the type of place: vaguely Italian-sounding instrumental pieces, and not a single opera solo. Definitely a blessing. Outside are a number of tables, with serapes and gas heaters standing by, but who would want to sit out there, listening to the traffic on Blanco Road, when this majestically created space is available?

The service was astounding. Though I wonder at the wastefulness of whisking away my half-consumed soft drink and replacing it with another, this is the level of service one would anticipate at the finest restaurants in New York or London. I can say it was attentive, refined, knowledgable, timely, efficient, quiet and thorough, yet I do not have words adequate to the description. It was that good.

And then there's the food. It has been a long, long time since I sat in a restaurant in Italy and ate a pizza, but the pizza margherita I had today was better than the best I can remember there. Very different from American pizza, and frankly I think I prefer a good New York-style pizza to any that I've ever had in Italy. But as even the national-chain purveyors of cosiddetto pizza claim to understand, it's about the ingredients, and you cannot fault the ingredients used at Dough. 

They make their own mozzarella, and even a paisan like me, who's never spent more than three consecutive days on a farm, knows, mozzarella doesn't travel well. You make it, you use it there, because by the time it gets through any kind of food-distribution system, it will be reduced to ... well, that rubbery crud you get at the grocery store. 

They have heirloom tomatoes grown to their specifications. Look at the bowl sitting by the kitchen; there are half a dozen tomatoes in there, varieties you've never seen at HEB. They come from a farm in Schertz.

They grow their own herbs. Well, okay, that's not that hard; I, with my black thumb, grow my own, too, but to grow enough for a business like this requires a significant investment.

The people who own this place have gone to a great deal of trouble to make a pizzeria as authentically Neapolitan as possible. Until today, I would have thought that a distinction of dubious value, never having been impressed with pizza in Italy; but this place, in every respect, is a triumph. I guess I was just going to the wrong places. Now ... well, who needs to go all the way to Italy?

Uptown Upscale: Mary Lou's Café

Mary Lou's has come of age quickly. When I saw the large (for the area) building going up in the retro-chic quasi-blighted section of McCullough as it passes through Olmos Park, I thought, This place will never make it. I was wrong; not for the first time, but one of the few. Mary Lou's has worked out all the kinks of a new restaurant, and is on its way to excellence. Maybe because it's descended from an established place on the South Side, and combines down-home Tex-Mex cookin' with North-Side glitz in a way just far enough over the top to be amusing instead of tacky. It even seems to be sparking a slight gentrification in that area; even the car-wash next door has had a facelift.

I first went there about a year ago and was only moderately impressed. In my memory, the service seemed vague, the food merely good, the prices a tad higher than they should have been, and the décor ... absurd. The colours were all right for a Mexican place, maybe shaded just enough to clash, and the hangings were a mix of Victorian cat-house and Tamaulipas  pulquería, with the odd neon beer sign thrown in. The floors are marble; why, I don't know. The seating in the main dining room, unlike a bayou farmhouse, seems too small for the room. A line of high-backed benches down the middle gives a visual hint of romance and intimacy, but the space is so vast, and so noisy, that there is precious little of either. 

I don't know that any of that has changed since that first visit; I suspect there have been minor revisions, because the place no longer seems so irredeemably outré; but maybe I've just grown inured to it. In any case, I've discovered that what appears to be a bar, off to the left as you enter, makes a much more comfortable dining room in which to enjoy the excellent food on offer here.

I took a friend that I haven't seen in a while -- you can't swing a dead cat in this town without hitting one of those. She ordered a carne guisada plate that must have been cooking for days, the meat was so incredibly tender. The seasoning of it was somehow out of the ordinary, in a way I can't identify. Not so fantastic as to warrant the sobriquet "extraordinary," but remarkable enough to exceed the faint praise of "ordinary." My dish was beef fajitas asada. Preparation and presentation were both on the high end of the quality scale. The beef was cooked just to the ripe edge of perfection, with a bit of a crust starting to form; and the onions and peppers were browned to as fine a point. 

The side dishes are what holds Mary Lou's back from that last half-chili-pepper. The rice was better than average but nothing special; the refried beans my friend had were unremarkable, while my borracho beans were above-average but not outstanding. There was just a sense of intentions unrealized about them, as though someone had laboured long and hard over a fabulous recipe, only to have it mishandled in the execution. 

On the plus side, the corn tortillas here are excellent. The flour tortillas are merely good. The tostadas, too, were unexceptional, while the salsa was flavourful, with a hint of roasted pepper to it, and a good texture, but a tad more cilantro than I think is necessary. 

The service was excellent, very much better than on any of my previous visits. The prices are still slightly higher than your average Tex-Mex lunch spot, but they're not out of line with the competition in the area. If they were, I suspect that this place, in this odd location, would not have lasted this long.

Neptune's Seafood House

It's not often I get a hankering for seafood. Almost never, in fact, though I like it fine. The quality of seafood suffers mightily when freshness starts to pass, and it starts to pass mighty quick. Unless you're willing to pay the price to get that fish from the water to your plate in very short order, you just ain't gonna get no really good fish. So in a town like San Antonio, close to God but far from the sea, I have pretty low expectations of seafood.

Tonight, though, the wife had a hankering for fish. I, who generally disagree for mere sport, know better than to resist those rare desires, so I went to my trusty local Urbanspoon website to see what places in town were well thought of by people who could be bothered to state a preference. There were a surprising number listed, but that turns out to be distorted: anyplace that offers a fried fish filet sandwich or popcorn-shrimp appetizer gets a listing as a seafood restaurant. (I mean, come on: Bill Miller Barbecue, listed under seafood? There needs to be some discernment in the passing around of those rubrics.) But with a few clicks, I was able to come to a choice between two local restaurants, actual seafood restaurants, that had perfect ratings from the general public. Admittedly, not a lot of votes were cast for either -- 15 for one, 17 for the other -- but that's the way it is with the smaller local restaurants. That's why restaurants with high ad budgets and glitzy locations near freeways tend to win all the best-of competitions; it's a popularity contest. But I figure that if everybody who voted said they liked a place, it must have something to recommend it.

Here's what Neptune's Seafood House on Goliad Road has to recommend it: moderate prices, down-home atmosphere, and reasonably good service. Judging from the number of people in the place, all of whom looked like they were regulars, they do good fried fish, too. I don't generally eat fried fish, because (a) it's fried, and I have beach-related hopes for later in the year; and (2) the upside on fried fish is small, while the downside is very large. In other words, it's hard to excel at fried fish, but easy to do it badly.

They do have, though, a few grilled options on the menu: grilled fish (variety unspecified), grilled shrimp, a combination of the two, and grilled catfish; plus grilled chicken, for those who like feathered seafood. Tonight they also offered grilled tilapia and grilled salmon, but we'd already placed our orders long before we noticed that sign. 

The place is a throwback to the 1960s or '70s, back to an era when nobody really paid any attention to a salad. Remember when restaurant salad meant iceberg lettuce, a slice or two of tomato, and maybe some colourful third ingredient? They still serve those salads at Neptune's. The lettuce is fresh enough, but utterly tasteless, and it comes in gigantic chunks that no person could get a mouth around with any kind of aplomb. The tomatoes were sliced, I'm guessing, a week ago at some processing plant in California. The colourful third ingredient is carrot, julienned by machine into little sticks about the size of those little boxed matches that self-important night clubs and hotel bars used to give away to show they were a cut above. The shredding of these carrots pre-dated the tomato-slicing by perhaps a further week.

But salad ... well, y'know. People don't come to Neptune's for salad. Salad, there, is a vague bow toward the concept of healthy eating; it's not meant to be actual healthy eating itself. Salad exists to assuage the guilt that people get when they order a plate of fried seafood: they can hear their mothers in the back of their minds, telling them to eat their vegetables, so they have this salad. And it is what it is meant to be. It comes, you eat it, and then, duty done, the fish comes.

We both chose the combination plate of grilled fish and shrimp. From the five sides on offer, I chose the salad (here's to healthy eating) and a baked potato; the Mrs. picked the salad and rice pilaf. Perhaps if the waitress had mentioned that the plate came with rice pilaf already, she would have ordered something else as one of her sides, but the fact was not disclosed on the menu, and the waitress thought it best to keep mum as well. So the wife ended up with two servings of rice pilaf. And if I had known that my starchy urges would be thus attended to, I know I would not have opted for the baked potato, a $1.39 extra.

As it turns out, the rice pilaf was the best feature of the combination plate. It was well-cooked and had a good, nutty taste, helped by generous inclusion of pignoles. The baked potato, on the other hand, was regrettable. A little rock of potato, barely cooked through, kept too long in a warmer set to too low a temperature, and offered up with a handful of Country Crock margarine capsules and a tube of Daisy sour cream, plus a little plastic tub -- the kind you put your salsa in at Taco Cabana -- of what can only be HEB Mexican Mix Fancy Shredded Cheese. 

Now, the fixin's for the potato -- the margarine, the sour cream, the cheese -- would all have been fine had the potato been good, or had the price been lower (like, nothing). But for $1.39, even at a restaurant of this unpretentious ilk, you ought to get better than what they're serving up.

The fish and the shrimp were okay. I thought the fish was a little on the soggy side; my wife thought it was just fine the way it was. The shrimp were nicely seasoned and properly cooked. They were the size that grocery stores sell as medium, so four make a pretty good portion alongside two filets of some white fish. 

The only other thing on the plate was a dinner roll, of the packaged variety. I considered it dry and tasteless; my wife thought it heavenly. Go figure. (She only ate half of hers, but that's because she, too, plans to be on the beach at some future point, not because it was dry and tasteless ... though it was.)

Neptune's strong point (besides, presumably, fried fish) is the atmosphere in the place. Unless you require someone to recommend a wine, you can't help but feel relaxed and comfortable in this place. There's no rush, no stuffiness, no pretense to be anything other than what it is. It's busy but not crowded, noisy but not loud. (The curmudgeon in me wants to point out here that this encapsulates the difference between restaurants on the North Side and restaurants on the South Side, but I don't really know that this is so; I just have a feeling about it.) It's just a pleasant place to be on a Friday evening. (That might be different during Lent, but now, at the inception of Carnivál, I stand by what I say.)

The service was good, as far as performance is concerned, but the waitress's failure to point out the board showing the day's specials, and her reticence regarding the rice pilaf, count against. And the place is a good value (I see it's rated at two dollar-signs on Urbanspoon, but it's not that expensive; all of the grilled options on the menu -- the things I paid closest attention to -- were under $9; our total bill, including that baked potato add-on, was less than $20.)