I Just Don't See It

Curry Boys BBQ 

Courtland Street at St Mary's

 

 A local version of a national on-line publication recently cooed about one of those click-bait lists that define so much of the internet, in lieu of actual information. In this case, it was a list of the "100 Best Places to Eat In Texas", or something like that, compiled by one of those ratings sites like Yelp or Travel Advisor or, I don't know, Google Maps? It doesn't matter. Spur-of-the-moment reviews created by two thumbs on a mobile phone's keyboard seem as far removed from thoughtful critique as Donald Trump is from George Washington.

 The highest-rated local restaurant on that list, Curry Boys BBQ, happens to be not too far from my house; and the other evening we decided to pass a few hours at the San Antonio Museum of Art, so this restaurant happened to be on the way home, and open. I saw an opportunity to try something new and different, something that a number of people, at least, seemed to like.

 As I understand it, two local restaurateurs -- one with a seafood place and one with a barbecue house -- decided to fuse their culinary experience and expertise, and Curry Boys is the result. There's a California connection in there somewhere, but to be honest I don't remember the stories I've read about the restaurant's history, and you can look it up on line just as easily as I can, if it interests you. It doesn't me. 

 So they come up with this idea, and open the restaurant, and it's a hit, and now they've moved from one pink house to a larger pink house. (I'm actually more curious about why the pink, but not enough to look that up either.) 

 The new, larger pink house is right at the southern end of the St Mary's Strip, behind Burger Boy and across from a black-painted former gas station (I'm guessing) that now houses a taco place. I didn't see a lot of parking, but there was enough. Meaning that we got a place and there was at least one left. On stepping inside, we were greeted in a friendly way by a welcoming young lady, who referred us to the menu board posted next to the order window. I noticed that several items on the menu were covered over with painter's tape, so I supposed they're out of those things. Rather than read through the remaining options, I asked the woman for the best thing they had. "That would be the Missing Link," she said without hesitation; so I ordered that. My wife chose the Magic Mushroom, and she wanted an order of edamame for us to split. We both had kölsch beer to drink. We chose a table and had a brief wait before the food was brought out to us.

last city inspection: perfect (4/23)

  The Missing Link is sausage served sliced in a bowl with rice, potatoes and carrots, the whole thing treated with a Panang curry sauce. The quality of ingredients is very good, and the quantity is completely satisfying. The hard veggies were cooked perfectly: retaining their texture but soft enough to eat comfortably; not at all mushy. And the rice, like everything else, was expertly prepared. The combination of flavours, notably between the sausage and the curry sauce, was delicious; I put that down less to the very good sausage and more to what I have to think is the best Panang curry sauce I've ever had. (For one thing, the strong flavour of peanuts, a major ingredient, was kept subtle.) And there was just enough of it to moisten and flavour everything in the bowl without producing a souplike puddle.

 My wife's Magic Mushroom was, essentially, the same dish, but with marinated mushrooms instead of sausage, and a green curry sauce instead of Panang. I had a couple of tastes of it, and found it as well-made as my own dish. The sweetness of the curry sauce was particularly noticeable, which I like.

 The only less-than-excellent thing about the food we ordered was the edamame. The pods were served in a light sauce of some kind (the menu just calls it a "Thai sauce") that seemed to lean heavily on red peppers. The pods themselves were listed as "smoked," but I couldn't identify any kind of smoky flavour about them. And they were unusually tough to get open; I finally had to try stringing them like old-style green beans, but even that didn't often work. Most of them are still in our refrigerator, awaiting a burst of industriousness that may not come.

 The ambiance of the restaurant seems to me to be going for a kind of modern we-don't-really-care funkiness. The dining room isn't large -- they may do a lot more take-out than dine-in service -- yet it has a kind of open feel to it, a relaxing space comfortably but inexpensively furnished. I suspect that if I had been there on a typical Friday or Saturday night, it would have been crowded with college-aged and 20-something patrons, but a quiet Tuesday evening was perfect for an older couple like us ... though we're neither of us as grown up as people seem to think. 

 I do have one complaint about the ambience of the place, and that is the environmental wastefulness of disposable utensils and single-use plastic cups and go-boxes. They serve the food in bowls that have to be washed; I'm not sure what their reasoning was in deciding they couldn't economically wash and re-use forks and spoons at the same time. (I'm theorizing they use a dishwasher.) I think that's enough said on the point, as these days people generally seem more aware of the damage we do with these things. (And I am old enough that I re-use the go-boxes at home. They're good for at least a trip or two through the microwave.) Also, this isn't the first time I've fixed on that topic in this blog, to no visible effect.

 The value was pretty much on target. (Two and a half chili peppers is a good rating in my calculus; if you want to know more about those ratings, look here.) With two entrées, an appetizer, and two beers, plus tax and tip, our bill came to just over fifty bucks, about normal for a night out in this town at this sort of place. 

 So yeah, I think Curry Boys BBQ is a pretty good place, and I would definitely go back (if it's not crowded and noisy). But I think Best-In-Town status is over the top. There are lots of very good places in town; this one might be all the rage right now, but in six weeks or six months the bloom will be off the rose. And I've looked at a lot of those restaurant "reviews" on those web sites, and in my view they're nothing more than glorified popularity contests. Not to be relied on for anything serious.

Summer in the City

OMG it's so hot! Well, yeah, happens every year. Maybe it's just a skosh hotter than usual this year:  we've just had, I hear, Earth's hottest day in 125,000 years. But it's not like you'd really notice the difference. Anyway: so here's my thought process:

Even with the AC running, it's less than perfectly comfortable in the house. We only have half a dozen window units, three up, three down, and one of them doesn't work at all. Plus, we're like super cheap, so we only run them when it gets above about 95F, and only in the rooms we actually use -- the front room, where the TV is, and the upstairs back room, where the computers are; and the master bedroom at night. (We have a larger unit in the kitchen, but honestly, it's hardly ever worth cooling that down for the time it takes to wash the dishes or make a meal, unless of course it's a real hell of a meal; and that never happens. So I think that unit has been used maybe twice in ten years.) 

My wife left town the other day to go play in a soccer tournament in Carolina; I get to stay home with the dog. That's how we do things most of the time, because we don't like to board the dog, and we can't always take her along on a trip. So we take turns travelling. So I'm home with the dog, who is perfectly content to spend long parts of her days asleep in my wife's closet, as long as she gets a walk first. I, on the other hand, can only spend so much time at the computer or in front of the TV without going to other places: the kitchen, the utility room, the bathroom; and even though those little side-trips are limited to no more than eight minutes in the heat, you know just how hot it is. So yesterday I got the idea that I would go somewhere cool for the worst part of the day, that stretch between about 2:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon. And I thought, Hey, I could go to a movie! 

I always think these thoughts and then don't follow through on them, but yesterday I happened to think it while sitting at the computer. So I pulled up a movie-times website, expecting to be utterly nonplussed by the narrow range of options available. San Antonio is, generally speaking, a cinematic backwater. The major theater chain here, Santikos, has like two hundred screens at maybe 35 locations, and they all show the same seven movies; AMC probably has 2 or 3 multi-screen locations, and they seem to copy the Santikos schedule. The local Cinemark theater seems to cater to the South Asian community, and shows movies in Hindi and Punjabi and I don't know what other languages. The last time I saw a movie in Hindi was at least 10 years ago (Shampu, if you're interested; I'll recommend it), and while that was a funny movie and an interesting look at Indian culture, I'm not generally in the mood for reading subtitles for two hours.  Anyway, the point is: most movies don't ever play in San Antonio.

So I open the movie-time website expecting to see nearly 200 showings of sterile Marvel Universe drivel, mediocre franchise sequels and some non-Disney kiddie movies. That's been the usual summer assortment in this town ever since Iron Man first did whatever it is he does. Imagine my surprise when I found four -- count 'em, four -- films that sounded good. Okay, one of them was the new Indiana Jones movie, which I hadn't planned on going to see in first run because I'd heard bad things about it, but when I checked the Rotten Tomatoes ratings, which I swear by, the way I used to swear by Siskel & Ebert's reviews -- not because they're always right, but because when they're wrong they're wrong in predictable ways that lend themselves to successful interpolation -- I was surprised that the critical and audience ratings were pretty good. The other three were films I'd never heard of: 

• The Sound of Freedom, about child-trafficking in Colombia, a movie which had, I kid you not, a 100% audience rating with several thousand reviews. That never happens. (Today I see it's dropped to 99%; oh, well, can't please all the people all the time.)
• Joy Ride, which sounds like a feminist version of The Hangover; and
• No Hard Feelings, which looked like a straightforward Rom-Com but with good ratings on both sides of the equation 

All four movies were showing at multiple locations at appropriate hours, so I had a tough decision to make. I decided to think about it overnight, and marked my calendar to remind me, around noon today, to make a decision. Because I know myself: I'd procrastinate and finally decide maybe I didn't want to go out after all, and later I'd regret that.

This morning I decided not to go see Indiana Jones. I know my friend Roland will be interested in that one, and it'll be around forever ... first run, second run, streaming.... I think the chances of seeing that with someone to discuss it with are pretty good, so I'll pass on it for now. 

Then I thought that I would leave my choice of movie up to chance, of a sort. I wanted to go have lunch somewhere, as there's "nothing much to eat" in the house, so I decided I would do that, and then decide which movie to see based solely on what I could get to without having to wait. And that's what I did. I procrastinated until nearly 1pm; but only after taking the preparatory steps of (1) having a shower, which would have been essential even if I hadn't spent a good chunk of the relatively-cool morning walking the dog and doing sweat-streaming housework; and (2) deciding where to go for lunch.

My choice for lunch was Basil's Mediterranean Kitchen, a reliably good place out in Loopland, easily accessible to all three movies at various theaters. I got there about 1:30 to find that Basil's is no more. Now it's a place called Sevin Mediterranean Kitchen. Ordinarily I don't go to restaurants until they've been around a while, but under the circumstances I figured I'd risk it. 

Sevin is so new that when you do a search for the name, you get results for Basil's; but the waiter told me, when I asked, that it was absolutely not the same; where Basil's was, apparently, a sort of multicultural hodgepodge of Levantine cuisines, Sevin's is "more Turkish," and that "we like to think we do things just a little bit better." Considering how good Basil's was, that's quite a claim.

The menu may have changed; I don't know. As a matter of custom, I ordered a dish I was very familiar with. I always do when trying a new restaurant, so I have a basis of comparison. In this case, it was doner kebab. It's a simple dish -- grilled meat on rice. At Sevin, it was served with a side of grilled tomatoes and some very hot green peppers, one of which I ate and three of which I set aside; and with a salad of mixed greens. I was also given a basket of flat foccacia-style bread with a yoghurt-and-cucumber sauce. 

Nothing was badly done or unpleasant. I will say that the yoghurt sauce was almost flavourless, and that the kebab was surprisingly oily, but not extremely so. The salad was dressed with oil and vinegar, liberally but again, not to excess. All in all, it was a good, enjoyable meal, though I could not point to any way in which it was better than Basil. Except for this: at the end of my meal, the chef (possibly the owner?) came by and asked about my experience, then presented me with a bit of lagniappe: a small piece of some kind of delicious cake encased in a wonderful coating of something that may have been chocolate and rolled in light flecks of coconut. This was absolutely wonderful. (She was, justifiably, proud of this little dessert. As she put it in front of me she whispered, almost conspiratorially, "I make this.") I don't know if they give that to  everyone, or just those that she happens to interview, but honestly, it was one of the best things I've eaten in weeks. Longer. 

As I finished up, I checked the list of movie times I'd written down and decided (finally!) to go see No Hard Feelings at the Quarry. I got there and into my seat while the commercials were running, so I whipped out my phone and read some emails until the previews. (Judging from the previews, no one in Hollywood has had a new idea since well before the pandemic. Sequels and rehashes are almost all we have to look forward to, though at least in one of them all the cast members are dogs. It seems clear that all the original thought these days is expended on what we used to call mini-series.)

No Hard Feelings doesn't involve original thought. In fact, I even found myself completing some of the clichés before the actors actually said them out loud. But it was, nonetheless, an enjoyable if improbable movie. There are just enough unexpected twists on familiar tropes to provide a rewarding level of humour. I was one of eight people in the matinee auditorium, and we were all laughing with some regularity. 

Jennifer Lawrence plays a blue-collar 30-something in gentrifying Montauk, New York who works two jobs to not pay her bills. We learn she is overburdened by the high taxes on her home, caused by rising values due to the pernicious effects of wealthier people moving in and buying up the town. Like in San Francisco, or Austin. (We never learn why she apparently doesn't pay any of her other bills.) 

Among those wealthier people is an unlikely pair of helicopter parents who offer a Buick to anyone who will "date" their matriculating son, a skinny, possibly autistic nerd more at home with rescue dogs. (Well, who isn't?) She, needing a car, decides to go for it, since she has, shall we say, plenty of experience with meaningless brief sexual experiences, and she really needs a car. The movie, of course, is about the change that comes over her through her experience with this much younger would-be man, starting, perhaps surprisingly, with a soulful rendition of a Hall & Oates song. She grows up. 

Oh, if only life could be like the movies.