Politically Correct Adequacy

The Clean Plate
1022 North Main

(at Lexington)

There is nothing wrong with wanting to reduce one's carbon footprint. Doing that is the main justification for the current fashion of "Eating Local": buying supplies from nearby producers eliminates much of the pollution created by transportation, which is, after all, one of the filthiest things we routinely do. And there are, purportedly, side benefits as well: Savings in transport costs. Greater local prosperity. Fresher foodstuffs. But after a first visit to this recently-established restaurant, I begin to wonder where the benefits are accruing.

The Clean Plate is owned by a couple of women who used to have a food truck, but found that San Antonio wasn't ready for bison burgers on wheels. So they moved into the space vacated when Pete's Tako House moved downtown, and started serving an interesting mix of Asian and New-Age selections. We happened to be there on what was a normal gorgeous late-autumn weekday in San Antonio, so we grabbed a table on the "patio," a small enclosure jutting into the triangle where Main and Lexington Avenues come together. City folk from Dallas or Houston or Philadelphia might question an outdoor table by two major arterial streets during a workday, but we know that in this part of town,  heavy traffic means there might occasionally be as many as two cars at the red light. Traffic noise was not an issue.

The waiter was, inexplicably, as nervous as a black cat passing a coven on All Hallows' Eve, but the service was good nonetheless.  One of the owners, cheerful, personable, and bedecked with enough piercings and tattoos to make me feel uncomfortable, came out to check on her al fresco customers, and to give a little background on the restaurant. Judging from the publicity stories I've seen in a couple of places, she's getting lots of practice at that.

Our first choices for an early lunch late last month were unavailable, one because the kitchen had run out of an essential ingredient, the other because the dish is being taken off the menu and they hadn't gotten around to printing new ones. So, dismissing other, more exotic options (mostly because they seemed overpriced), we both fell back on the tried-and-true choice of Americans everywhere, a plain ol' burger and fries.

Well, perhaps "plain" ain't quite the mot juste here. The burger was on a nice, soft bun, with fresh veggies to grace the assemblage, and an unusual combination of seasonings in the meat. It was cooked a little longer than medium, and considering that I'd have ordered it medium-rare (had I been asked), I thought it was a little on the dry side. But I use the phrase "plain ol' burger" to distinguish the hamburger from the bison burger, also on the menu. This beef was as dry as bison. Some may consider that a good thing; I do not; but it was, still, acceptable. The fries were nicely seasoned and expertly cooked, but suffered from being composed mostly of the residual shards of cut potatoes. Every cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining here is that it makes you eat them more slowly.

Last city inspection: September 2013
3 demerits (very good)
about ratings

I don't know how much carbon we saved the world by having lunch at the Clean Plate. I know we did not have remarkably fresher ingredients than we would have gotten at, say, Timbo's or the Armadillo, two nearby eateries that do burgers better; and I'm absolutely certain that we saw no price savings from the lowered transport costs of eating locally. Quite the contrary: these burgers were flat-out overpriced.

The Clean Plate, obviously, is not a burger joint: In that sense, it is unfair to judge the place on its burgers. Okay, I'll accept that, and despite my disappointment on this first experience with the place, I look forward to trying some of those more exotic offerings. But that will have to be another day, if the place stays around long enough.

A Nice Option in Balcones Heights

Queen's Cottage
4535 Fredericksburg Road, Suite 223-B

(across from Crossroads Mall, soi-disant Wonderland of the Americas)

You can get a giant burger of reasonable quality at Babe's; a few doors down from that, you can pig out for lunch at Simi's excellent Indian buffet. But if you're looking for a meal that won't bust your belt or your budget, you have another choice in this old-fashioned strip center.

This shop is half cutesy gift boutique, half 50s-style malt shop. Fortunately, the menu is fairly up-to-date, so the décor comes across as retro-chic instead of heavy-handed homage. Sparkling clean and bright, my only complaint about the ambience of the place is that the seats of the vinyl-covered chairs seem to lean back like a bucket seat. Not really a problem, but kind of a weird feel when you're eating lunch.

We were alone in the place one day last week, and it looked like the young man behind the counter was in the middle of his lunchtime set-up work. The menu consists of wraps, sandwiches and salads, plus a few breakfast items, drinks, soups, sides and sweets. Rick chose the chicken salad sandwich, while I went for the day's special, a meatloaf sandwich. We both added a cup of one of the day's soup choices, tomato-basil. Roland went for a plain salad.

Balcones Heights doesn't publish restaurant
inspection results

All the food was tasty, but mostly unremarkable: fresh, good quality ingredients prepared according to very traditional recipes. I'd really have liked to have more of the soup, even if it wasn't in an elite category; but the chicken salad was a little heavy on the mayo, and the meatloaf was slightly bland and much too moist for sandwiches. Still, over all, the food deserves a slightly better-than-average rating.

Prices were reasonable. The only real failing of this place was the length of time it took between our orders and the delivery. There seemed to be some issue in the kitchen that I tried my best to ignore, but was just at the point of inquiring about the delay when the plates came out. This is most likely a one-time occurrence that shouldn't greatly influence readers in their decision about where to have lunch.

Relentlessly Trendy

Barbaro
2720 McCullough

(just south of Mulberry)

This space used to hold a church-affiliated coffee shop, but is now being put to somewhat more promising use as an uber-trendy pizza joint, complete with too many craft beers and odd toppings imported from Spain in cans. (Presumably the Spanish are at the acme of food-canning technology. For those who like eel and shellfish on their pizza, there may be no better way to get it, this far from the ocean.)

The place got a write-up in some local newspaper while I was out of town, sufficient to engage my wife's curiosity; so on our first dinner outing after my return, we tried it, indulging our predilection for patronizing places in our own neighbourhood. Barbaro, though, is clearly aimed more at the University crowd and the overflow from the Quarry and Pearl, two nearby trendy areas that try with some success to evoke the glamour of Los Angeles without also invoking its shallow, seamy side. Made me feel very Old-Guard to be there.

I thought, when we stepped in, that they were expecting a very large party, as there appeared to be one long table for 24 down the middle of the well-appointed dining room. But no: it was just a dozen tables for two, lined up so ... let's say, intimately ... that they appeared as one. Personally, I don't enjoy sitting so close to other diners, as they are too often engaged in conversation so inane or pretentious that it makes for painful, yet unavoidable, eavesdropping. We were lucky, though: it was early enough that we snagged one of the half-dozen booths along the front wall.

The menu is fairly brief: pizzas, a few salads, cheeses; all of these have ingredients with unfamiliar names. We were given a run-down of the dozen craft beers on tap, and selected two to sample. Both were good, but we both preferred the same one. Then we had our waitress, who had clearly been well-instructed in the details of the menu offerings, give us a brief exegesis of the terminology, before making our selection. We chose the least exotic pizza they had: cheese, cilantro, red onion, some kind of pig-meat. We also asked for house salads, but we were told the house salad has no greens in it, just chunks of something trendy, so we skipped that part of the meal.

By the time our pizza arrived the place had filled up with what looked like the steering committee of the Bexar County Democratic Party: a guy who looked like a liberal-arts professor at the community college, with an acolyte; a table of four girls who appeared to be celebrating the city's recent insertion of the thin end of the wedge into the sexual-orientation kerfluffle; some young couples on dates; and three girls who seemed saddened by their unwise decision to give away their tickets to that night's Scorpions match. (Scorpions won, by the way. Yea.) 

The pizza itself was good, with a well-choreographed blend of flavours from fresh ingredients. Most gratifyingly, the cilantro wasn't allowed to overwhelm the other ingredients. The toppings, though not overdone, were too much for the very thin crust to bear. The liquid of the tomato sauce had fully penetrated, so the ends of each piece had to be carefully supported with a fork to effect a transfer from platter to plate. The outer edge was satisfyingly crisp, though the residual flour on the underside gave an unpleasantly dry and flavourless jolt to the tongue. 

All this exotic food and trendiness comes at a surprisingly reasonable price. When we go for pizza, we usually have half a pie left over for the next morning's EPL matches, but the large pie at Barbaro, while enough for two good appetites, isn't enough to warrant a go-box. Maybe the price doesn't compare favourably with heavily-advertised pies the major pizza chains offer, but then, this is actual pizza, not some circular tomato-based salt conduit. You won't come away feeling like you could have done better on your budget.