Twinkies All Around

Big Bob's Burgers
2215 Harry Wurzbach

(just south of Rittiman Road)

Noting that Big Bob's Burgers is about to open a location near my neighbourhood, on Hildebrand, it was almost pre-ordained that when my friend Rick and I found ourselves on Harry Wurzbach looking for a place for lunch, we would pull into the parking lot of their bright yellow ramshackle building. We arrived just at 11.00, early enough that the neon "Open" sign hadn't been turned on; we were the first customers of the day for them

The menu is straightforward: burgers, fries, tots, onion rings. Three kinds of cheese are offered for the burgers: Swiss, American, and cheddar. I opted for the cheeseburger combo, with cheddar cheese, fries and ice tea — which is available sweetened and unsweetened. (That's three times in a week I've had ice tea; it's also three times in three years. I must be trending.) On an impulse, I ordered a "deep fried Twinkie," having heard of similar silliness (I understand deep fried Mars bars are popular in Scotland). Rick chose the bacon cheeseburger, with Swiss, and onion rings. 

The service was excellent. The young lady behind the register was friendly, engaging, and informative. The manager (possibly the owner; I don't know) was solicitous of his customers, going from table to table making sure everything was satisfactory. (The place is popular with soldiers from nearby Fort Sam; we were about the only people not in uniform; although I was wearing my camouflage shorts from Wal-Mart, so I'm sure I blended right in.) He was particularly interested in my take on the deep fried Twinkie, and told me he'd gotten the idea from a place in Las Vegas.

The prices are about right, for the most part. I thought $1.95 for the fried Twinkie was a little on the steep side, but I'm not going to get worked up about it. The combo price is a pretty good deal at, I think, $6.50, and the á la carte prices are in line with similar places. 

The city's health inspectors appear to be
unaware of the existence of this place.

While we were waiting for our orders to come out, I had a chance to note that the dining room was not very carefully tended. There was food on the floor under some of the tables, including ours, and since the restaurant had just opened, it must have been there all night. Someone needs to check up on the closing crew. (On the other hand, it does offer evidence of a lack of scavenging vermin in the place....) And the floor beneath the soda fountain looks like it hasn't heard the whoosh of a broom since Lieutenant Eisenhower brought his bride to dine. (Having noticed this, I was particularly interested in the city's food-safety inspection report; but I couldn't find that the place has ever been inspected.) The rest of the place, including the restroom, seemed indifferent clean, as a certain English bard or Danish prince might say: that is, clean but not sterilized.

I'm sorry to report that the burger was only fair. It was of a good size, and properly cooked, and the sesame seed bun was reasonably fresh, as were the dressings of lettuce, tomato, pickles and onion. The correct cheese was present in respectable quantity. But the whole package just lacked that special burger flavour that I always look for, that grilled taste that lets you feel you're in somebody's back yard, feet up on a box, waiting for someone to bring you another beer. The burger was strangely bland.

The fries weren't bland, but they weren't good. Deep fried in oil that needs badly to be filtered or changed, they came out with the flavour of seasoned salt and old grease. The seasoned salt I could live with (though I regard it as a passing fad, and would prefer to be given a choice not to have it), but the old grease flavour is not what I look for in my french fries.

Rick's burger was about the same, though he did like the bacon's flavour. And his onion rings were definitely in the top half of their class. The quantity was up there, too: I left most of my fries on the table because they were lousy; he left some of his onion rings because there were just so many of them.

Surprisingly, that deep fried Twinkie was the high point of my visit. Not that I would get it again, but it was definitely an enjoyable splurge. It came out looking like a flabby, undercooked corn-dog, on a wide popsicle stick, golden-brown with just a hint of darker colours around the edges. I admit that I haven't experienced the taste of a Twinkie in, oh, dozens of years, but as soon as I touched it to my tongue I could identify that remarkably memorable taste of sponge cake and preservatives that is the hallmark of the eternal kiddie treat. The filling, however, melts in the heat and puddles at the bottom. While this gives you a pleasant charge of sweetness when you get down that far in your devouring, it also gives you an unpleasant burning sensation as it dribbles out onto your fingers when the feeble cake shell is breached. Be warned, but enjoy.

A Sense of (Disposable) History

Clear Springs Restaurant
1692 South Texas Highway 46
New Braunfels

(in the community of Clear Springs, at the turn-off to the New Braunfels Municipal Airport)

There's something about a really old building put to a new use that makes people feel comfortable. Psychologists might explain it with reference to our disposable culture, I suppose, but when you get right down to it, who cares why it's so? At Clear Springs, that disposable culture goes up against our sense of history; I'm not sure which side wins.

(photo from restaurant's web site)

Here's what you do: take a big ol' barn of a place that was around the last time Comanches attacked; bring it up to code; decorate it in the instant-relic style of a Cracker Barrel restaurant; line the rustic-style tables up as though it were a church hall, and fill the place with gimcrack souvenirs and the familiar aromas of frying, and swing wide the doors. That's pretty much what these people have done. They have four other locations around Texas, including in San Antonio proper, as well as the Gruene River Grill and Auntie Pastas in New Braunfels. Most of their other restaurants also inhabit "repurposed" old buildings, but ... well, I guess you can't find such things just lying around everywhere. 

We started off with an order of onion rings. We hadn't intended to; but as we sat down the waitress suggested that or fried pickles, and somehow it just seemed like the right thing to do. I'm glad we did, if only so I can say what they were like: they were good, with a light, crisp batter, and they were plentiful, piled high up on a (disposable) tray. I enjoyed every sinful one of them, and though I may say I regret the unnecessary calories, you'll know better than to believe me. When I say that I regret not having tried the fried pickles, I'm being a little more honest. Just a tad.

The menu reads like a who's-who of fried food. Because we'd split the order of onion rings, I decided that was enough fried food for a man just over a year from his first heart attack; so I ordered the grilled chicken, which is almost the only thing on the menu that isn't fried. And it's probably only there as a sop to people who believe all that healthy-eating crap that spews out from nanny-groups like the American Medical Association. Or for people like me, who acknowledge the truth of that stuff but generally implement it only in the everything-in-moderation sense. Well, a large half-order of rings was my moderation for the day. Rick, whose cardiac event was far enough in his past for him to pay it no mind, went with the chicken fried steak. I really wanted that chicken fried steak. 

My side orders of choice were green beans and garlic mashed potatoes; his were coleslaw and french fries.

Restaurant inspection reports in New
Braunfels are not available on line.

I tried hard to convince myself that his chicken friend steak was lousy, but really it wasn't. Maybe it wasn't a great chicken fried steak, but it was a good one. It had a fine-grained batter with moderate seasoning, maybe fried a touch too long, and it was tasty. Certainly better than my grilled chicken, but the chicken, too, wasn't as bad as I wanted it to be. It was acceptable, a large-ish chicken breast with nice grill marks and a slight crunch to the edges. Unfortunately, the (disposable) utensils provided were no match for the chicken. Other than that, I can't complain,* which in the context of a restaurant is pretty faint praise.

The side dishes were, for the most part, a step above the main dishes. My green beans were good enough to be fattening, and the garlic mashed potatoes were certainly fattening, and garlicky, and creamy-good. Rick's french fries were fried just to his liking, and seasoned lightly. The cream gravy for his steak was some evidence that yes, some cream gravy is better than other cream gravy. Only the coleslaw was in the range of mediocrity. Oh, and both dishes were decorated with a cold, hard slice of buttered Texas toast that could have been used as a coaster.

The service was good; personable in an aw-shucks-we-all-jes'-folks-here way; our waitress confessed to being born in (gasp!) Illinois, but she was appropriately apologetic for the fact.** She and her colleagues did their job in a solid way, not in any great hurry but not vanishing inexplicably at any point; though I did feel like I waited a long time for a refill on my ice tea at one point. Essentially, the wait staff put the customers at ease, made them feel welcome and comfortable and content.

* Obviously, I can. Some may recognize this as irony. Others won't get that.

** I can sympathise; I, too, was born in exile.

Smack-Dab in the Middle of the East Side

Angelica's Restaurant
311 North New Braunfels Avenue

(a couple of blocks south of Houston Street)

A small bit of business required my presence on the East Side yesterday, and as is my custom I made it an opportunity to sample a new restaurant in that part of town. The North Side may have a near monopoly on upscale glitz and trendiness, but the other parts of town are home to innumerable excellent small restaurants featuring any number of cuisines. My mood, however, mandated Tex-Mex or, as we loosely call it in these parts, Mexican food.

San Antonio is justly famous for Mexican food. There is, to be sure, an increasing number of excellent Mexican restaurants in other parts of the country, especially at the high end, but no other place in the USA can touch San Antonio for the sheer number of good taquerias and enchilada houses. They are scattered across this city like tinsel on a Christmas tree decorated by small children. And even within the genre of Mexican food, there is variety based on the origin of the kitchen's mastermind. Most people don't appreciate it — most of us go just to eat and enjoy and leave. We are Neanderthals most of the time. Even I, the Curmudgeon-About-Town, have been known to just eat and not appraise. 

Well. It would have been a good idea, maybe, if I'd taken that approach at Angelica's. 

We arrived at the height of the lunch rush. We thought it was a good sign that the parking lot was just about full. Imagine our surprise when we walked in and found the place all but empty. Seems there was some kind of sales meeting going on in their private dining room, which accounted for all the cars out front. 

The menu was unremarkable: breakfast on one side, lunch on the other. A quick scan told us that the prices were unremarkable as well, which is generally a good thing. 

I suspect that the waitress was new to the job. When my companion ordered beef fajita nachos, she had to copy it off the menu. I made life simple for her by asking for the Daily Special, which on Mondays is steak mexicana. She acted as though she had never heard of it, even though it's a regular enough Monday special to be printed right there on the laminated menu card. We both went for ice tea.

The tea arrived  first, two Texas tumblers filled with sweet tea that had that unmistakable tang of Lipton's. You either like it, or you don't, or you don't care. I don't care. I don't generally drink iced tea (though I had it again today, elsewhere, so I'm on something of a binge, I suppose), and Lipton's is fine with me. I do realize, however, that there is a fringe group of foodies out there who believe that artisanal ice tea is an art form to be sought out. They will not appreciate the tea at Angelica's.

Next to arrive was a bowl of chips and salsa. The chips were on the thick side, and still warm from the fryer (or maybe a heat lamp) and not too greasy, but neither were they especially flavourful. Let's just call them routine. The salsa was better than that, but still was nothing special. A shame, really; it's so easy for Mexican restaurants to entice return business with a notable bowl of salsa.

My friend's nachos arrived in good time. He politely waited for my food to arrive, despite my recommendation that he begin. He eats so much slower than I do (everyone does) that it's well he had a head start.

Some time later the waitress put in front of me a plastic basket containing one crisp taco. I looked at it and tried to recall what I'd ordered. Off the top of my head I couldn't remember but I was pretty sure it wasn't a single taco. In a moment it came to me, and I informed the waitress that I had ordered the steak mexicana. She looked at me as though, again, she had never heard of the dish. "The daily special," I said, wondering if maybe English was not in her purview. I tried to think of the Spanish for "daily special," but since much of my rusting command of that language comes from ordering in Mexican restaurants, where the accepted phrase is "el daily special," I was at something of a loss. But she took the taco away and left with a quizzical expression before I could complete the task of mentally translating the phrase.

At this point my companion decided to eat, and bless him, he offered me some. So I got to try the beef fajita nachos.

In the world of nachos, there seem to be two schools of thought: one, that the nachos should be carefully laid out, the chips precisely touching or evenly spaced, with a dollop of each ingredient carefully centered on the chip; the other, that the ingredients should form sort of a mound or jumble, filling the plate higgledy-piggledy in a sort of culinary riot. I personally prefer the latter, and so does the kitchen at Angelica's. It was a large platter covered with a veritable pile of chips dosed with refried beans, peppers, onions and seasoned meat, and decorated with one mound of guacamole and another of sour cream. 

Last city inspection: February 2010
28 demerits

They were fair. Nothing remarkable. The chips were the same not-quite-flavourful ones that had filled the bowl of tostadas; there was a smear of beans and lots of green pepper and enough onion, and the meat was a reasonably good cut reasonably well seasoned. The guacamole was good, the sour cream perfectly ordinary. Yet overall the nachos lacked flavour. They cannot be described as bland; nothing in Mexican cookery is bland; that's why I like it so much. They were just ... limp.

My food eventually arrived. The steak was a good cut of meat, cut in very small strips and finely prepared; the sauce was tasty and had good body. The rice and beans that accompanied the dish were, like so much else, unremarkable. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised to find number-ten cans of Gebhardt's refried beans in the kitchen dumpster. The corn tortillas I'd requested were made of flour, and not, I suspect, in the kitchen. Well, they were okay, too.

I don't know how long Angelica's has been around on New Braunfels Avenue, but overall, I'd say I regret having passed up three or four other taquerias on the way there. It was, after all, six or eight blocks out of my way, and that, it turns out, was a waste of precious gasoline.

This is cool.

I used to have a poster on my office wall called The Earth At Night. It was a composite of night-time satellite photographs of the entire globe, seamlessly joined. I used to love staring at it, picking out places I'd been, or places I wanted to go to, marvelling at the spread (or lack thereof) of development, wondering about the darkness of central Africa and the Amazon basin.

If you get off on that kind of imagery, check out this link.

Just a Little Better than Average

Las Pichanchas
450 Fredericksburg Road

(at Colorado Street, near Five Points)

There are probably more than a thousand small Tex-Mex restaurants in San Antonio, many of them, like this one, open for breakfast and lunch. There are probably fifty such places within half a mile of Five Points, catering to the local lunch trade. Most of them are run-of-the-mill, tacos and enchiladas the way mamá used to make them. You could probably try a different one every day for months and not have a single really bad meal. (You would, though, put on ten or fifteen pounds, unless you spend the rest of your day digging or swimming or doing something else that requires a lot of energy. Judging from the folks I see at local eateries (and in the mirror), not many of us are doing that kind of work.)

And if you run one of those thousand small restaurants, it's really tough to make yours into any kind of a destination. You have to do something better than the taquería on the next corner does; you have to be cheaper, or more convenient, or more welcoming, or you have to make your food better somehow.

Las Pichanchas does some of that, in small ways, which is why it's become a local success. It's one of the larger Tex-Mex places in the area, yet when I visited before the lunch rush peaked, it was hard to find a seat. And not just local workers were eating there: residents of the area were there with their children. Lots of them.

Most people who eat there probably walk over. I say this because the parking lot could never handle as many cars as it would take to carry that many people. And yet, even though it was the one very rainy day of 2011 (so far), I had no trouble parking right in front. 

The interior is done up in typical Tex-Mex-Restaurant style: walls of various brilliant hues that might lift the soul of tus padrones but would cause grinding of teeth among the Architectural Digest crowd. (There's a point for Las Pichanchas.) A few pictures on the wall, nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, the only intriguing thing about the place is the sign over the women's restroom: "Enter at your own risk." I maybe should have asked about that....

The waitresses are all dressed alike, in what seem to be an approximation of parochial girls'-school uniforms, guaranteed to upset Sister Mary Rose: too-tight white blouses and too-short plaid skirts. But the customers don't seem to mind. Maybe because, well, how can I say this tactfully? I can't, I guess. The waitresses are effective and friendly and capable, but Catholic school girls they ain't. The management's odd clothing choice for its staff seems intended to emphasize a lewdness that the personnel, thankfully, lack. As a result, it makes for a tacky look, whereas, if they just dressed normally, they'd likely appear reasonably attractive. 

The food was good, as was the service. Particularly noteworthy was, believe it or not, the salsa that was placed on the table when we arrived. It seems to be a blend of salsa picante and chili con queso. Whatever it is, it's delicious, and deserves better than the chips served with it, which weren't particularly bad, but were far from what they could have been.

Last city inspection: February 2011
20 demerits

My lunch partner went with enchiladas verdes; he got a plate with good Spanish rice and refried beans, and two well-made chicken enchiladas, topped with a good salsa verde and more sour cream than was absolutely necessary. (Can there be too much? Probably, but not here.)

I, on the other hand, went for chili relleno, one of my customary favourite Tex-Mex dishes. It came with the same refried beans, which were good enough to be ordinary, and the same Spanish rice, which was a little better than ordinary, and unlike so much Spanish rice in restaurants like this, had not been sitting around on the stove long enough to dry out. The chili relleno itself was done with journeyman quality: stuffed with a reasonably good picadillo, coated in a tasty egg batter, and covered with enough cheese to give it what it needs in the way of flavour and texture, without being profligate. The plate was also host to a larger-than-expected lettuce and tomato salad, which struck me as being unusually fresh. Drizzled with some of that delicious salsa and tucked into a flour tortilla (I ordered corn, but got flour, I guess because I'm a gringo and everybody knows gringos always want flour tortillas), it makes a nice accompaniment to a good meal.

It would, in the end, have been so easy for Las Pichanchas to come out even better in my evaluation: Had the chips been fresher, or thinner, or crispier, or in any way superiour to what one accepts as ordinary, maybe there'd be another half a chili pepper there. Had the waitresses not been dressed so peculiarly, maybe there'd be another half a pepper on the ambiance rating; had I gotten the corn tortillas I'd asked for, instead of the (good but not great) flour tortillas, there'd almost certainly be another half-pepper on the service rating. 

But as a place for a quick, tasty, reasonably-priced Tex-Mex lunch, it's probably the best place around Five Points.

Ho Hum.

Galatas Cafe
2011 Austin Highway

Galata Tower, Istanbul

The most interesting thing about this place is its name. I thought it was odd that a Mexican restaurant would be named for a neighbourhood, however charming, in Istanbul. Turns out it's not. No, according to the waitress, "Galatas" is something from the Bible: "You know...John? Paul? It's like...from the Bible." 

I figure it must have to do with Galatians, the community in Asia Minor that St Paul wrote to. You know, the one that's famous for the verse, "For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: Love your neighbour as yourself." (Galatians 5:14) (Nobody ever seems to talk about verse 5:12, "As for them, I wish they'd go all the way, and cut their own nuts off." I wonder why; it seems a most un-Christian sentiment these days, and surely worthy of at least some discussion.)

 But I digress.

Once the issue of the name is resolved, I find I have no further interest in this restaurant. The service is attentive and friendly without being particularly effective; the atmosphere in the place is perfectly ordinary for such family-run taquerías, and the prices are unremarkable: good enough so you don't feel ripped off, not so good that you'd be back because of them.

The food, unfortunately, is less than satisfactory. The home-made corn tortillas were perhaps the thickest I've ever had. Maybe somebody's abuelita made them that way, but that'd be about the only thing I can think of to recommend them: they have no flavour to speak of, not even the subtle, very mild flavour that one usually associates with corn tortillas. They were just there holding the filling, not adding anything of their own. 

The flour tortillas, also made in-house, were better in texture and appearance, and according to my friend Rick they had a good flavour. I would have asked for a taste, but after my own meal I wasn't inclined to have more. And you would think that Rick would know by now that he should offer me a taste of everything, since he can't easily bring himself to describe things without great prodding and intense interrogation. I may have to look into this waterboarding technique that the CIA finds so effective.

But again, I digress.

The chilaquiles were, oh, so-so. No, that's being too kind: they were bland. The quantity was good, even generous, but the quality was lacking. The machacado was similarly bland, and had the added unpleasantry of a huge chunk of gristle. And, I'm sorry, but the meat in that machacado taco was not machacado — shredded dried beef. It was, maybe, fajita meat cut in chunks and thrown in with the eggs and what-not.

Last city inspection: December 2010
13 demerits

And as for that what-not, the veggies that give both chilaquiles and machacado con huevo their substance and appeal: the cook in this restaurant's kitchen is in waaaaaaay too much of a hurry. It only takes a minute or two of sautéing to give the onions, peppers, and tomatoes the texture and flavour they require to do their job. These veggies may have spent fifteen or twenty seconds in the pan before the eggs were introduced, and then it's too late to make it right. The objective, for a restaurant cook as much as for those of us who do it at home, is that delicate balance between crunchy and tender, the moment when the cellular structure of the onion has broken down just enough that all the flavour of the oil or butter can seep in and all the flavour of the onion itself (or the pepper, or the tomato) can get out. If you just toss it in the fat for a few seconds, all you're doing is warming it up, and if you then serve it to a customer, you're serving, essentially, raw onion and raw peppers and raw tomatoes — a salad — with scrambled eggs. That's not what your customers want, they want you to invest just that minute or two needed to produce, if not a work of culinary art, at least a journeyman product.

Rick says the picadillo was good. It wasn't greasy. It looked unremarkable to me, and again he didn't offer me any. I really need to have a word with him about that.

It Only Seems Pretentious

20nine Restaurant & Wine Bar
255 East Basse Road, Suite 940

in the Quarry, on the side closest to 281

A quick scan of the online dinner menu for "20nine" convinced me that here we had a truly pretentious wannabe-upscale eatery, appropriately placed somewhere in the citadel of pretense, the Quarry. I mean, really: "Berkshire Pork Cheek Tostadas braised in Ancho Chili's [sic] with Cheddar, Red Onion and Cilantro"? "Grilled Flatbread: Laura Chenel Goat Cheese, Sun Dried Tomatoes, Basil and Parmesan"? I was licking my lips at the prospect of ridiculing this sort of fatuousness. 

Unfortunately for the Curmudgeon, I really liked this place. It's not pretentious if you actually deliver on the high-flown promises you make on the menu; it's just pompous. Even my wife (who, having just returned from California, was all primed to spot pretentiousness) found that 20nine lives up to its potential.

For starters, 20nine is different from the other wine bars I've been to in town. They are all, with no exception I've discovered, places to drink overpriced wine while snacking on stale water crackers and under-chilled or over-chilled cheeses of unremarkable character. 20nine, by contrast, is as much a top quality restaurant as it is a wine bar, and much to my surprise its prices for both wine and food were not bad. (In fact, it turned out that we were there at "happy hour" — I hadn't been to a happy hour since I gave up indiscriminate boozing years ago. Stumbling onto this unexpected bonus made the prices better by 25%, hence the favourable value rating.)

In addition to the unusual menu, 20nine offers an extensive wine list (of course); but, even better for the oenodilletante, they offer groupings of wines at reasonable prices. So instead of a six-ounce serving of one wine, you can sample three similar wines in two-ounce servings. I went for the "Road Trip #4, Whimsical Wines": a pinot grigio, a pinot gris, and a pinot blanc. The wife, who is partial to red wines, went for "Road Trip #10, Spanish Wines".

I'm not going to comment on the quality of the wines; I'll leave that for people who actually care about such things. When I read that a wine has "aroma of grapefruit, green apple, honeysuckles, white peach, apricot, lime and floral notes. With [sic] flavors of melon, mineral, lively citrus, stone fruit and honey," I just roll my eyes (and not just because whoever writes for this restaurant has real issues with punctuation). I don't taste any of those things, not even vaguely. It just tastes like wine. One was a little sweeter than the others, and one was a little lighter. Other than that, it was wine. Wine is wine; it's good, or it's not good, and beyond that I just don't care. Well, these were good, even if I didn't taste "bright lemon zest and tropical lime curd" or "pear, banana, peach, anise and honey notes". Those of you who buy into all that wine-talk, go, enjoy, make up descriptions for your friends.

Last city inspection:  May 2010
9 demerits
(they actually count the gnats?!?)

Now, the food. Ooh.

The online menu (April 2011) is out of date, apparently; there have been some changes. We selected fried risotto balls stuffed with Gouda as an appetizer; the wife ordered grilled chicken pasta for her main dish, and I agonized over my choices until I finally selected a jalapeño and beef pizza. (Our waitress's favourite pizza, she confided, as though they weren't really allowed to have favourites.)

While we waited for the appetizer to arrive, our waitress brought a small tray of bread with butter. The bread was a very good, mild sourdough, crusty and yeasty, but the butter was excellent. I cannot remember when I've had a more creamy tasting butter, and I had the waitress ask in the kitchen what kind of butter is was. Unfortunately I've now forgotten the name of it, which I didn't recognize, but believe me, as someone who's tried butters in a lot of civilized and uncivilized places, this butter was vastly superiour to others. 

We also passed the time wondering about the cardboard coasters on the table, bearing the legend "Don't Go Home Alone." This didn't really seem like a pick-up bar; and it's not: the slogan refers to the house's practice of selling all its wines by the bottle or case or something, and they want you to take home a bottle, not the hot '09-er chick or dude you met over a glass of Nobilo '06 at the luxurious bar with the kitschy wine-box footrests. 

I would never have thought that fried risotto balls stuffed with Gouda cheese could be the highlight of any week. They were.

The grilled chicken pasta is a plate of aricchiu in a savory sauce, with cherry tomatoes and thinly sliced chicken. My first taste of it hit on something somewhat bitter, with a strange aftertaste, but it must have been some stray bit of spice that fell into the dish, as several other trials produced nothing but the most exquisite flavours. I would gladly trade a slice or two of pizza for some more of that pasta dish.

Our waitress — Jennifer, by the way; credit where credit is due, she deserves to be mentioned by name as an accomplished practitioner of her craft — has excellent taste: the jalapeño-beef pizza was delicious. A thin sourdough crust topped with mozzarella (not, perhaps, the fabulous house-made mozzarella of Dough Pizzeria, but a reasonably good version), red onion, tomato, and sliced jalapeños — not the pickled kind you get out of a can, but fresh, unprocessed peppers cut as precisely thin as only a very sharp mandoline can manage. And beef: good, hearty chunks of it (the menu says ribeye and tenderloin, but honestly, I didn't pause to evaluate that claim). The overall effect was nearly as good as you can find in the best pizzerias in town.

On its web site, the restaurant promises that its "European sized portions enable our guests to save room for dessert." Don't be misled, as I was, into thinking that the portions are small at all. After splitting an appetizer, I have more than half my pizza sitting in the fridge downstairs, to see me through breakfast and lunch tomorrow; that was no personal-sized pizza, but a full-blown pie; and my wife has at least half of her entrée for similar purpose. And we did not have room for dessert. 

Well, that's not actually correct: we could have squeezed some in but could not agree on which one to split. I narrowed my choices down to three; she narrowed hers down to one, but it wasn't among my three, and we weren't willing to splurge to the point of ordering two desserts. Especially after all that food. 

When I go back to try the bread pudding with white chocolate and cranberries in a vanilla sauce, maybe I'll remember to ask about the butter again. And maybe I'll ask why their logo incorporates the Interstate-Highway shield, instead of the California State Highway triangular sign; after all, the place is named for California Highway 29. I'm just anal-retentive enough to fixate on that.

Thai in the 'Burbs, II

Thai Lao Orchid
18410 Highway 281 North, Suite 115

    (in the Legacy shopping center at the northeast corner of 281 and 1604)

It's not so very long ago that only sophisticated world travellers knew there was such a thing as Thai food. I've been around some in my time, and am at least sophisticated enough to know when to extend my pinkie finger, and when not to (even if I don't quite know why), and I had never given it a moment's thought until I stumbled upon a Thai buffet in a now-defunct restaurant off San Pedro, oh, maybe 20 years ago. (My, how time flies.) In the intervening years, though I have not been to Thailand, I've had enough Thai food to form opinions about it, and to compare the quality of one house's to another's.

What was, not so long ago, exotic and rare, is becoming commonplace, a phenomenon first observed (in my lifetime; dare I date myself so much?) with pizza and Chinese food back in the 1960s. The difference is that, in the case of Thai food, the move is not so much a down-market move as an upscale-downmarket move. Thai Lao Orchid is an example, though only one of many here in town. My favourite food-finding website, Urbanspoon, lists 61. That may not be precisely accurate, but it'll be close.

Take a rental space in a just-built pretentious suburban shopping center; deck it out in murals and décor that could be Mexican, or Italian, or South Asian. Add a few odds and ends of indisputably Asian influence: the copper fish on the wall, the Chinese curtain. As the owners of this place clearly recognize, it doesn't really matter, so long as it's attractive (it is) and bright (it is) and neutral in a religious, political, and social sense (it is). This will encourage good feeling among customers while not distracting them from what should be their focus: the food.

Last city inspection: July 2009
9 demerits

Thai Lao Orchid gets it right. The good variety of appetizers may be a little pricey, but the lunch specials ($8.95, including soup, rice where appropriate, and a choice of beef, chicken, pork or tofu) are just about right.

The soup of the day was chicken and rice. Not the kind of salty guck you have in that aging can in your pantry, but a delicate, almost clear lightly-seasoned broth with slightly-mushy rice and finely sliced scallions. It's a small serving, which is to say it is just enough to whet the appetite, and it accomplishes that task admirably.

My choice for lunch was the Number 7. (I'm sorry, I don't remember what it was called.) Wide noodles served with stir-fried vegetables in a rich but not thick sauce, with thin slices of beef. I thought the carrots should either have been sliced thinner or cooked longer, but the texture didn't detract from the overall experience of the meal. There was plenty of ginger and spice (I ordered it medium-spicy, out of an abundance of caution), and the presentation was excellent.

My friend's order was spicy stir-fried vegetables, Number 4. He got it with chicken and asked that cashews be added as well, and he asked for it fairly spicy, 7 out of 10. (I always find these demarcations of seasoning a little too precise to be real, sort of like TSA's regulations for liquids in carry-on luggage.) His dish was served with white rice. He thought it was very well done, he said, and I can take him at his word, as his dish would not have required washing, were it not for other, less silly government regulations.

The service, as is often true at Asian restaurants, was very good. I know it's not fashionable these days to ascribe cultural reasons to such things, but there must be some cultural reason why Asians seem to always excel at whatever they attempt, be it waiting tables or making electronic devices. Or graduating from college. Maybe it has to do with all that "Tiger Mom" stuff.