Woolcott Redux

 I write this blog, and my other one -- when I write -- for myself. Unlike many others who read it, I actually enjoy my own acerbic writing style, and appreciate my own facility with punctuation. I am, in this, like Alexander Woolcott, albeit with less to say. One consequence of this type of amour propre is my habit of occasionally going back and reading some of the things I've said in previous posts.

 Lacking all modesty, I present here some of my favourites:

Loquacious though I usually am, I am reluctant to waste words describing most of the food on those plates. 

(On reviewing Jimmy's Egg, a now-defunct eatery in Castle Hills)

 

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. 

(From a review of Bourbon Street Seafood Kitchen on Loop 1604.)

 

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. 

(From a review of the restaurant FOLC, in Olmos Park.)

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? 

(From Lunch and a Movie, a review of the Dwayne Johnson vehicle in 2015.)

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. 

(From a review of La Gloria Ice House.)

The menu, I reckon, changes often, because it's printed on simple yet elegant card stock. The computer used to produce it has no capacity for capital letters and lacks a dollar sign. Slashes are used where the word "and" belongs, as if the character's actual meaning was irrelevant. (Does the roast chicken come with either lemon jus or honey jus? Surely not.) (The pedant in me required that little hissy fit.) Or perhaps these are just affectations that, in the mind of the menu writer, make everything feel classy. Well, all these fatuous fashionable departures from custom and meaning still make my eyes roll, but silently; and since I'm writing a review I feel obliged to mention what I would not point out were I engaged in polite conversation. And further, though they are irksome, they are trivial things, on a par with a presidential tweet, but with more substance, if less moment. 

(From a review of Periphery, a short-lived place on Main Avenue.)

Abnormal Behaviour

 

Just a hedge. Nothing special. Not relevant to anything.

We're creatures of habit, my wife and I. Both retired, living 35 years in a house way too big for just the two of us, and our interests in life are pretty well set. My wife knits constantly. She also plays soccer most weekends from September through May. We watch a lot of soccer on TV: US women's and men's national teams, and the English Premier League, August to June. (I'm a Liverpool fan, she's a Chelsea fan, but we both like watching most of the Premiership teams.) We have our routines for housework and maintenance, inside and out. We go out to dinner now and then. When it gets hot, like now, we just kind of slow down, though outside observers may not be able to tell the difference in life's pace. (The main difference in summertime is that we run a couple of window-unit air conditioners more often. Our house was built before AC was a thing, so we don't often need it. We've never had an electric bill above $120.)

 So I don't know what's happened recently; it's like a flurry of activity by our standards ever since I got back from my little county-counting trip to Georgia.  (That link, by the way, is to the first of six blog posts describing the trip. This blogger program seems to no longer notify people when I post something, so you may not have been aware that such a great piece of serial literature was even available for your perusal and edification. Not to be missed, though.) In the few days since then -- and in addition to the group stage of the Gold Cup, in which the US men's team found success while still disappointing fans, and our almost-weekly "date night," when we go out somewhere for dinner -- we actually did things for a change.

 First, we went to the zoo. We live like a mile from the zoo and have not been there in, what, twenty-five years? It's a great zoo, one of the finest in the country, but it's like the Alamo, except we don't even suggest it to visitors from out of town. Mostly because we -- or I, at least -- consider it to be overpriced. I don't even know what they charge to get in, normally, but I know that at some point in the last two or three decades, I saw the figure and was shocked to the bottom of my Seventies-era soul. 

 But on June 15, they had what's called "Locals Day," and city residents could get in for $8 each. I know they've done that before, but I never heard about it until I saw the news report after the fact, so when I read about it somewhere I put it on my calendar, and we actually went! 

There've been lots of changes at the zoo since the last time I was there, and after an hour or so it got pretty crowded, and then of course it got pretty hot. But it really is, still, a very good zoo. (And if you do go, park under the freeway. It's a little less of a climb when you leave.) They've added a lot of open-area enclosures for the animals, and more are being built, and they've added some very interesting animals, including an okapi and a couple of Komodo dragons, and an entire exhibit area of Australian critters. Only the chupacabra exhibit just off Platform 9 3/4 was a disappointment; but then, they're nocturnal creatures and you can't expect to actually see them during the daytime. 

photo by Natalia Sun

And just a few days later, we went to a concert. A concert! Us! Again, it was something of a surprise that we even knew about it before-hand, but we did, and we actually went! That so rarely happens. It was the final concert of the season by a local chamber-music quartet called Agarita. (I didn't even know they existed until I happened across a notice for this concert.) it was actually two concerts, one on Saturday at Incarnate Word, the other on Sunday at the Empire. I won't go to the Empire theater: there's insufficient room between the rows of seats for my knees, (and I'm not freakishly tall), so it had to be the performance at Incarnate Word. I looked on line for the program for the concert, fearing that it would be the kind of classical music that only musicians could love, but I could find nothing describing it, so I took a chance and got a pair of (free) tickets, figuring that we could sit at the very back, and if it started to sound like a traffic jam in Havana or Kampala, we could just leave.

 There was, in all honesty, a point during the evening when I thought it was time to sneak out. Several such points, actually. The first came at the very beginning when a local poet named Naomi Shihab started reading some of her works, talking over the beginning of an excerpt from Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring in a weak, slightly strained-sounding voice and using a barely-functioning microphone (thank God they got that straightened out quickly!), as though that great piece of American orchestral music was written to accompany her poetry. Well. 

 Yet it worked. There actually seemed to be a conceptual connection between her poem and the musical imagery of Copeland's famous music. It did not distract, as I had feared it would. (I wish I could remember the poem. There were several excellent lines in her recital of poetry during the evening, when I was impressed by her turn of phrase, and I know at least twice I repeated lines to myself and swore I was going to remember them. I did not.) Likewise in the next piece, three selections from Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin. The poetry was a yet more interesting part of the performance by comparison, because Ravel's music simply isn't as good as Copeland's. It's like the difference between a perfectly-cooked steak served on a fine china dish, versus the same steak served on a paper plate.

 (I made a quick search while writing this, hoping to find one of the poems she read that evening; but there's simply too much to go through on the off chance of recognising a phrase only vaguely remembered. But I did come across this poem, which I really like; and if you like it, too, you can probably access more of her work easily from that page.) 

 In the middle part of the program there was another one of those moments that put me in mind of sneaking out, when the group (who were, by the way, joined for much of the program by a New York City-based woodwind ensemble called Imani Winds, but they sat out this particular segment of the concert) played two short pieces of Music I Could Do Without: Blue Dress by Julia Woolfe, arranged for string quartet, and sweet air by David Lang. But we stuck it out. Next up was a piece written by one of the members of the aforementioned Imani Woods, Mark Dover, and when he started off by explaining what had led him to write the piece (a sad story, of course, but I had left my empathy on the charger at home and was not moved), I remembered something I'd heard recently, to the effect that "If you have to explain it, it probably isn't very good to begin with." But the piece, called I Am, Here Now, surprised both of us as the most evocative work we heard during the entire concert. Not very long, maybe 4 or 5 minutes altogether, it painted a completely realized picture: I thought of a melancholy man alone at home, staring out the window into a rainy evening in a big, vibrant city, life seemingly passing him by. Extremely mellow, excellently arranged with just two instruments, piano and bass clarinet.... I can't remember when a piece of modern music has seemed so ... so vivid, so rewarding. 

 Well, the rest of the concert was anticlimactic. A pair of uninteresting but blessedly short compositions written specially for the Imani Woods group; a few more selections of Copeland; a Stevie Wonder song and a Donnie Hathaway song. None of those things reached the image-making level of I Am, Here Now. 

 There was, however, one other aspect of the evening that bears mentioning. In addition to the poetry and the music, the program included a performance of interpretive modern dance by someone named Tanesha Payne. I don't like modern dance. I think it's like abstract art -- capable of any meaning, and thus no meaning. When I saw her name on the program, I was nonplussed; when she actually came out to perform, to a piece by Reena Esmail called Saans, I was dreading it, and praying for a mercifully short performance. What actually happened, though, was something of a revelation. 

taneshapayne.com/

 Tanesha Payne, it turns out, is the embodiment of grace. Maybe there is particular meaning to this or that motion of the arms or legs, or the turning of the body in this direction or that; I don't know and I don't care. But within a very few moments of the start of her performance I was captivated by the sheer grace of her movements. It helps, no doubt, that she has perhaps the longest arms and legs of any human being alive today, but that can only add to the grace of her movements, it can't be the graciousness itself. I don't know what this Saans composition sounded like; I have no memory of it. Maybe it was good, more likely it was not. But whatever it sounded like, it was good enough to provoke one of the most elegant and compelling performances of modern dance that I, at least, have ever seen.  

 So. Wow. First the zoo, then this (unexpectedly) very enjoyable concert, where even the seats were comfortable. (I can't sit through a whole performance at the Majestic anymore, or even the new Tobin Center; and as I've already said, I can't even sit down in the Empire, let alone enjoy an entire show there. So the seats at Incarnate Word make a big, big difference.) This is practically unheard of in my existence here in San Antonio since retirement twenty years ago. It just doesn't happen, that we go out this often. But wait! There's more!

 Because today I dragged the tarp off the convertible and we cruised up into the Hill Country to see an exhibition curated by the Smithsonian Institution called Crossroads: Change in Rural America. It's a travelling exhibition that I'd read about some time ago, and I was interested enough in the subject to put it on my calendar. If nothing else, it would be the excuse for a nice little road trip with the wife. Good weather, some winding roads, lunch in a small town (Bandera, where the exhibition was set up in the local middle school), and maybe we would learn a thing or two about something that has occupied a surprising amount of space in my brain for the last ten years or so. Because you can't avoid seeing that people in rural areas have become Red States, while people in urban areas have become Blue States. I didn't expect the Smithsonian to provide an explanation as to why this is so, but I was hoping for some small bit of enlightenment as to why rural America is different and how what must seem like rapid and incomprehensible change is driving the thinking of those people. 

(taken from the exhibition's page for its South Carolina incarnation)

 There was a little of that, a bit of implication as to how change affects the perception of American life in small communities. There is the implication that the (necessary) self-reliance of small communities seems threatened by the wholesale changes being forced on them as a consequence of the changes taking place in the cities, and by the clumsiness of government in failing to take the sensibilities of these small communities seriously when formulating policy. (The exhibition didn't say any of that outright, of course; it was too superficial an examination of the subject.)  

 And here's an opinion that will certainly be unpopular among my friends and family: I can see from this exhibition why those knee-jerk reactionaries and Neo-Nazis in the pro-Trump camp -- that is to say, most of them --  are so down on "DEI." It is a subject that has become tiresome. (I don't agree with that view, least of all when it's harped on by the Big Orange, who is undoubtedly the stupidest and most ignorant person ever to fall all the way upwards, but I can certainly understand it.)

 We had a nice lunch at the O.S.T. Restaurant (excellent service, good prices, nice atmosphere, pretty good food if you like cheese, and who doesn't), then headed over to take in the exhibit. The Smithsonian's show is in the middle of the large "cafetorium," while exhibits of local interest are along the sides. I couldn't enjoy those, though, because I couldn't hear the soundtrack for the video, over the voice of a very loud woman explaining everything about Bandera to a couple of new residents just a few feet away, and she wasn't moving. Gave up and went for the main exhibit, and by the time I'd looked through all of that I'd been standing up long enough for my own satisfaction. I was resting my legs with the intention of having a Round Two, but before I was ready Sherry was done with the whole thing, so we left. I wasn't really that interested in Bandera history anyway. It was enough to learn about the origin of dude ranches, which happened in Bandera, and the "Stompede," the big celebration of Cowboy Culture they used to hold in town before it all got out of hand.  

 So! Three outings in the space of ten days. That just doesn't happen around here. Truly abnormal. Unlikely to happen again.

Now I Want A Pasta Making Machine

Pazzo Pasteria

13777 Nacogdoches Road, #107

(near O'Connor Road)

  When I was a kid growing up, I don't think my Italian grandmother ever made her own pasta. There was a shop in Hammond, Louisiana -- the local metropolis five miles away -- that sold fresh, so why bother? Besides, she never worried too much about the shape of the pasta, and I've pretty much adopted the same who-cares mentality about it. I buy and use a few basic shapes: capellini, if I want long pasta (though I'll occasionally use fettucine or linguine, and rarely spaghetti); conchiglie, if I want short pasta, or occasionally orecchiete, cavatapi, penne, ziti or rigatoni if they're readily available. Lots of times they aren't. And when you're using store-bought dry pasta, it doesn't really make a lot of difference.

 But after one dinner at Pazzo Pasteria I feel a little differently about the whole subject. There's no store-bought pasta in the place, and I think I could actually tell the difference. Who'd 'a ever have thunk it?

 We had been at the movies, an uncommon event for us, seeing the new Christmas movie Red One at the Quarry; and since we had already covered a third of the distance involved, I figured we might as well go the rest of the way. 

 It's not a big place, just two units in an ordinary strip center, and the well-lit dining room is barely half the total. The ambience is American suburban with a hint of nostalgic Italian, mostly provided by the unobtrusive soundtrack of quiet modern music interspersed with things that would have made my mother exclaim, "Oh, I love this song!" (A single song from Perry Como would keep her happy for hours.) It was all quite comfortable. We were greeted with a big smile and I had the feeling that, if the hostess had known our names, she would have introduced us around to the other diners. 

What the ratings mean

 Having come so far, we decided to splurge a little bit, so we started with wine and an appetizer of spiedini. (I had been thinking vaguely of making some myself, and wanted to see how it was done here.) The name, spiedini, means "on a skewer" or something like that; when I was a kid, it was what we called kebab. Pazzo's version is from some other part of Italy. It was mozzarella cheese wrapped in prosciutto, which is a good combination, but it was served on a fabulously delicious bed of spinach dressed with a balsamic vinaigrette and coarsely grated parmesan that lifted it way beyond merely good. 

 We each freshened our palates with a small house salad and bread. The salad was a mix of lettuce and spinach with a few interesting ingredients added, most notably some really piquant finely-sliced onion that gave a wonderful and unexpected kick to the course. All this was topped with an excellent vinaigrette dressing, not the balsamic version that had been so nicely applied to the previous course, but a milder sort that complemented the character of the salad's ingredients. The bread was good but not that good, especially compared to everything else. One breadbasket is complementary at Pazzo; after that they're something like three bucks. I'm sure they do that because of people like me, who will happily make an entire meal of the bread, given the opportunity and a certain superior quality. In this case I was happy with just the complementary quantity.

 All the pasta dishes offered come in two sizes. Since we'd started with appetizer and salad, the smaller size seemed sufficient, and they were; but when I go back, if I don't have an appetizer, I will want the larger size. I guarantee it. My wife's choice was fusilli gorgonzola: pasta spirals in a creamy cheese sauce, with chicken. I'm the opposite of a big fan of gorgonzola cheese, which is the Italian version of bleu cheese. I think of it as rotten, so I never eat it. But I did sample her pasta course, and found it tasty. I still would never order it myself. In the words of somebody more famous than me, My gorge rises at it.

 I went with bucatini fiorentia: tubes of pasta in a butter and garlic sauce, with spinach, mushrooms and chicken. Oh. My. God. Oh, my God! The combination of flavours was outstanding, and the textures! This is why freshly-made pasta is better than store-bought. I had never had bucatini before; I thought the word had something to do with oil wells (it means something like "little bore-holes" and turns out to be an apt description of the shape). But now that I've had bucatini at Pazzo, I want a pasta making machine so I can have it whenever I want at home. (I won't get one, of course, but at least now I can see the point of one.)

 All in all, an outstanding meal. I wish I'd picked a better wine to go with it.

Another Good Choice

Maui's On Main

 1022 North Main

(at Lexington)

 I don't get out as much as I used to. Partly this is because of the increasingly intractable heat of the summers around here, and partly it's just plain ol' lack of interest in the world around me. But sometimes I force myself to shower and shave and go through all the tedious effort of selecting clothes to wear and deciding where in this vast and bustling city I feel like going. Often, the answer is "Nowhere," and so I stay home again.

 But last night my wife and I managed to rouse ourselves to action, largely by the draw of curiosity about Maui's On Main, a newish (six months old or so) and well-regarded burger joint not too far from home. It's in the space once occupied by Pete's Tako House, which long ago made the short move into downtown; and later by a locavore spot that wasn't good enough to long survive. 

What's that mean?

 Maybe this place will do better. It certainly impressed more on a first visit. We were immediately, almost boisterously, greeted as soon as we went in; it felt like arriving a little late at a neighbour's backyard barbecue. After a couple of explanations of menu items, we made our selections: my wife chose the regular single-patty hamburger with fries, while I went for the Loco Moco.

 It might have been nice enough out to sit on the patio, but we opted for a table in the tiny dining room. When we were making that choice I thought it was too windy outside -- I saw the decorations billowing in the breeze -- and only after we were seated did I realize that there was a huge-ass fan going out there. But we were comfortable enough inside. There was a kid's video playing on the one TV on the wall behind me, softly enough not to distract. Later, the sun got low enough that I had to change seats or be blinded; they could use a shade on the west-side window. But overall the place was exactly as it looks: small, unpretentious, funky, maybe even hip (I'm no judge of that anymore, I can assure you). 

 

 The food seemed to take a substantial time to arrive, but that may have been more perception than reality (owing to my own thoughts provoked by the particular video being shown), so let's not linger on the point. It came before too long, and the only consequence was that my wife's fries weren't as hot as they should have been. Everything else was fine.

 

 I don't know what makes Hawaiian rolls so good -- I've seen all kinds of recipes, some with sugar, some with brown sugar, some with pineapple juice, but I've never tried making them -- but after tasting my wife's excellent (and very large) burger at Maui's, we both have a new favourite. If I was rating the food based on just that burger, it'd be five jalapeños for sure. Everything in the burger was excellent and just thinking about it now is making me plan another visit. Best burger in town? Gotta say yes.

 

 My own dish, Loco Moco, was good too. Not as good; so few things in life are. But good. It consists of spam-fried rice, a traditional Hawaiian dish, topped with two hamburger patties, brown gravy, and two sunny-side-up fried eggs. It's served with a pasta salad. Both the main dish and the side dish come in copious quantity. I could only manage to eat half my dinner, but it came in a go-box so was no trouble to pack up and carry away. I expected to have a complaint about the cheap single-use plastic utensils, but they proved to be up to the task in this instance. (Though I still wish more restaurateurs would avoid them.)

 I was happy with the dish overall. A lighter touch with the brown gravy would be an improvement; it overwhelmed the other flavours of the dish, to the point where I couldn't actually taste the spam at all. And if I'm being honest, I would have been content with one hamburger patty and one egg on the dish. But this is America, Land of the Supersized Serving, so who can really complain about that? And I loved the pasta salad for its creamy simplicity.

 Anyway, it doesn't matter. Because next time I go to Maui's On Main, I'm getting the burger.

Kind of a Surprise, Really

The Dogfather

6211 San Pedro

 at El Mio and Recoleta

Going up and down San Pedro, I've passed this place perhaps seven hundred and fifty thousand times. Most of the time I don't even notice it. After all, other than the font on the sign out by the street -- made to emulate the font of the famous movie series that the name puns -- there is nothing to draw the attention away from the garish green tire shop next door and cause one to notice the existence of this modest little corner eatery.

And yet, there it is, and has been for years, and I've never tried it before. To be honest, until about a year ago, I never even thought about trying it. I mean... it's hot dogs. Like any all-American boy of the post-war era, I grew up thinking of hot dogs as something akin to haute cuisine, and there was nothing better than a wienie sliced up on spaghetti or macaroni and cheese or just nestled into a nice warm bun with mustard and relish and ketchup. But then the warnings started hitting. Rat hair! Bone! Insect parts! Lord knows what sort of contaminants were hiding in those jiggly pinkish tubes of cast-off ingredients. 

And so here I am, forty-nine years old again (for the Nth time) and I have ordered a hot dog, or something like it, as a meal exactly three times as an adult: once at the airport in Chicago -- because, you know, they're famous for their dogs; once at a place on Austin Highway named for Chicago -- because, you know, they must know how to do it like it's done in Chicago (a disappointment), and most recently at a restaurant in Roswell, Georgia, because I'd been thinking about The Dogfather while driving -- I don't know why -- and how I'd never tried it. Plus hot dogs were the chef's special* that evening. 

It occurs to me that hot dogs are not the contaminated mystery meat we were warned about in the waning days of my childhood. I trust our government enough to believe that they have responded to those complaints and that the ingredients in your average hot dog, or whatever type of sausage you're dealing with, are reasonably safe. 

And here I am at loose ends for dinner: home alone for a week (well, the dog is here with me, but she's not much for dinner conversation), and tired of leftovers and thrown-together meals of Whatever. So I decide to go out, and while perusing the options on Google Maps, I remember the Dogfather. I've been telling myself I was going to try it out; tonight's the night! This -- this -- is the appropriate juncture! Now is the time! So I did.

This is one of those places where you order at the counter and the cheerful young cashier (he reminded me of Hank Azaria playing the dog walker on Mad About You) will bring your order to you. There are a few tables inside, maybe room enough for fourteen people, plus a few barstools facing a counter under a window. Outside there are five or six picnic tables and a few small cafe two-tops. The weather being remarkably cool for mid-July (only eighty degrees for a high today; can you believe it?), I thought I'd give the patio a try. Expectations were low, as San Pedro is usually a busy, loud street: seven lanes in that area. But the traffic was no distraction (except for one moment when some J.D. in a black pickup had to show off his exhaust note). The seating was comfortable enough, I was untroubled by flies, and the wind was low enough that napkins didn't fly away. There was some music being played on a P.A., just loud enough to mask any conversation at other tables but not so loud as to impose itself.

I decided on a Brat. I figured I couldn't go too far wrong with that; most of the other menu options seemed a little too fru-fru for a first-time hot-dog-restaurant sampler. I wanted something I could identify, for comparison purposes. I also ordered some curly fries, and I was going to get a beer but they only have it in cans, so I went for a fountain drink. (They have some brand I've never heard of, but it was okay; better than Pepsi, anyway.)

Brat with curly fries

The menu describes the Brat as being made with beer, and served with spicy mustard, horseradish, crema, kraut and fried onions. There's no mention of the bun, but I assumed there would be one. I was right. There was, and let me tell you this: the bun and everything they put on it was great. Great! The bratwurst may or may not have been made with beer; I'll take their word for it. But it was delicious, marvelously seasoned and expertly cooked just to the near edge of crispy. The mustard and horseradish had just an elegantly subtle kick to them, and were not slathered on in dollops designed to conceal some other failing. The pickled kraut was delicious, made with red cabbage, and I'm pretty sure somebody did their dissertation on How Much Kraut Should a Brat Have? And those fried onions were like the thin, crispy, seasoned onion rings you used to be able to get at Frontier decades ago. The overall effect? Great!

What's that mean?

The curly fries, too, were outstanding. I'm not a big fan of curly fries in general, but this serving will raise the entire genre in my overall esteem. Perfectly fried, perfectly seasoned, escorted by a small container of spicy ketchup, and served in enough quantity to satisfy without overdoing it. I didn't feel the least bit guilty even as I downed the least little crumb clinging to my dish. 

* Though the food in that Georgia restaurant was good, I use the term "chef" loosely.

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.

Local Haunts

 

 A while back, I stopped writing restaurant reviews every time I ate out. I felt like I was saying the same things, over and over; and since I most often go for the same things -- machacado or chilaquile tacos; lasagna; curry -- it felt entirely too repetitive.

 And yet I have, still, this unquenchable urge to share my opinions with the world at large, even knowing that the world at large couldn't care less what I think. This is the curse endured by those of us who are always right, even when we're not. And so I present this post, a synopsis of restaurants close to where I live, places I patronize or avoid routinely. 

The Right Stuff

(in alphabetical order)

 

The Armadillo

McCullough at Evergreen, by Metropolitan Hospital

    Everybody needs to have a favourite burger joint, and this is mine. It inhabits the space made sacred by the much-loved but long-gone Little Hipps, and as the years go by it more and more captures the same sort of eclectic funky atmosphere that was one of the legendary restaurant's charms. More importantly, after years of tweaking its preparation methods, it has -- now that it's stopped trying so hard to be Little Hipps 2.0 -- gotten very close to the quality of food that made Hipps such a success for so long. Nothing fancy (though there are some oddities on the back of the menu that I never bother to look at -- taco salad, baked potatoes), just burgers, fries, tots and beer: the essence of the good burger joint. 

    Sadly -- well, it makes me sad, and a little bit angry -- my review on Zomato has disappeared from the internet, since that website decided only to host reviews in India and the UAE.

    My favourite meal: half-pound cheeseburger, tater tots and a draft beer.

Cabaña de Jalisco

Hildebrand between Blanco & San Pedro

    This taquería didn't start off as my top choice along the Hildebrand Corridor; when I reviewed it, more than ten years ago, it was pretty ordinary. But now it's undeniably become my all-time favourite place for breakfast tacos. For one thing, it has the best coffee and the best service, and it at least matches the quality of Tex-Mex food I find anywhere around here. The corn tortillas are as good as anybody's, and quality of the taco fillings I've had (and I've had most of them, though I've settled on a favourite) are, with one exception, the equal of any. (If I were rating it now, I would add a chili pepper to the food rating, another to the value rating, and two chili peppers to the service rating. It's improved that much.

    My favourite meal: tacos de machacado con huevo and coffee.

Caparelli's On Main

Main Avenue at Mistletoe

    One thing I'm sure about is that when Caparelli's is good, it's very good. Another thing is that it's not always good. Depends, it seems, on who's running the kitchen. Lately, though, and for the past few years, it's been really good. And popular: where once we could just show up on a Friday or Saturday and get a table, nowadays we need the forethought of a reservation. Another thing is that, even when it wasn't at its best, Caparelli's lasagna was still the best around, and the ambience in there (or on the patio) is always pleasant. (Even when they had live music that was almost always true.) Service may be hit or miss, depending mostly on the experience of the individual server, but generally it's clearly on the right side of pretty-good, and the value is also reliably good. (They also have the best pizza in the immediate area, and when we want one for take-out, they're who we call.) They have a good wine list, too. If only they could tear the salad lettuce into smaller pieces....

    My favourite meal: Lasagna! Lasagna, lasagna, lasagna. (But if they ever put the Chilean sea bass back on the menu, I might have a decision to make.) (No, it'd still be lasagna.) With a glass of Cavit pinot grigio.

Chela's

North St Mary's at Mulberry

    This one's on the very edge of my local area -- barely within walking distance; it's on the other side of 281, which is a mostly mental dividing line -- but it does have absolutely the best deshebrado machacado tacos I've ever had. I'd go there all the time, except that their coffee is abysmal and the service is ... well, let's call it uninspired. 

    My favourite meal: deshebrado machacado tacos, to go.

 

Julia's

Blanco Road at Elsmere

    Owned by the same people that have Sohill Cafe (see below). It manages to feel upscale and funky at the same time. The food is kind-of-French, and very good. The menu changes from time to time, but the quality is consistent. Service quality depends on the kitchen, though only once has it been a real issue. (The waitstaff know their business, the kitchen not always.) Ambience has mellowed over the last couple of years. 

    My favourite meal: can't say I have a favourite. Consistently good, though.  

 

La Fonda On Main

Main Avenue below Woodlawn

    When I moved to this area, decades ago, La Fonda was already old; it's been there more than 80 years now. Unfortunately, back then, it was abominable. Then Cappy & Sue Lawton, owners of the more-than-successful Cappy's restaurant on Broadway (Ground Zero for the '09 set) came in and turned the place into one of the best upscale Mexican restaurants in town, with a gorgeous patio and (now) another dining room beyond. The ambience is unbeatable, whether you dine indoors or out; the service is generally excellent (though sometimes you get a new waiter, who's still feeling their way; though even then there's a certain competence to their work) and the prices are quite reasonable. Sadly, like at Caparelli's, the days when we could just walk over and get a table are long gone: reservations are now a must.

    My favourite meal: steak relleno, or spinach tacos. With a house margarita.

Outlaw Kitchen

Flores Street at Magnolia

    This place is unique. The menu is limited to two entrées, one of which is always vegetarian; they grow a lot of their herbs & spices in the garden beside the converted house. They're only open a few days a week. They only have a few tables. (I assume there are a few more inside, but I've never been inside.) Everything is excellent. Everything. Prices are a little high but the value is excellent.

    My favourite meal: they've never had the same thing twice, as far as I know. But everything I've ever had has been better than good.

Pesto

On McCullough, in the Yard

    This place is another that's a little out of the local area (meaning, it's not within walking distance of my house) but since it opened a few years back, it's become my favourite for Italian food. The menu isn't as extensive as Caparelli's On Main, but everything they do, they do very well. The service has been much improved the last few times I've been, too -- before that it had been ... well, not bad, but inconsistent. My only complaint is that they've changed their bread from a cheese-laced foccacia to a more run-of-the-mill product. Still good, but hey, I used to go there just for the bread, which could help you understand Les Misérables. 

    My favourite meal: a toss-up between the scallops and the stuffed shells. Either one with a glass of pinot grigio.

 

Regio Cafe

McCullough, between Myrtle & Locust

     Okay, this place is as much about location as food. When I'm down in that part of town (it's near my doctor's office, and the post office) I go here because it's (a) convenient, and (b) better than any of the other Tex-Mex places in that area. The service is generally good, the prices are always good, the food is always a cut above and the atmosphere is unpretentious and welcoming.

    My favourite meal: machacado tacos and coffee. 

Scratch Kitchen

San Pedro at Russell Street

    This place is new to my mental list of local favourites. At this point, in fact, it's really more on my wife's mental list than mine. It's very small, with no table service, a varying menu, and kind of a kitschy feel to it. Excellent baked goods. A place to meet your neighbours and their dogs. Limited parking. A place to kick back and let other people stare holes in the back of your head because they want your table. Only drawback: the disposable utensils & dishes. I hate those.

    My favourite meal: haven't tried enough things here to say. 

 

Sohill Cafe

Blanco Road at Elsmere

      The first time I went to Sohill, right after it opened, I was struck by the ambience of the place. It felt like a purely local place, just a bunch of neighbours getting together for a glass of wine and a bite. The food was just okay, but the attraction of the place was absolutely palpable. Apparently not just to me, as the next 4 or 5 times I went there, the wait for a table was so long that I gave up and went elsewhere. Then the pandemic hit. 

    Fortunately, they've re-opened now, and the food is much better than before (thanks, I guess, to a new chef). And the atmosphere remains. I almost hate to say anything about it, for fear that other people will go there & it'll once again be impossible to get a table. 

    My favourite meal:  fried pizza, just about any kind.

YaYa's

On McCullough, in the Yard

    There are many good Thai places in town, but only two that are better than YaYa's; but neither one is as conveniently located. And frankly, only one of those two is really better; the other is now living on reputation (though it's the only one of the three that has pad wun sen, my favourite Thai dish). Surprisingly, I've never seen YaYa's crowded, though the ambience is excellent, the prices are reasonable, and the service and food are both top-notch. Still, it's managed to survive for a number of years now, despite being nearly invisible from the street. (Personally, that's one of the things I like about it.) They do a pretty good take-out business, though, especially since the start of the Pandemic. 

    My favourite meal: Curry; green or Panang. With pork or chicken, and shrimp fresh rolls.

 

 

The Wrong Stuff

(places you won't find me eating)

in alphabetical order

 

Blanco Cafe

Blanco Road at Elsmere

    Good value and ambience, along with a good menu, don't make up for so-so food of the greasy-spoon variety and really lousy service.

Chris Madrid's

Blanco Road at Hollywood

    Undeniably the most popular burger joint in town, but to me it's a grease-pit with an uncomfortable feel (indoors; the patio is more welcoming) and mediocre service. 

 

El Jarrito Cafe

Blanco Road at Rosewood

    Just another mom-&-pop taquería, but with really loud a/c, mediocre food, mediocre service, and no real charm.

Mama's Kitchen

Hildebrand at Breeden Street

    Borderline. I almost decided not to list this place, because the owner (or, at least, the guy who ran the place) is such a friendly, conscientious, helpful guy. The prices are okay, the food is okay, the ambience is close-to-okay (as long as you don't sit by the air conditioner), and the service is pretty good. When the pandemic hit, I made up my mind to go there regularly, just to do what I could to keep it going through the tough times. But I was thwarted by the unreliability of their hours. That's probably no longer an issue, but after two years I'm just out of the habit of even trying it. Plus their corn tortillas aren't as good as at other places.

Panchito's

McCullough at Annie Street

    Used to be good. Now: the food is still alright, the prices aren't bad, and the ambience of the place is sort of bourgeois-Tex-Mex; a family feel to it. The service, though, has gotten really erratic. The last three or four times I've been, I've felt like I was imposing.

Salsa

San Pedro at Mistletoe

    What can I say good about this place? Sadly, only that it's not horrible. The chips and salsa are, but the rest of the food is just mediocre. The service, likewise. Prices are reasonable, but the ambience has sort of a Great Depression vibe to it. (I've noticed that they advertise music on certain days now; I admit I'm curious about that, but not enough to actually go check it out.)

Taco Taco

Hildebrand between McCullough and Howard

    I object on principle to this place because of its designation by two supposedly reputable sources (not, I assure you, Yelp! and TravelAdvisor, which are the antithesis of reputable sources -- does anyplace earn less than four stars?) as having "the best tacos in America" when I know from personal experience that it doesn't even have the best tacos on that street. By a very wide margin.

And by the way, most of the restaurants listed here have been reviewed by me, either in this blog or on Zomato.com (formerly Urbanspoon). If you want to read the reviews in this blog, check out the indexes of Mexican, Asian, or Other restaurants on the right-hand side of the blog page. If you want to read the reviews on Zomato.com, search by restaurant name; but good luck finding my review among all the other expressions of opinions, mostly worthless, on those pages. I did nearly 500 reviews of restaurants all over the country on that site before it got to be too frustrating, several years ago. 

 

June 3, 2026:

Since I wrote this post, Sohill on Blanco has shut down and been replaced by an interesting breakfast-&-lunch restaurant from the same owners. I've been twice. The first time I thought it was terribly overpriced; the second time it seemed just a little overpriced but the food seemed more interesting. Worth another try, or two, or three. And I've moderated my opinion on Jarrito's, also on Blanco. The staff is still a little frowny; but maybe they're getting used to see me (I go there some mornings just for a change from preferred spots within walking distance of my house), and it's cheap. Always a plus. They have basic breakfast tacos for a buck and a quarter each, before 10AM, except cheese is extra. Still, sometimes basic is in order.  

An Update, of sorts

Chela's Tacos

3420 North St Mary's Street (at Mulberry)

After my rave a couple of weeks back about Chela's Tacos, on Broadway,  a reader informed me that the "other location" mentioned on the restaurant's web site was at North St. Mary's Street and 281, in the space occupied for many years by Joseph's Storehouse. That was good news for me, since that location is, just barely, within walking distance of my house. 

The St. Mary's location is close to being just across the freeway from the YMCA, and I've been thinking (for a long time -- major life-changing decisions must be given thorough consideration) about re-joining a gym; and I could picture myself walking over to the Y for a workout, then up to Chela's for a taco or two. It's a pleasant thought, and nothing motivates me to get to the gym like the promise of tacos.*

So today, my wife and I made that walk: had tacos at Chela's, then checked out the Y. 

The food at this location of Chela's is every bit as wonderful as at the Broadway location. This time I also tried a machacado barbacoa taco, which is very good but not something that sets my taste buds to humming like the machacado deshebrado. Maybe it's partly because I didn't specify corn tortillas, and apparently the default here is, unexpectedly, flour. (Based on experience, I'm pretty sure that everyone who operates a Mexican or Tex-Mex restaurant assumes that Anglos prefer flour tortillas. Is it racist that I've noticed that? Is it racist for them to assume that? Discuss among yourselves if you care about it; I'm only mildly offended by it.) That would be my mistake, I guess, so next time I go I'll remember that, and specify corn. 

The St Mary's location also has a few tables outside, so if the weather's good and there are two of us, we could take the dog -- another strong plus. (They may have table service at this location, although I placed my order at the counter. If they do, I can take the dog even when it's just me.)

On the down-side, the location also houses a cantina, and the room seems geared to that more than to the taquería. The whole space (it's one large room) is done up in a kind of techno style, an approach to commercial interior design that's really starting to seem retro, what with the hard surfaces and exposed wiring and air ducts hanging from a black-painted ceiling. The result is that the sound inside ricochets all over, producing a din that, with a few more bodies in it, would be as unbearable as at the original Rosario's in Southtown.

* Maybe a bakery would.

Absolutely the Best (so far)

Chela's Tacos

5231 Broadway (in Alamo Heights, south of Austin Highway)

 Every time I pass a certain taquería on Hildebrand, I'm reminded that in the recent past, two national culinary authorities* proclaimed it the source of The Best Tacos in America. As I've written before, I don't even consider it the best tacos on that street.

 Still true. Those authorities may know food in general, but they sure don't know Tex-Mex tacos.

I missed it, twice.

 And now I have to add a further caveat: the best tacos, the absolute best tacos, in San Antonio (and, therefore, the United States), that I've found so far, aren't on Hildebrand at all, but on Broadway, at a place called Chela's. It's tucked into as unprepossessing a strip-center as the upscale enclave of Alamo Heights can muster, with parking out front for maybe a dozen fashionable European sedans and SUVs, with more spaces in the back. (The restaurant's web site mentions another location, but refers to it only as "St Mary's," with no address. It may be a food truck on The Strip, or maybe it's some kind of facility at the university of that name.)

 Chela's takes seriously the mantra of fresh ingredients, and it produces results. The machacado tacos I had on my most recent visit, like every time I've been there, were a splendidly balanced blend of eggs, vegetables, and beef. The flavour had a smoothness to it that is hard to describe as anything other than buttery. The tortillas had exceptional integrity -- so often an issue -- and held together all the way to the end of the meal. The coffee was self-serve, with free refills; it's brewed a little more toward the acidic end of the spectrum than I like, but not so much that it needs a dose of salt. (This, from someone who prefers Community Coffee, the Louisiana brand that my go-to taquería on Hildebrand serves.)

 I rarely get over to Broadway these days, and even more rarely during breakfast-taco hours, so I consider the accidental discovery of this place a few months ago to be one of the great good things in my life since the Bush '41 administration. Honestly, if it were within walking distance of my house, I'd be there just about every morning, with a plate of deshebrada machacado tacos in front of me.

* Specifically, Bon Appétit magazine, and that guy from Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on some foodie TV channel.

Still There, Still So-So

Blanco Cafe
1720 Blanco

just north of the Fulton Street circle

I've never really been a fan of the Blanco Cafe. It has a loyal following, people who presumably enjoy something about it, but I've never been among their number. To me, there were only two reasons to ever go there; one was its location, which is convenient to my house; the other was a neighbour who had some kind of personal relationship with the family that started the local chain.

Well, there are plenty of restaurants convenient to my house; and that neighbour died some years ago. I never went back to Blanco Cafe after that ... until last week. My immediate reason was the desire to get some exercise, something I don't do nearly enough of. My secondary reason was curiosity: had it improved at all in the years since I'd last been? In that time, one generation of owners had given way to successors, and I've been told that still others are now in charge there.

I've been back twice now, and have decided that twice is plenty.

The first time, I sat at the lunch counter on a stool that was so low I felt like a grown-up visiting a kindergarten. It was uncomfortable enough that, for my second visit, I resolved to take a table, even if that meant having to wait (though I would probably have just left and tried again later). But there were several open tables, and I took one in the back. I'm never comfortable occupying a table for four when I'm alone in a crowded restaurant -- a table for two, sure, but anything larger and you're taking food out of the servers' children's mouths. Fortunately at that moment, the place was busy but not crowded, and yes, it helped that about half the tables were occupied by people dining alone. That shouldn't matter, but it does.

Last city inspection, January; score: 84

These are the things I like about Blanco Cafe: they have a good menu, they have good coffee, and they have good prices. They also have a comfortable atmosphere, a true neighbourhood family-friendly feel, and just enough noise to be a warmly pleasant sanctuary. (Most of the time, anyway; at one point someone in the kitchen felt that something important needed saying in emphatic Spanish that was too loud for me to ignore but too rapid for me to follow.) And there is nothing trendy about the place. (That's probably part of the whole "neighbourhood feel" thing.)

And these are the things I don't like: the service is mediocre, the staff is unhappy, and the food is so-so. On both visits, it took too long for someone to wait on me. That might be understandable when I'm at a table in the back, though I know they saw me come in and sit down; there's no excuse for it when I'm at the lunch counter. Coffee refills were slow in coming, too. The waitress on my second visit spoke to me in what I can only describe in a murmur delivered through an etched frown. The cashier acted, on both visits, as though she had just that moment learned that her favourite soap opera had been cancelled, and she didn't want to talk about it. The staff I encountered on both visits were an effective counterpoint to the ambience of the place.

All my memory could conjure of the food at Blanco Cafe was the image of grease on a plate. That, at least, seems to no longer be the case. I ordered machacado tacos both times. Both times I got eggs with shreds of dried beef, scrambled with peppers and onions and wrapped in cold, dry flour tortillas. On the first visit, they didn't ask if I wanted corn or flour and I didn't specify; on the second visit, I specified corn but got flour anyway. They were not good tortillas. On the first visit, the eggs méjicana were done the way I like them, the way I think they should be; on the second visit, someone in the kitchen decided salt was a good thing for scrambled eggs. (I strongly disagree). Both times, though, they were scrambled to a very good consistency, without too much butter or oil, and had they been tucked into a nice, soft, pillowy warm corn tortilla they might have been enough to tempt me to come back to Blanco Cafe again and again. But being, as they were, stuffed into a couple of rigid old flour tortillas will ensure that, when I need an excuse to take a walk, I'll go to one of the many other taquerías near my house.

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