San Antonio 2020: Change You Can Try To Get Used To

Mayor Julian Castro's project for putting this lame ol' town in the forefront of civilisation is rolling along, I hear. Fancy streetcars and buses and trains; just the other day, they tore up the wrong lane on Fredericksburg Road, I hear, getting it ready for whatever they've got planned over there. And high-tech stuff all over the place, and lots of bicycles.  Education bells and whistles. People going to the theater and just sort of generally getting all cultured-up. Getting people to vote more (which, if they had a lick of sense, they'd know they can only do in two ways: one is to always have a scandal involving an elected official going on, and the other is to arrange it so that all our local elections occur at the same time as larger elections.) Volunteerism. Parks and pretty things along the roadways and just a little more public interference in private lives. That's all fine with me (except the last part); I try to think of it as an investment instead of an expense, even though I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that everybody involved on the corporate side (and that includes quasi-public entities like CPS and Via) is in a lip-licking frenzy over the fat revenue streams flowing through the trough once the sales tax rate is raised. No doubt the local disreputable weekly throwaway rag will be filled with exposés about waste and fraud and corruption, and some of it will be true, but that'll be a while, because they like Mayor Castro and are unlikely to find much fault with the project until he's out of office. (Of course, the regular so-called newspaper won't bother, because it would upset some of their advertisers. Digging up dirt on elected officials and the wallowers in the public trough is not for them, they only go after drunk drivers and sex criminals.)

Meanwhile, the project needs a better slogan, one that reflects the things about San Antonio that we want to keep, yet promotes the city as a place for business and innovation. So, to that end, I unveil my suggestion (copyrighted, of course, by dint of publication here) as a slogan for the city as it moves along:

San Antonio

[put that little Alamo roofline design here, or maybe
use that downtown-skyline design they're using now;
it's kind of cute too]

Laid Back

Cutting Edge

Getting It Right

De Stefano's Italian Cafe
6825 San Pedro Avenue

(just south of Oblate)

Almost a year ago, I happened across a new Italian restaurant that had taken the space long occupied by Luigi's. It was a vast improvement over its predecessor, but good as it was, it didn't last. Its place has now been taken by yet another — and better still — Italian restaurant. 

Giuseppe de Stefano has all the right credentials, having grown up in a Calabrian family in New York, where God goes for good Eye-talian food on his increasingly rare visits to the City. (Calabria, for those not familiar with Italy, is the second-best part of that country, after Sicily. Ad ogni acìeddu suo nido è bìeddu. New York, I guess, would be the third-best part.) Even a stint cooking in Dallas was unable to drain the skill from his stirring hand. 

I went to De Stefano's for lunch a week and a half ago, and was impressed with the stuffed green peppers that were one of the day's specials. They were, honestly, better than my grandmother's. Tonight, I went there for dinner, and was impressed again.

The interior is largely unchanged from before; a smallish dining room with a curving bar at the back, with a larger private dining room off to the side. On this occasion, that room was used to provide live music for diners, in the form of a man singing to the accompaniment of a karaoke machine. Having him in that location, where he was visible and audible but separated, was a wise choice: it kept his performance from being too much a part of the overall experience of the evening, a background soundtrack that added interest but didn't insist on diners' attention. Still, it seemed a little weird, and it effectively rendered that dining room unusable. But no doubt when de Stefano's business gets to the point of needing that space, they will find a less obtrusive means of providing a pleasant aural atmosphere.

Our server made it a point of telling us that they were short-staffed because of the start of Spring Break. Why he would bring it up is a mystery; it certainly didn't seem to cause any degradation of service, which was prompt, accurate and pleasant. If anything about the service could be faulted, it would have to be the too-eager attempts at mild humour the waiter engaged in, and the fact that he told the same joke to us twice. I told him I'd have to count off for that: if he's going to engage in stand-up comedy at tableside, he should at least have enough material to get him through a meal. (I was kidding, of course, about counting off. I actually thought it kind of charming, though I imagine it wouldn't please everybody.)

No city inspection done yet.

The opening accoutrements of the meal consisted of a couple of glasses of house wines and a dish of garlic bread, excellent to the point of decadence,  and served with a ramekin of marinara sauce. This was followed by salads made with a wide variety of fresh ingredients and offered up with a delicious house vinaigrette dressing full of tangy and savoury bits. The main courses were both pasta dishes: one, cannelloni, off the menu and stuffed with veal and cheese, and baked under a cheesy red sauce that was every bit as good as anything to be had on Mulberry Street between Canal and Bleecker. (Writing about it now, I think maybe I should have gone with a four-chili-pepper rating.) The other entrée was one of the evening's specials, a dish of pasta shells stuffed with a mixture of chicken and spinach, deftly seasoned with the triumvirate of Italian cuisine, and lightly covered with cheese and a tomato-cream sauce. I once had the same dish prepared by a famous kitchen in New Orleans, and it wasn't this good. Ordinarily, I would have taken half this dish home for the next day's lunch, but despite the plentiful quantity of food on my plate, it vanished before I could think to ask for a go-box.

Luckily, I won't starve: I have some cannelloni to see me through.

The best part of the evening was when the check came. I'm accustomed to spending well north of fifty bucks for two meals of this quality, including wine, tax and tip; but we were out the door at de Stefano's for less than forty ... and that was without a favourable mistake in the addition. De Stefano's is a couple of miles farther from my home, but it may supplant my neighbourhood cucina as a personal favourite. 

Busy Busy Busy

Fina's Kitchen
914 West Hildebrand

(just west of Blanco Road)

Since it opened on the edge of my neighbourhood some years ago, I've tried Fina's Kitchen probably four times, without ever being impressed. The last time was probably three years ago, well before I started writing this blog and developing a more-or-less standardized rating scale for restaurants. So I decided to give the place another chance to impress, with a more regularized standard in mind for comparison.

In an area rife with Mexican food, most of it of the mom-and-pop variety and most of it pretty good, Fina's has the distinction of being busier than any of its competitors, from what I've seen. Okay, the mediocre place with the proud banner staking its outdated (and never accurate, in my opinion) claim to have The Best Tacos In America always has a line out the door on weekend mornings, but that's only on the weekends, and I suspect that the line is populated by people who respond to fashion more than quality. And Panchito's, easily the largest local Mexican restaurant, probably does more business, but it's big enough now that it's no longer in the mom-and-pop category. 

At an hour of the morning when we're accustomed to having our choice of seating, we found three empty tables at Fina's Kitchen; and two of them were unready for new occupants. The parking lot, too, was all but full, with new arrivals having to wait for a car to vacate a spot. Clearly something draws people to Fina's Kitchen, something not observed on previous visits.

Last city inspection: January 2011
12 demerits

It's not the food. The food is merely ordinary, run-of-the-mill Tex-Mex from chips to check. The salsa looks, smells and tastes like Pace Medium straight from the bottle — not bad stuff, if you're dining in Lansing or Memphis, but in this town we rightly expect more artistry than that. The chips were on the thick side, not at all greasy but not at all hot, as though they, too, were out of a vendor's pack. Again, they weren't bad, but they weren't what we expect around here.

The coffee was good; the tortillas, both corn and flour, were, too, but there was nothing the slightest bit exceptional about them. The machacado was tasty but had an odd pablum-like texture, as though the meat had been finely chopped instead of properly shredded. The mélange of egg and vegetables was nicely prepared, keeping the overall product from being thoroughly uninteresting. The chilaquiles, though, were not saved from that fate. They lacked the exquisite characteristics that long ago made the dish my favourite. There was no cheese, for one thing, and too many warmed-over tortilla chips, of the same variety that had been served us while we waited for our food. The picadillo taco filling looked good, with nice chunks of potato and some tomato mixed in, but there seems to have been no seasoning applied. It was just ground beef. Likewise, the beef fajita filling: the right meat was there, in adequate quantity, and grilled to a pretty good degree of done-ness, just missing that hint of crunchy edge that makes a fajita special. But there seemed to be no seasoning. It was bland.

For a place as busy as Fina's, it's a testament to the competence of the staff that they get by with only two waitresses, and one busgirl. I thought surely a place like this would have to have at least one more waiter, but no, their staffing plan calls for just the two overworked women we saw this morning. They did all they could to keep the customers happy, and did a fine job of it, but we still ended up waiting nearly 20 minutes for our orders. If you're going to skimp on floor help, it'd make sense to skimp on kitchen help, too, and orders emerge from Fina's kitchen at a pace attuned to the excessive demands on the waitresses. Maybe the management spent so much on its admittedly attractive dining room that it can't afford to hire that third waiter that their business seems to demand. I don't know what their thought process is, I'm just guessing based on first observation.

Or maybe it's because Fina's prices are low. A machacado taco, which will run me $1.80 on average, is only $1.45 at Fina's; a chilaquile taco, also normally around $1.80, is $1.50 here. Coffee service is slightly below average cost, too. Pennies, yes, but it adds up. Being the miserly curmudgeon that I am, I'd have to say that if I were to go back to Fina's Kitchen, it'd be because their prices are about 20% below the local norm; and as long as the food's reasonably good (which it is), that's what I consider a bargain.