Ten Years' Hiding in Plain Sight End

Enchilada Warehouse

2106 North St. Mary's Street, at Grayson

We went trolling around the Tobin Hill - Monte Vista - Alta Vista part of town in search of a dozen or so restaurants I found listed on Urbanspoon that I had never heard of. I figured that, this being My Home Turf, I would know what's where. Most of the places I'd written down did not, in fact, exist (one listing showed an Indian restaurant half a block from my house), a couple did, and though I don't know any more about them, I at least know now that they are there, waiting to be sampled.

Across the street from a continually-failed restaurant (an elegant, elaborate Mission-style place that's housed probably 15 different attempts at high-end Mexican cuisine since it was built about 15 years ago) on North Saint Mary's is the unprepossessing Enchilada Warehouse & Cantina, looking for all the world like a well-kept double-wide Hill Country mobile home. Something about it called to me: it didn't look sufficiently derelict to be in that neighbourhood, maybe. It being almost noon, and most of our potential eateries being but a sad episode in some entrepreneurial restaurateur's past, we decided to stop in.

It was too late for breakfast tacos; the menu says they're only served until 10AM. I know, they'd probably make them for us if we asked nicely, but there are reasons why restaurants have that sort of cut-off, and it'd be rude to insist at that late hour.

The specialty of the house is enchiladas in all their manifestations, although a sign out front claims they have the best carne guisada in town. Enchilada plates run about $7; daily specials are a dollar less, but today's was chicken mole enchiladas, and I'm not a big fan of most moles. According to our waitress, enchiladas tricolores are their biggest seller, so I went for that. Rick, who has his favourites and rarely departs from them (pot to kettle: "hey, you're black"), ordered enchiladas verdes.

Last city inspection: January 2011
22 demerits

As usual, while we waited for our orders, we had a chance to assess the look and feel of the place. There are two dining rooms: a small one, essentially a hallway, with half a dozen tables as you enter; and a larger one just beyond, with about a dozen tables and three or four booths. The tables are well-spaced, making the room feel larger than it is. The booths, however, had low benches that were too far from the table, making it a little uncomfortable to sit there. I tried moving the bench closer, but was only partly successful before I gave up.

The décor is taquería-standard. It looks like someone with a good eye for colours painted the place and suggested the major wall hangings, and then the children were brought in to adorn the remaining spaces with hand-lettered signs and souvenirs bought on a trip to Nuevo Laredo before the recent troubles. The combination produces a feeling of comfort, as though you were in your mom's dining room and no company was expected. 

The service was competently efficient with only a bit of stiffness. This restaurant, it seemed, is a place where regulars, and only regulars, come to eat, so we must have seemed stranger than we really are. But our waitress got over it, and went about her business promptly, and with a minimum of fuss. Chips and two kinds of salsa arrived with our coffee. The chips were fairly fresh, if not plentiful (there's a dollar charge for more) and the red salsa was tasty though not at all piquant. I didn't try the green. The coffee was pretty good, maybe a little weaker than would be my preference. (I don't like the kind of acidic sludge that seems to be the modern norm.)

The food, overall, was excellent. Rick's enchiladas verdes, he said, hit exactly the right level of spiciness. His frijoles refritos were well-made, and tasty, a little spicier than you get at most places. I had ranchero beans, which were also very good, and in the kind of quantity you expect: about a cup. Neither of us cared much for the Spanish rice, which was reasonably flavourful and not at all dry, as it so often is in Tex-Mex restaurants; the problem was that it was just a little mushy. My enchiladas were an absolute triumph. Beef, chicken and cheese, all were masterful creations, with good amounts of meat and cheese rolled in freshly-made tortillas and covered in excellent sauces, each good enough to serve to el obispo en domingo.  It made me feel special.

I've been down this stretch of St. Mary's Street a thousand times in the last twenty years and have never noticed this restaurant before today. The waitress says it's been there about ten years. My only excuse can be that my attention is always taken to the elaborate, colourful building across the street; the unassuming Enchilada Warehouse, set back behind its parking lot, never intruded on my consciousness. Well, that oversight has now been corrected.

Too Much of a Good Thing, Too Much of a Bad Thing

Chris Madrid's
1900 Blanco Road

When I first moved back to San Antonio twenty years ago, all of my new neighbours raved about Chris Madrid's. Even back then, it was a local institution, everybody's favourite burger place in the neighbourhood. I went there a couple of times and wasn't impressed. Actually, less than that: on my first visit, I thought my burger was gritty and overcooked, as though it had been dropped on the floor and not brushed off before being served. I tried the place a couple more times, convinced that there was something about it that I wasn't seeing. How could I not like a place that was so widely popular?

Never figured that one out, unless one takes as literally true the stock line about underestimating the general public. So for fifteen years or so, I've just avoided Chris Madrid's. Lots of people liked it; I didn't.

So I thought, after all these years of its continued popularity, it was time to give it another chance to impress.

I went with a friend who, like me, had never found much to be impressed by at Chris Madrid's. The first thing I noticed was that the outside patio was smaller, and the inside dining room larger. I guess that in a city where Winter is a Thursday in February, that's probably an improvement. They've closed off the old corner entrance, so now you enter from the patio, and have to wind your way through a narrow path blocked by chairs of the morbidly obese to the counter by the old corner entrance. Place your order at the register and receive one of those radio-activated vibrators, which will let you know you're order's ready back at the pick-up counter. We split an order of the macho nachos; he ordered the bacon cheeseburger (I forget what clever name they have for it, but a rose by any other name...) and I got the jalapeño cheeseburger.

The employees' names and faces have changed, but otherwise it's the same group of vaguely disinterested, somewhat distracted people, who give you the impression that they would already be at some more important place if you didn't have to have your goddam hamburger. I'll make an exception for the older woman who ran one of the registers; she, alone among the half-dozen or so staff I spoke to, evinced some interest in customer satisfaction and comfort. But the rest of them were like college students during finals week after a semester of bingeing.

The nachos came out first. These consisted of perfectly flat tostada quarters layered with refritos, picadillo and cheese; jalapeños come on the side, in insufficient quantity. The refritos are billed on the menu as something like an old family recipe. I found them runny, which, compared to dry, is the lesser of two evils when it's a side dish to your enchiladas; but as the base layer for a nacho it makes for a soggy tostada. Add to that some well-seasoned picadillo that is made from the cheapest ground beef and not drained at all, so that the grease from the meat runs off the sides and soaks into the tostada. Cheese is applied on top, in generous but not excessive quantity. Making this combination of ingredients taste bad would be a feat beyond the capacity of any hung-over, dragged-out crackhead, and I'm relieved to report that the taste was, naturally, pretty good. Messy as hell, and eating them required that I metaphorically gag and bind the health-conscious part of my inner self (which, I can tell by a glance in the mirror, has never been overly assertive anyway), but yes, they tasted pretty good.

My friend liked his bacon-cheeseburger. Naturally, I couldn't let him get away with just the bare comment, "It's good." I quizzed him on what he liked about it, and how he would rate it. His comments were, essentially, that (A) it was extremely greasy, (B) there was a whole lotta cheese, and (C) the bacon wasn't cooked enough. He gave it four chili peppers out of five. I thought he was being generous, but then excessive grease and cheese don't really count as good things in my way of thinking.

There were plenty of jalapeños on my burger, and way too much cheese. Cheese oozed out the sides of the large bun like pahoehoe forming new islands on a paper-plate sea. Good quality cheddar cheese, but still way too much of it. The veggies that dressed the burger were reasonably fresh, machine-chopped (and probably ordered from a service) lettuce, tomato and onion in roughly equal quantities. The bun was oiled and might have been trotted past a grill, but there was little evidence of it. The meat patty was as large as the bun, and I swear that, overall, the sandwich is the greasiest burger I've ever had in nearly a half-century of burger-testing. Four chili peppers? I'd give it half that.

(And now that the experience of dining at Chris Madrid's is a few hours behind me, I'm beginning to suspect that the food was heavy on the salt, too: I'm as thirsty now as if I'd eaten half a Pizza Hut pizza, and starting to feel bloated.)

Last city inspection: July 2010
18 demerits

Inside, where it's air-conditioned, there are nice tile-topped tables with a southwestern feel, and lots of noise, in kind of a happy, welcoming way -- not the overbearing kind of loudness you find in so many late-model eateries. My only gripe about the interior is with the one-hole restroom: it's insufficient for a place this busy at 2:30 in the afternoon; I can't imagine what the line is like when the beer starts through the college students in the evening.

Outside are a number of picnic tables, about 18, six with umbrellas. It's only March, the temperature's only in the 80s, yet if you're not in the shade you start sweating very quickly. But in the evenings, when, I reckon, Chris Madrid's does most of its business, you don't have the sun to contend with, only the flies (which even now are barely tolerable; strange, I haven't seen any at home yet, and I don't live that far away) and the breeze. And pardon me for saying it, but any restaurant that's going to serve food that greasy and messy ought to offer cloth napkins that won't blow away in a light breeze, instead of those uber-cheap paper things from the bright red dispenser. If only for the environmental impact.

I have to pause here, and go drink another glass of water. I feel like Tantalus in the pool.

After visiting Chris Madrid's today, and again at a loss to understand how it can remain so popular for so long, I started asking people: Did they like it? If so, why, specifically? There are two reasons given, both of which echoed my companion at lunch: They like the grease, and they like the exuberance of cheese.

I'm sorry, but enough is enough, and Chris Madrid's is serving up way too much of each.

Picture This

Boardwalk Bistro
4100 Broadway
824-0100

I don't normally take pictures of food. I've seen enough blog photographs of Combination Plate #4 to be convinced that, barring exceptional understanding of the art, photographs of food are dull viewing. So I surprised even myself when the delivery of a dish to my table yesterday prompted me to run to the car for my little digital camera.

The dish was Boardwalk Bistro's seafood boil, a special concoction for the restaurant's "Mardi Gras Menu," a selection of five special dishes in honour of the nation's greatest city-wide festival of excess. I really wanted the boudin with shrimp and crawfish étoufée, but settled on this more expensive ($15) choice on the ground that it had to be less fattening. I was probably wrong about that, but have no regrets, having not been on a scale in some time.

Last city inspection: March 2010
7 demerits

Boardwalk Bistro is my friend Rick's favourite restaurant, to the point where he exchanges health reports with Cindy, the waitress; so we've been there a number of times. Despite being somewhat pricier than our normal pool of taquerías and coffee-shops, we find it a good venue for the occasional splurge: reliably good, comfortable and clean, with a tempting and varied menu. The atmosphere in the dining room, as I vaguely recall, is cheerful and somewhat chic, though more crowded than cozy. I say this because I remember having to squeeze past people to get to the restroom; but usually we sit outside, on the large deck, where only a too-strong sun, a too-stiff breeze, or episodes of too-loud traffic might blemish the ambiance. 

The starting point for the food at Boardwalk Bistro is the Mediterranean. There's plenty of feta cheese, tzatziki sauce and hummus for those who think the Mediterranean stretches only from Phoenicia to Ionia, but the kitchen here understands "Mediterranean" in a more expansive sense, and includes tastes from all around the inland sea to the Pillars of Hercules, with a few side-trips to more land-locked places for things like knackwurst and sauerkraut. Duck, veal and lamb snuggle up with the triumvirate of beef, chicken and pork, plus their vegetarian step-sister, to make a menu fit for any persnickety palate. Rick, having taken some mild umbrage at my earlier teasing observation that he always ordered the Greek salad here, went instead for the blackened-chicken Caesar salad instead, to prove he could. Our exorbitantly-cheerful friend Peter, whom we'd dragged from his sick-bed for the selfish pleasure of hearing his Orleanian accent, wanted only a bowl of the tortilla soup (Rick and I also ordered cups of that). I, as I started out to say, took on the seafood boil.

Now, tortilla soup is on its way to becoming an iconic dish around here, and it may someday form a Tex-Mex Trinity with enchiladas and breakfast tacos. I was introduced to the stuff about twenty years ago, when one of my good friends, the Hankmeister, embarked upon a quest to find the best tortilla soup in San Antonio. My personal preferences are the soups at (1) Los Barrios, (2) Jim's (!) and (3) Panchito's on McCullough, but these days the ground is thick with Honourable Mentions, and the dish has become something of a playground for chefs who feel the need to make it their own. The chefs at Boardwalk are, it seems, secure enough in their abilities to leave well enough alone: they content themselves with combining traditional ingredients of good quality in generous quantities to make a tasty bowl of soup. If, like me, you want your tortilla soup to have a little kick to it, let your waiter know and the kitchen will oblige.

The Caesar salad with blackened chicken was an outstanding choice. Rick pronounced it so, and his actions backed up his words. He was well into it before I got back with the camera, and came up for air only long enough to describe it as perfectly prepared, with tender chicken, seasoned and seared to wonderment, overlaying fresh, crisp greens coated with a rich, creamy home-made dressing. Then it was gone. I probably wouldn't have taken a picture of it anyway (see above), but it would have been a pretty good picture by my amateur standards.

And then, there's that big ol' seafood boil, a luscious-looking bowl of mussels, crab and shrimp with potatoes and corn, elegantly presented in a rich lobster sauce with a sprinkling of thread-like shoestring potatoes. Delicious, and well worth the mess of eating the shellfish. The sauce was too good to leave, but there is, sadly, no tasteful way to get it out of the bowl, unless you're willing to work with a tiny soup spoon. I tried, but gave up. If you're unconcerned about etiquette, there is a plastic straw handy....

Real andouille is thicker and darker than the smoked
sausage you get at the grocery store. This example is from
the Best Stop, in Scott, Louisiana, and is probably the
best andouille made in the New World.

The only disappointment in the seafood boil was that the sausage, billed on the menu as andouille, was plain ol' country-smoked sausage, à la Eckrich Farms. A small matter, perhaps, but if I'm promised andouille, my mouth isn't going to be satisfied with less.

Boardwalk Bistro has something of a reputation for exquisite desserts, so when our waitress asked about it, and Rick looked thoughtful, I suggested he go for it. He did, probably because he remembered that it was my turn to pick up the check, but he knew he wouldn't be able to fend off the fork-raids. His choice was key lime cheesecake; my choice was an extra fork. Peter expressed no opinion regarding dessert.

The cheesecake itself had a light texture and a delicate flavour, as is appropriate for those bitter little limes; though the graham-cracker crust seemed to lack a bit of richness. By way of enhancement, the dessert came with a delicate coating of crème brulé that, unfortunately, was just a tad too brulé in places. Had I not expected perfection from this restaurant, an expectation born of experience, I might have been more satisfied with it; as it is, I wasn't, entirely. Luckily, though, it wasn't my dessert.