No Improvement Whatsoever

La Gloria
100 East Grayson Street

(at the Pearl Brewery)

The last time I reviewed this place, five years ago, I was reasonably well-satisfied with all aspects of my visit; another visit a couple of weeks later confirmed that opinion. This time, I went with my wife on a busy Saturday night, after the Pearl's tamale festival on the night the riverwalk lights of the Mission Reach were lit. It was busy, and the crowd was lively and yet not overly loud. The line to be seated wasn't overly long, and other than the slack attitude of the girl taking names at the door, the first impression was favourable. Our waiter was brightly welcoming, and cheery. 

We started with margaritas. My wife's was on the rocks, mine was frozen. Hers was fine; mine was essentially a thick lump of margarita that couldn't be stirred with the plastic straw. Its taste was fair, and once it started to melt the texture was acceptable. It was also fairly large, which would have made the $9 price tag seem reasonable if I had liked it enough to actually drink it. I drank about half.

We ordered tlayuda callejera and an order of tacos al pastor. What we got was a tlayuda tradicional, though I didn't realize that until the bill came. I just thought it was uninteresting; I didn't realize it was wrong. 

The tacos were basically just alright. My wife thought more of them than I did; to me, they were, in the parlance of Weight-Watchers, "not worth the points." They were of course small, served on cold four-inch corn tortillas, with cubes of well-marinated pork and an assortment of not terribly interesting other things. 

Last city inspection:
August 2015
10 demerits

The tlayuda -- a large crisp corn tortilla topped like a pizza -- was also cold, as though the heat lamp over the service counter was either nonexistent or nonfunctional. (I don't honestly know if there was a heat lamp there, but judging from the food we got, there needs to be.) It was smeared with black beans and topped with lettuce and a couple of slices of tomato, and a couple of slices of avocado. If there were other ingredients, they didn't present themselves. It was also made difficult to eat by not being cut before it was served to us. Cutting a lettuce-topped chalupa with a table knife makes for a certain degree of mess.

The draw of this place, still fairly high on the trendiness meter, is the ambience. A cool, not cold Saturday night at hipster central makes for a good time with friends. Of course, you could have the same kind of good time with them at home, or at a park, or at a really good restaurant. Somewhere else, perhaps.

 

Introducing Carly

Also known as "Buick," because she has a tendency to pull in front of you and slow down.





She's a Rottweiler/Catahoula Leopard Cur mix, a real sweetheart who came to us from the ADL during the summer, and has already taken over the house and yard. Her favourite chew toys are fingers and the cat. She loves to fetch and throw up in the car. She's also wild about sprinkler systems, though a sprayer head on the hose will do in a pinch.

The Lights Of The City

Last night, we took in the light-show on the facade of San Fernando Cathedral. I've been hearing about this for a while, & finally got a reminder (in Texas Highways magazine) at a time when I could actually take it in.

The show goes off at 9:00, 9:30 and 10:00 PM through the end of 2015. If you can get down to see it, you'll enjoy it. You might want to take a folding chair, but most people just sit on the plaza. The show lasts about 20 minutes. (And, of course, parking meters are not in operation after 6pm.)

Raising the Rates

Evers Cafe
6734 San Pedro

(between Jackson-Keller and Oblate)

When I first reviewed this little place on Zomato.com a couple of months ago, I was impressed. Now, having been drawn back there over and over in the intervening weeks, I feel compelled to say that it is even better than I'd first thought. This little place is great.

The menu is short and varies from day to day. Around 11:00 AM they post a neon board with five or six dishes, each about twelve bucks, and the food is so good, and so consistently good, that you don't really need to read what's on offer; you could just tell the waitress "I'll have whatever's listed second," or third, or last, and it will be delicious.

What's that mean?
last city inspection: April 2015
5 demerits

My choice today was pistacio-crusted fish salad. Sounds kind of meh, but Oh Wow! It was stupendous. A nice piece of fish, carefully crusted with a nutty covering and gently fried to perfection overlays what is possibly --- no, not possibly; definitely --- the best salad I've ever tasted, made, shockingly, with a fabulous beet sauce. (Beets were long a staple of my List of Five Foods I Will Not Eat Under Any Circumstances, but now have vanished from that list, leaving only viscera and black-eyed peas.) The salad also featured roasted tomatoes and a nice feta cheese.

My tablemate chose the seafood enchiladas, which were also wonderfully delicious: tortillas rolled around a slightly piquant fish concoction, topped with a cream sauce and shrimp, served with a small salad and a side of Spanish rice, nicely done with an unusual and flavourful seasoning. 

The service is extraordinary here, too. The only down-side to this place is that they aren't open for dinner.

 

Lunch and a Movie

Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen
15607 Interstate 10 West

(between UTSA Boulevard & Loop 1604, on the outbound side)

As is often the case, choosing this restaurant for lunch yesterday was prompted by nothing more than its location, relatively convenient to our eventual destination at the Palladium theater. This chain, originally out of DFW in the late '70s, now spreads across several states, including three locations here in Paradise South. I, though, had never heard of it, owing to my natural and intrinsic disdain of all things suburban. I found it on Zomato.com (formerly Urbanspoon), and liked what most people said about it.

My friend Roland, who got there first and claims (falsely) that he never gets to see his name in these blog posts, got us a booth in the bar area. Our server was a young man named Brandon, who impressed us both with his personability and memory: we each ordered vegetable plates, which come with soup or salad and four side-dish choices, but he wrote nothing down and still got everything, including that, exactly right. He followed up with timely checks on our satisfaction, and dealt promptly with our bills. This may be the first time I've given a restaurant 5 chili peppers for service.*

The layout and atmosphere was pretty run-of-the-mill for restaurants of this type, but everything was clean and in good repair, and the obligatory ubiquitous televisions around the room were surprisingly unobtrusive: they were far enough away to be ignored, and the sound was low enough not to be heard in our part of the room. We were untroubled by noise from them, from the bar, or from nearby tables. The décor was done with some skill, so that the room was dark enough to feel cool yet light enough to see easily. All in all, quite pleasant, quite comfortable.

What's that mean?
Last city inspection: May 2015
5 demerits

Our choices of side-dishes was due, in both our cases, to an ongoing desire, mostly honoured in the breach, to lose weight. Recent small successes in that area encouraged both of us to opt for foods that Weight-Watchers calls "power foods": things that, in theory, you can pig out on (though I'm sure they wouldn't put it that way) without much risk of adding to an already undesirable mass of body. My choices were a baked potato, with toppings on the side; "southern style" green beans, with the instruction that they be well-drained, owing to some unpleasant prior experiences elsewhere; steamed broccoli; and red beans and rice. I thought I was just ordering sides, but our waiter told us that the "veggie plate," which I didn't see on the menu but consist of any four side-dishes, comes with a choice of soup or salad. I picked the tortilla soup, which Roland had tried at another location and approved of.

Most of these dishes were very good. The baked potato was small by postmodern restaurant standards, but was certainly enough to satisfy. I got a small dish of butter,  sour cream and a sprinkle of shredded cheddar cheese; these too were in sufficient quantities. I might have wished for more sour cream, and more cheese, but I know I didn't need them, and was satisfied with what was there. The green beans were cut in short segments and had been seasoned with a sprinkle of sugar, giving them a pleasant sweet character that I seldom have tasted. Most often, green beans in restaurants are kept on the heat in large batches, and end up being mushy. These, though, retained enough crispness to please. The broccoli was steamed with perhaps a spritz of olive oil, giving them and excellent flavour to go with their perfect crispness. They were florets cut from the stem, so I felt I was getting only the best parts of the plant. 

Only the red beans and rice was at all disappointing, and that only because I would have like a slightly larger serving, and because I thought the seasoning was underdone. There was a bit of sausage of indeterminate variety in the mix, and the dish was cooked to an excellent state of doneness.

I expected to be charged about ten bucks for this assortment, based on the individual prices of side-dishes on the menu. The total bill, though (drinking only water) was right at seven bucks. That, to my way of thinking, is a good deal. 

 

After lunch, we headed down the road a piece to see the recent Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson disaster. I'm sorry: disaster movie.

San Andreas

directed by Brad Peyton

Having just last week seen Jurassic World, with its much-hyped CG dinosaurs and high approval ratings, my expectations were a little lower for this movie. After all, the star isn't known for his ability to infuse vast quantities of raw emotion into the quiver of a lip or the arch of an eyebrow; and movies of this genre seldom bother with anything more than a bare-bones plot involving romantic tension, shorthand relationships, setbacks, and eventual triumph. This movie didn't disappoint, and who doesn't love a movie where California gets ripped apart?

The cynic in me loathes the absurdities of the plot, the ludicrously underdeveloped characters, the casuistry in the film's tenuous relationship to scientific reality, etc., etc. But come on: it's a disaster movie, and it's all about the special effects. On that, this movie delivers. Emphatically. The crumbling buildings and collapsing infrastructure seem in every particular to attain a perfect state of apparent reality ... unlike those much more profitable dinosaurs.  And if, in the end, I end up caring more about the daughter's incipient relationship with the two brothers from England, whom she meets just in time to save their asses when disaster strikes, than I do about the oh-so-touching relationships among her, her father, and her mother... well, that's neither here nor there. The actors may not be Leading Lights of the Cinema, but they do well enough to get you through the film. Let's call it solid performances. The script is full of holes that nobody cares about. The film is just a rockin' good time in a dark room. It's a movie that I'll watch (in bits and pieces) again and again when it hits the small screen, and on the big screen I felt like I got more than I was expecting.

* Probably not really; but it sure doesn't happen very often.

Movie and a Dinner

Jurassic World

directed by Colin Trevorrow
starring computer-generated dinosaurs and some actual people

In the original movie of this franchise, there were two moments when the computer-generated dinosaurs genuinely seemed utterly, terribly, frighteningly real: the kitchen scene when two pre-teen children are hiding from velociraptors among the cabinets; and the moment soon after when one launches itself up through a grate in the ceiling. Those two moments scared me as much as any movie moments, and are the main reason why, having seen them once or twice, I don't care to see them again. Yet I also remember the sense of magic I felt the first time the dinosaurs took the screen, and when the stars of that first movie found themselves in a stampede of critters, hiding under a log. It was truly, truly amazing stuff.

Fast forward twenty years and change. The amusement park for the first movie has been reborn as Jurassic World, a successful destination for a prosperous fun-seeking world. But success isn't good enough for the corporation that owns the project: it must always grow and expand and attract more and more visitors and more and more dollars. Okay, we get it: greed and shareholders are the root of evil.

Yada, yada, yada. The plot here is a formulaic rehash of every decent movie. Just sit back and watch. It's a technical achievement, not art. It contains the usual mash-up of dime-store philosophy and blatant obviation deemed necessary by Hollywood types who feel unable to let viewers' imaginations fill in facts. Cardboard people do things for simplistic reasons, or for no reasons. Jurassic World is an ironic attempt by those who own the movie to grow and expand and attract more and more dollars. Nothing more.

It has no moments of shock and surprise like the first Jurassic movie. The dinosaurs look, at best, as good as they did two decades ago; not always, though. Their motions seem more obviously computer-generated, the lines of sight don't always coincide precisely, and the creatures don't always know about the laws of physics. The plot lines advance in predictable ways through a story held together by peanut butter and chewing gum. As entertainment, it's good for a matinee, which is where I saw it.

Afterwards, we headed back down to my neck of the woods for a visit to
Attagirl
726 East Mistletoe

(at Kings' Court, just off the St Mary's Strip) 

I had noticed this place when I went to the restaurant next door for dinner a few months back, and was reminded of it by a laudatory review in the local weekly throw-away rag. The friend I was with is known to be a big, big fan of fried chicken, and that is this restaurant's specialty. Seemed a natural choice.

In actual fact, Attagirl isn't really a restaurant; it calls itself an Ice House, which people who've been around San Antonio for a while know means a place where you can get a beer and maybe something to eat. An apropos description.

The main feature of the place is its comfortable ambience. It's in a modest hundred-year-old building, just two rooms with a patio facing the side street, and no parking of its own. Luckily for the neighbourhood, Attagirl is small enough that it's unlikely to add much to the density of cars already blocking driveways and knocking around trash bins. We found a place half a block up Kings' Court, at 8:00 on a Thursday evening.

There are a couple of tables inside, and a couple more on the patio, but mainly the layout is geared more to the casual: benches along the patio walls, counters with barstools along the inside walls. Very Depression-era. Half the interior space is taken up with the bar and kitchen, including a large cooler for bottled beer, and taps for the dozen or so craft beers offered.

What's that mean?
Last city inspection: June 18, 2015
0 demerits

I chose an overpriced local brew billed as "kölsch." It wasn't really kölsch, which even I know is impossible, but it was vaguely kölschish, and drinkable. To go with this I ordered the chicken and waffles, a "traditional" southern dish that is relatively new to my southern-boy awareness. My friend Roland thinks it's a black thing, and he may be right; although he said he never had chicken and waffles growing up: they always had pancakes. Well, close enough, I suppose. Anyway, I'm pretty sure none of the black folk growing up in Dixie and beyond had Belgian waffles with their chicken. Not sure it makes a difference to any but a purist, and when it comes to chicken and waffles, that ain't me.

My meal consisted of three larger-than-natural chicken wings, well battered and deep-fried. There was a touch of honey to them, which gave them a pleasing resonance with the dollop of maple syrup on the (Belgian) waffle. The waffle was smallish, sufficient for its purpose and not the overlarge sort we Americans seem to have come to expect. It was large enough for any Goldilocks. It was, though, a bit overcooked, and consequently slightly too dry to really please. 

My friend Roland had a different type of batter on his chicken, which I didn't try; he did, however, give me a taste of the potato salad he had ordered, and which we had overheard another customer raving about. She, I think, has low standards. This was just plain ol' potato salad, dryer than one gets at HEB but similarly seasoned. In the kingdom of potato salads, this version can be found hiding behind the throne while mayonnaise is passed out.  It fails to live up to its $4 price tag.

 

Who Needs It

Folc
226 East Olmos Drive

(near the Circle in Olmos Park)

N.B.: This was written last October, but not published until now. I  don't know why. Anyway, some of the details mentioned may now be out of date, but I'll not be going back to find out.

H. L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore back when Baltimore was something, is probably most famous for observing that "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." Whoever the people are behind this new Olmos Park restaurant, they doubtless hope Mencken is as wise as he sounds.

There was nothing intrinsically wrong with our experience there. We had heard nothing about the place, but had just noticed its presence in the space twice abandoned by a restaurant we sometimes liked, and decided to try it. To be honest, we weren't even completely sure it actually was a restaurant before we pulled up in the parking lot, and saw tables and chairs inside.

It's one of those places that thinks it's classy to spell out the prices in text instead of numbers; and whoever wrote the menu has decided that punctuation need not enhance understanding. Those who enjoy studying a menu will be assured of a rousing good time.

But not a very long good time. The menu is short, with four categories of plates (fowl, sea, land and earth. Can one be more pompous.) The wine list is skimpy enough that even my wife was uninterested in any of its offerings. I, unusually, went for a glass, despite the confusing listing, and despite the name-dropping the waiter engaged in to describe what it was. 

Everything is a la carte here, because you can charge more that way. My wife chose the fish of the day, while I picked the pastrami duck, mustard, pumpernickel, caraway twenty-three. We also split a side order of the asparagus, mushroom, cream ten. 

The wine I'd ordered ("Bin 27 High on the Hog - California, Grenache blanc, voignier, roussanne, marsanne nine" -- "Think chardonnay," says the waiter) costs five dollars a bottle in the store, but the good people at Folc feel justified in charging seven times as much, because the stuff is made by some people retired from a well-known upscale grocery chain. It was a little on the sharp side, as one would expect of a $5 bottle of wine, but drinkable.

The dishes arrived individually. This appears to be an affectation much beloved by restaurateurs who prefer not to take the trouble to instruct their kitchens in how to arrange for orders to coincide. I guess that's just too much to ask these days. So we got our side order first, then my wife's fish, then my duck. The lag between arrivals was just enough to irk without becoming a serious problem; in fact the two main dishes arrived close enough together to suggest the waitress bringing them simply doesn't have the strength, or possibly skill, to carry two plates at the same time.

My wife's fish was on the order of ceviche: not cooked. She seemed to enjoy it, though not a lot; her only comment on it was that if they were going to serve you raw fish, they ought to tell you that in the description, either on the menu or by the waiter. I don't eat uncooked meats, so I didn't try it.

The asparagus was good quality produce in a carefully made cream sauce, with just enough thinly sliced mushrooms (cremona, I think) to enhance the texture. It was the only thing that pleased without qualification.

My disdain for uncooked meats almost extended to my duck, which was served close enough to that state to cause me to consider sending it back. Although I chose not to -- who wants to be the person at the table not eating? -- I was uncomfortable enough eating the stuff that I would not make that same choice again. And fortunately, there wasn't enough of the stuff on the plate to concern me for long. I will admit, though, that the mix of flavours and textures in the dish would have been deliciously intriguing, had the meat been cooked sufficiently.

The front page of the restaurant's web site says that it offers "American contemporary family-style plates." This is where marketing hype departs from reality and misleads: family-style plates are like serving platters, containing enough food for a group of people. These dishes barely contain enough for one, even if they are intended to be shared. For any group larger than two, they provide nothing more than overpriced amuse-bouches.

 

Disappointing. Or Worse.

Bourbon Street Seafood Kitchen
2815 North Loop 1604 East

(at Redland Road, on the west-bound side)

After reading many of the reviews of this restaurant on its Urbanspoon page, and looking over its web site, we decided that this would be our new favourite Cajun/Creole restaurant in San Antonio. Not a big competition, I grant you: the best thing you can say about most such restaurants hereabouts is that they Used To Be Good. One still is, but in a downscale, almost apologetic way; and it closes early. But this one had a very persuasive website, and some really appetizing pictures, and the reviews on line said all the things I would look for in evaluating the opinions expressed.

Hmmm. Seems now that I need to re-evaluate how I evaluate the opinions of strangers.

After driving to the very edge of Civilisation, way out by the Death Loop, I thought things were looking pretty good. Got a parking space very close (I lead a charmed life, when it comes to parking spaces) and the wait was only a few minutes. The room was comfortable, if a little on the loud side; the hostess was cheerful and welcoming; and the server seemed to know what she was doing. Another staffer brought three excellent rolls hot from the oven with a tasty pesto in lieu of butter. None of us wanted wine, so we started to query the waitress about the beers they serve.

She admitted that she was "not a beer drinker," and reported things about the beers that others had told her. Ordinarily, that's sufficient to provide adequate info to a customer, but not, it turns out, this time; specifically with regard to the Abita beers. They offer four different Abitas (the product of a brewery in Tangipahoa Parish, across the lake from New Orleans, and very much an iconic Louisiana thing), two of which I was familiar with, but two of which were new to me. I ordered an Andygator, which turns out to be a "doppelbock," the kind of beer brewed for spring festivals in Germany. If the waitress had known --- as she should have --- that it was a bock beer I would have been more comfortable placing the order, but bock beer is good, so I was happy enough. The other was a Purple Haze, which the waitress had no information about. My wife, trusting soul, ordered that. It turns out to be ... raspberry-flavoured. It tasted to me like grape Nehi soda.

That's the kind of thing a table-service staffer ought to know, even if not a beer drinker. Not everybody would have been happy with that kind of surprise. I sure wouldn't have.

The meals we chose from a fairly extensive menu were crawfish étoufée for me, and eggplant "bayous" for my wife. The former is a Cajun classic dish: crawfish tails with peppers and onions smothered in a rich sauce and served over rice. Bourbon Street offers it over dirty rice, a variation that would be anathema to a snobby purist (like me, sometimes) but which sounded appealing to me. I demurred, though, intent on sampling the orthodox version on this first visit to the restaurant. The eggplant dish is, as far as I know, something developed in-house by the chef. On the menu it appears as "eggplant stuffed with scallops and shrimp in a creamy saffron sauce." On the plate it appeared somewhat differently.

But first, the crawfish. The first, and essential step in making a good étoufée is to make a roux, the simple blend of flour and bacon fat or oil that is the foundation on which all good Cajun dishes are built. A cook who cannot do this successfully should not be allowed to operate unsupervised in a Louisiana kitchen. Young children from Calcasieu to Plaquemines spend most of their formative years learning to get this right. Many never do, and I must count myself among them. Still, I know the formula if not the art, and I certainly know enough to appreciate when someone's gotten it right. The kitchen at Bourbon Street have not gotten it right. The roux was pale and thin and utterly, utterly flawed, and even if all the ingredients added to the roux were fresh and well-prepared (and they were), and even if all the seasonings were in place in proper amounts (and they were), the dish could not pass muster any more than could a battleship made from paper. It was a failure, not even an average example of crawfish étoufée.*

What's that mean?
Last city inspection: Dec 16, 2014
21 demerits

The "eggplant bayous" was a more interesting and successful accomplishment, though once again the information provided to the customer was inadequate. This dish is not eggplant stuffed with scallops and shrimp; it is a slice of eggplant, breaded and pan-fried, topped with scallops and shrimp in sauce. There were three shrimp of a moderate size, quite enough to satisfy; the scallops were actually only two, sliced horizontally to appear as four. That, too, is enough, even if a little duplicitous in presentation. Appearance seems to matter more that substance in the kitchen, while at the table substance was satisfied despite noticing the attempt at deception. The sauce --- was there saffron in it? Who could tell? It didn't look the bright yellow colour of saffron, nor could either of us have identified the flavour, but the flavour of the sauce was good.

My wife ordered her eggplant bayous with the dirty rice. What it came with looked nothing like the dirty rice I've had in innumerable restaurants across Louisiana and Texas, and certainly nothing like the dirty rice I fix at home. It looked and tasted like a bland Spanish rice, but without the colourful additions. It was orange and bland and uninteresting.

The ambience of the place is good enough, with a slight suggestion of New Orleans about it. There are some vaguely old-world looking miniature street lamps, and towards the front some nice Mardi Gras themed decorations -- masks, beads, and such. The dining room is dominated by a very bad painting covering the entire back wall, which shows a view that someone who had never been there might have taken as a Vieux Carré street scene: one building decorated with wrought iron, another with a few café tables on the banquette, and a dozen or so unadorned buildings that would be more at home in a dodgy neighbourhood in Garden City, Kansas. The attempt at trompe-l'œil plaster fade was done exactly backwards, the "exposed" bricks being raised above the fake plaster, making it look as though it was the brickwork that was crumbling. At least the colours were suitable to the Crescent City theme.

As far as value, there's not much to say. The prices were in the range of what you would expect for what you expected to get.

 

* There was plenty of crawfish étoufée on the plate, and I took it home in the hope that it would taste better the next day, the flavours having magically matured, or something. It did not; it was, in fact, worse.