Bad Watermelon

Bun & Barrel
1150 Austin Highway

(at Exeter Street)

To me, barbecue is like watermelon. 

A good watermelon is wonderfully tasty, and messy. Bad watermelon isn't so much bad as just not good. The universe of watermelons is divided into a great mass of mediocre ones, and a tiny sprinkling of good ones. Very few watermelons are worth the inevitable mess. 

Barbecue, prepared by artists, is also wonderfully taste, and messy. Bad barbecue is okay, but nothing more (until you get into the styles popular in some other parts of the country, which can be revolting). Most barbecue isn't worth the mess.

Bun & Barrel is a restaurant that's been serving up barbecue on Austin Highway for ages. I'm sure when the first Spanish explorers passed this way, Bun & Barrel had an icon on their GPS screens, and they probably stopped in for dinner. Maybe they liked it, maybe they didn't. 

I was last there more recently than the Spanish explorers, but it had been decades; long enough that I had no memory of it, good or bad. So, driving down the road the other day with my faithful sidekick, Rick, and the lunch rush just beginning, we decided it was time to give it a try. 

Outwardly, the place hasn't changed since at least the Eisenhower era, a relentless hold on tradition that I find generally comforting. Inside, the place has surely been spruced up more recently, because the floors and walls and furnishings were clean and neat, showing nowhere near the decrepitude that sixty years will produce in retail property. The theme of the décor, loosely displayed, was the Rock & Roll era of the 1950s and '60s, meaning that the background music being played was mostly old when I awoke to the world. Another comforting thing, though I suspect people who came of age after the Berlin Wall came down are starting to tire of its ubiquity.

Not a large place, Bun & Barrel manages to pack people in at meal times, without having them feel packed in. Service is prompt and cheerful, and the staff's quickness keeps the tables turning over. There is a buzz of conversation in the dining rooms, but it's not so fashionably loud as to deter pleasant conversation.

The menu is almost without surprises: barbecued beef, chicken, sausage, ham; burgers; fried fish for the Friday Catholics; and side dishes that you expect to find in any self-respecting barbecue house. The only departure from the ordinary (besides the absence of pork loin) is the "spicy Thai burger," which I take as evidence to support the belief that Bun & Barrel is now owned by the people behind Tong's Thai restaurant, next door. I had Thai the other day, so I had no interest in that novelty menu item.

The best barbecue I've had — and despite my bias against the cuisine, I've had a lot, being a native Texan born in exile — is moist, tender and complex. That is true of good barbecue whether eaten in Texas, its true home, or in some benighted foreign place like Missouri or Alabama. The barbecue at Bun & Barrel, sadly, was none of those things. The turkey and beef were both dry through and through, and less tender than crumbly; as though they had been dehydrated prior to cooking. The two sauces available in squeeze bottles on the table (one sweet, too sweet for me; the other piquant) did a little to mitigate the lack of good texture, but not enough. The sausage was a little better in texture, but had little in the way of flavour to recommend it.

The side dishes were reasonably tasty, though only the french fries stood out. They, in fact, would probably rank in my personal Top Ten, if I could think of nine other places with really good fries. They were cut with the peeling on, and fried perfectly in good-quality oil. They had a hint of crispiness about them, and an excellent potato flavour on the inside. The beans were in that vague area between good enough and pretty good, with plenty of pork to flavour its thick, rich sauce, but the seasonings just missed the mark. The cole slaw was pretty to look at, and not bad to taste, but its sauce was runny to the point of being water. 

Last city inspection: September 2011
Only 6 demerits

There was something about the ambience of the place that prompted both of us to order malts, something I haven't done three times in my life. The malt flavour in Rick's was much more pronounced than in mine, I guess, because he commented on how clearly it came out, while I suspected that I had been given a mere milk shake. Still, the consistency of the it was excellent, and if I had ordered a milk shake instead of a malt, I would be raving about it, and comparing it favourably to the shakes at places like the Olmos Pharmacy. (No, it wasn't quite that good, but it would have merited serious comparison.)

My Happy Place: Guanajuato hildebrandensis

El Rafas Cafe
1535 West Hildebrand

(between I-10 and West Avenue)

Last city inspection: October 2010
15 demerits

I've often expressed the opinion that there are more good Mexican restaurants on Hildebrand Avenue than in all of San Antonio outside Loop 410. This is not mere hyperbole, but Hildebrand is, by local standards, unremarkable in this regard. All of the major streets, from here to Mission Espada, are lined with mom-and-pop operations that put the O in San Antonio. Hildebrand just seems to be the northernmost outpost of that thick carpeting of taquerías. Get beyond it heading north, and high-quality tacos grow increasingly rare and precious, until, when you can hear the traffic on the Loop, you have reached the taco equivalent of Death Valley.

I don't know why that is. All those people who grew up on the West Side and the South Side — before the people known locally as "Anglos," decades ago, discovered the Joy of Breakfast Tacos — now live on the north side, many outside the Loop; you'd think they would patronize places that make tacos como Abuelita hecha, yet those places seem not to have found their way successfully out to Loopland with the population. Maybe they eat at home?

Fortunately for me — and that is, of course, all that really matters — Hildebrand Avenue is close to home.

One of these many good Mexican restaurants is El Rafas. It's a little out of the main Hildebrand culinary cluster, being west of Interstate 10, but as it's right up there with the best of the best on that stretch of city street, it's worth the short extra drive. My friend Rick and I went there the other day for a late breakfast.

Jardín Unión, Cd. Guanajuato
photo by Gorgo

One of the things I like best about El Rafas is that the people who run the place are Guanajuatense. My love affair with comida tipica mejicana began decades ago with a plate of chilaquiles con huevo in a tiny, crowded restaurant that spilled out into Jardín Unión. Most of my good friends in Mexico live in Guanajuato, or are from there; all of them went to school there, and no matter how much they move around, when I think of going down to Mexico, Guanajuato is the place I think of. (Sadly, none of my pictures from there are digital, but I'm thinking of getting a scanner. It's just a shade too much technology for me now, though. Meanwhile, I have to use somebody else's pictures.)

Anyway: when I need a dose of memory, El Rafas is the place I go. The food is food that I could get at any of the thirty or so restaurants I know in Guanajuato (even if I can never remember the names of them: the place in the jardín; the place on the road to Dolores Hidalgo; the place that looks like a church; the place down the street from some other place ... you get the idea). If I had an abuelita to make tacos for me growing up, this would be the food I'd've grown up with. It's delicious, it's familiar, it's good quality. It's like another home.

But there's something else I particularly like about El Rafas: the feel of the place. No matter what time of day I go there, it always feels like it's full of family. Not that I get involved in the conversations going on around me; it's just that the place is always full of unusually chatty people.

Go to most decent taco houses, and you'll find people talking sotto voce, consciously keeping their conversations among themselves. Or people sitting by themselves, reading books or newspapers, or sitting silently with companions. But at El Rafas, it seems somewhat de rigueur for people to speak, not loudly, but in their happy voices, and the conversations are distinctly animated. Everybody's talking cheerfully and sincerely, like a TV family around the dinner table on a show from before Seventies Angst took hold of our culture. It all makes you glad to be a part of it. Even I, the laconic curmudgeon, tend to talk more, and more cheerfully, at El Rafas. (This may or may not be a good thing, but it certainly feels good.)

Otherwise, the restaurant features reliably good service and good prices. I almost hate to say such nice things about it, because it's already a challenge to find a table there, some mornings.

Not Worth the Drive

Las Salsas
2018 San Pedro

(a block north of Woodlawn)

I started going to Las Salsas not long after it opened. It was conveniently located, just a few blocks down the avenue from my house. The first time I tried it, I thought it was pretty good. The next time, not so much. The time after that, pretty good again. The next time, it was back to being not so good. Every time I ate there was like a voyage of discovery: would the chips be light and crisp, or stale and chewy? Would the seasoning be artful and delicate, or heavy-handed and unpleasant? Would the food be too hot, too cold, or just right?

In time, I stopped going. It was just too lousy too often. But now, after maybe seven or eight years, my friend Rick and I decided to give it another try.

Wish I'd stayed home.

Inside, not much had changed. It's got two large dining areas, each with room for about 40 people. They've replaced the mix of tile-topped and plastic tables for some with a bamboo veneer, nicely painted in primary colours, and all the chairs now match. The walls are a light yellow with occasional patches of trompe-l'oeil broken-stucco design, which despite being somewhat dated is not unpleasant. A few standard paintings of pretty Mexican village scenes compete with what look like reprints of old magazine ads rough-framed in cypress. The train track still runs around room just below the ceiling, but there was no train. (Years ago, often as not, the train would be derailed at one turning or another; maybe they just got tired of climbing up on a stool to fix it.) The dining area is clean and bright, though I wouldn't want to sit at a table by the window in the afternoon sun. 

The staff greeted us warmly when we came in, and the waitress was with us quickly as we chose our seats in the near-empty restaurant, giving us menus and taking our drink orders. We decided quickly, and then bided our time awaiting her return until Rick wondered out loud if they were having to grow coffee beans in the back. When the coffee arrived, it was lukewarm and even weaker than I like it — and I don't care for strong, acidic coffee.

Last city inspection: April 2011
10 demerits

We each ordered our usuals: beef fajita and picadillo tacos, on flour, for Rick; chilaquiles and machacado tacos, on corn, for me.  

My first bite of my chilaquile taco was disappointing: it seemed flavourless, almost unpleasant. I decided, though, after a few more tastes, that the problem was with the corn tortilla. Home-made, it may have been, but it lacks the flavour that a year of preferring corn to flour has taught me can be infused into a tortilla. The filling, though, was nicely made, and plentiful. The appropriate amount of time had been taken to sauté the vegetables and fry up the chilaquiles — the little strips of corn tortilla that give the dish its name — which, I might mention, were of an appropriate size. (Ordinarily I wouldn't even bother to say this, but recent experience has shown me that not every greasy-cuchara cook knows how big they should be.) The addition of a little red salsa moved them up the scale of quality, and if I were basing the entire review on this one dish, I'd give it four chili peppers. Three and a half, with the tortilla.

Sadly, though, the chilaquiles con huevo in my taco were the high point of the meal. The machacado taco was a disappointing version of the dish, machacado con huevo, that I have come to appreciate as much as chilaquiles. It was served in an equally bland corn tortilla, and while it was cooked properly, it had only a suggestion of the dried meat that gives the dish its name. Still, it would have deserved a rating, independent of all else, of three chili peppers, as overall it had good flavour, and fairly good texture.

Rick's tacos bring the ratings back down to merely average. His flour tortillas were more flavourful than my corn tortillas, but that's just because flour tortillas are intrinsically tastier than corn tortillas. These are run-of-the-molina tortillas. In the universe of flour tortillas, these rank right in the middle, below HEB and above Mission. The picadillo was seasoned, but artlessly, and was not so much moist as greasy. The fajita meat was barely seasoned, and overcooked, perhaps because the slices were cut too thick in the first place to cook through properly.

I thought the prices at Las Salsas would be better than they are. While coffee service, at $1.50, was reasonable, I thought the taco prices were well above where they should be. Small change, perhaps, but even putting aside the question of quality, $2.25 is about 30¢ too much for machacado, and $1.95 is about 20¢ too much for chilaquiles. The overall bill was about a buck more than it should have been. It becomes a question of where to draw the line. If the food had been better, I might not have minded the pricing excesses. But as it is, I do.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go take a Tums.

Booooorrring!

La Cocinita Cafe #2
701 West Rhapsody

(at West Avenue)

In the last year or so, I've more or less given up on finding any really good tacos in Loopland. Every place I've tried in that great abysmal swath of subdivision and traffic jam has disappointed. A couple of places managed a rating of three and a half chili peppers out of five for the food, but one had lousy service and the other is so far out that I just never go there if I can help it. The rest of the places I've tried kind of suck for air.

But this morning, when my friend Rick picked me up at the auto-repair shop to take me home, he mentioned having spotted another taquería just off West Avenue, and we decided to try it. We still live in hope of finding someplace, anyplace, in the general area of his house where we can find good breakfast tacos. Alas, this is not that place.

Tucked into a small space adjoining a convenience store at the intersection of Rhapsody and West, La Cocinita #2 has the appearance of a promising mom-and-pop operation. It is intimately small, having a square dining area stocked with a dozen or so tables, yet without a sense of overcrowding. This, despite the fact that there were quite a few people in the place, even though it was hardly prime breakfast hours. The décor is unassuming, unabashed taquería-normal, except for two posters on the wall touting sports teams from Texas A&M University. (I know that, as an alumni of The (Other) University, I should disparage Aggies as vaguely second rate, but I've never been able to summon anything more than a low level of ennui about either school, usually expressed, if at all, in sarcasm. Perhaps not surprisingly, some people take umbrage at that.)

I decided to vary my standard order. I normally will order two chilaquile tacos when trying a new place, or one chilaquile taco and one machacado. The latter option was foreclosed to me, as this restaurant doesn't offer machacado. Instead, I went with one chilaquile taco, on corn, and one fajita taco, on flour. Rick stuck to his usual breakfast of one fajita taco and one picadillo taco, both on flour.

After a brief and amusing conversation with the waitress about the nature of fajitas, and the difference between "fajitas" and "fajitas rancheras," we got our coffee and spent the interval in discussion of the past weekend's trifecta: a lost crown, a leaking roof, and a car in the shop.* Fortunately, the food came quickly, before I had a chance to get seriously depressed about everything going suddenly wrong in the world.

But the food, when it came, only added to the general feeling that I should be suffering from some sort of Carteresque malaise, and that there's something wrong with me, because I'm not. Maybe it was the joy that comes to the heart of a curmudgeon when he realizes he will get to complain about things. In this case, I get to complain about the food.

It was just boring. I mean just absolutely, unequivocally, unrelentingly boring. No panache whatsoever went into its preparation. Both the corn and flour tortillas were utterly unremarkable, and they were the best parts. The chilaquiles were barely edible. They were prepared using stale tostadas, tossed into the mix late in preparation, resulting in thick, chewy, unpleasant wads of soggy, over-large tortilla chips lightly coated with most of the things that are supposed to make chilaquiles enjoyable: egg, veggies, and cheese. (The seasonings were absent, or at least were not present in quantities sufficient to advertise their presence.) The overall result was as near an abomination as I've ever found in chilaquiles of this potosino style. 

Last city inspection: September 2011
8 demerits (pretty good)

The fajitas were nearly as bad. The meat was dry, almost completely unseasoned (!), and as tough as the toughest undernourished longhorn steer could make it. The peppers and onion were cut in huge slices, dosed with a little oil, and grilled for as little time as could be managed. None of the all-important flavours were allowed to come out in preparation. 

Even the picadillo was boring. It takes almost nothing — a few dashes of seasoning, maybe a few tiny chunks of potato — to make picadillo as perfect as it can hope to be, but that effort was not made. This was simply ground beef, grilled in its own juices and slapped into a tortilla. 

I don't know how long La Cocinita Cafe #2 has been around. If it were in my own neighbourhood, or anywhere inside the Loop for that matter, I'd say it wouldn't last a year. But being out there between the Loops, I guess it can survive. All those people that made it look so promising a venue have no convenient alternative to the generally low taco standards in Loopland. 

*and, just to make it worse, there wasn't any good soccer on TV. International weekend, you understand. Who can sit through Scotland v. Leichtenstein?

A Metaphorical Ornament

Turquoise Grill
3720 North-West Loop 410

(on the inside of the Loop, in the shopping center

 near the intersection of Fredericksburg Road)

"Turquoise" is an Old French word meaning "from, or of, Turkey." The semi-precious stone got its name from the fact that it first came to Europe by way of Turkey. Europeans, as ignorant of geography as any ordinary American schoolchild, believed Turkey was the source, not the middleman, of the stone. 

What I saw of Istanbul

A friend of mine took me to Turquoise Grill for the first time two or three years ago. Having spent a short time in Istanbul, I was eager to try the local version of Turkish food. My own experiences with the cuisine were limited, for the most part, to chai (meaning, simply, tea, not the gussied-up concoction of sugar and spices one finds at all the trendier coffee houses of the Starbucks Era); doner (the ubiquitous street food that consists of a pita stuffed with meat — a food that, 200 miles west, would be very familiar to me as a gyro; but that's a cultural squabble that I'd rather not get involved with), and a single accidental visit to a commonplace cafeteria on  Cumhuriyet Avenue, offering the Turkish version of dim sum (Lord, don't I wish I'd found that place on the first day instead of the last!). Being there alone, with no local guidance ("Don't worry," said everyone I know who knows Istanbul, "everybody speaks English there, you'll be fine." Many do, I suppose, but I did not find them. The only people I found who spoke English in a useful degree were the night clerk at my hotel and the counter attendant at the cafeteria, God bless him.), my explorations of that amazing city, and its equally amazing cuisine, were haphazard and confused. 

Turkish food is very much like Greek or Lebanese food, as you would expect. After all, the things that go into traditional Turkish food would be things that grow around there, and while the distance from Istanbul to Athens, or from Istanbul to Beirut, may be huge in cultural terms, in agricultural terms it's like going from San Antonio to Waco: slight. Seasoning differs to some extent, but if you enjoy any Mediterranean cuisine, or any western-Asian cuisine (like Persian), you'll enjoy Turkish food.

On a number of visits to Turquoise Grill in the years since my first introduction, I've come to settle on Adana kebab (named for a city in south-central Turkey) as a favourite; normally I wouldn't bother looking at the menu anymore. But tonight, for some reason, I was in a mood to try something different. The place has a new menu anyway, and I wanted to see if they offered a dish I had recently enjoyed at the other Turkish restaurant in town. (They didn't.) 

So this time, on a cross-cultural whim, I chose spaghetti. My wife, who apparently fell prey to a similar whim, chose a dish that was described on the menu as "Turkish lasagna." (I would tell you the names as they appear on the menu, but the restaurant's on-line version is not working properly on my computer, and I can see nothing of that page except the heading, "Salads.") To lead off the meal, I chose a soup made from puréed lentils in a tomato-based liquid, with interesting seasonings. It was delicious, almost lush: spicy without being piquant, more substantial than broth but not thick. 

Turkish spaghetti, as presented at Turquoise, differs from what American palates are accustomed to, in the inclusion of yogurt and butter in a tomato-based meat sauce. The seasonings are also quite different, and the overall effect is quite good. The yogurt gives the sauce a creamy character, but otherwise the appearance of the dish is much like anything one would get around Mulberry and Spring Streets; and the seasonings are exotic but subdued, and stealthy: they suggest a distant place that is at once familiar and unknown. 

The "Turkish lasagna," by contrast, bears no physical resemblance to the well-known Italian dish. This meal is presented as a single layer of small, curly pasta covered in a white sauce, mainly of yogurt, with the oil exuded by the ground meat floating in little pools on top. The seasonings are, again, quite different from anything found in the layered Italian dish, but still the food is very tasty in its own way. 

The entire meal was accompanied by a light, thick, soft bread with sesame seeds and, it appeared, cracked pepper. I always enjoy a good bread, and this was much more pleasing than the bread I was served at the other Turkish restaurant in town. 

Last city inspection: June 2011
only 3 demerits!

The main dining room at Turquoise is quite large and spacious; a smaller, more intimate open-dining room stands off to the side, along with a banquet room. The décor is attractive, not heavy-handed, and pleasant, particularly an attractive four-panel openwork screen separating the dining areas. Everything was kept clean and neat, though this might be in part because we were there on a Friday before sundown, when the local Turkish community is still celebrating its Sabbath. With few people in the place, the staff had no trouble keeping up with its chores. And this could also account for the excellence of the service, though I have been at much busier times and have never had reason to complain. (And yes, I do realize, as all who know me will attest, that I need no reason to complain. I am, after all, a curmudgeon.)

The prices are reasonable for food of this quality; the overall bill at a restaurant like this is always a pleasant surprise, since alcohol is not served. Not being charged the customary exorbitant restaurant prices for wine at dinner always makes the check, when presented, seem remarkably, and pleasantly, small.