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.

A Couple of Good Lunch Spots

China Star, on Babcock at Callaghan, is a nice little place for Chinese food on the northwest side. We stopped in on a whim the other day & found it had excellent service and above-average food. The dining room may not have been updated since the 1970s, but then neither have the prices. For five bucks apiece, we each got enough food for two good meals.

The hot & sour soup had an unusual sweet hint to it, and the fried noodles were crisp and not greasy. The beef & broccoli had a nice sauce, thicker than average, with a slight suggestion of ginger that gave it a complexity not usually found in Chinese-restaurant lunch specials.

Last city inspection: October 2014
6 demerits
(a tremendous improvement)
What the Ratings Mean

Yesterday, we went over to Garibaldi's on North West Military, in Castle Hills. We've been fans of the restaurant's Fredericksburg Road location, but sometimes this is a more convenient place. The food is as good as in the other location, plus the dining room is brighter and has a cleaner feel to it. I had the beef fajita nachos. A large order (12) was more food than I really needed, but I managed to lick the plate clean. Good service. Prices seemed a little high for Rick's tacos, but not outrageously so.

Castle Hills doesn't disclose
restaurant ratings on line, but the
restaurant posts the results by the door
What do those ratings mean?

Houlihorn, or maybe Longhans

A week ago, my friend Rick and I were drifting around the Death Loop, hoping for an interesting place for lunch. Unable to find one, we pulled into Houlihan's, a chain restaurant out of Kansas that's been around, oh, I don't know, maybe thirty or forty years. Okay, so it had been at least a decade since I'd been to a Houlihan's, & Rick wasn't feeling particular, so we decided to try it. 

The place has changed substantially since the last time I'd been to one, not that it was ever particularly memorable. They used to be a sort of glamourized bar that also served food. They still have a bar, but now the restaurant is the focus of the place. The room is large and nicely decorated, very much in the current fashion of minimalism and postmodern lines, with a few interesting touches not worth really describing. The partial old-fashioned acoustic-tile ceiling seemed to have been left behind by a prior occupant, not least because it was the only thing in the room that wasn't sparkling-clean. A little shiny steel and teak (or teak-coloured) wood, some glass and fake leather, and voilà: the modern Houlihan's. Nice. Comfortable. 

The hostess left us with menus, lunch-special cards, and a timer. This last is their gimmick: the lunchtime guarantee that your food will be with you in 20 minutes or less. The fine print on the menu reveals some limitations, of the obvious sort: if you order something unusual, for example, it doesn't apply. No one cares about such things, of course, until your food is delayed and you have to get back to the office without having eaten. That probably never happens at this restaurant, which I'm sure is a good thing that will interest some people doing drudge jobs in Überloopland.

Rick, on taking a seat, suddenly became oddly particular about what he was going to have; lucky for the waiter that the 20 minutes didn't start when we sat down, because Rick took at least 15 of those units to make a decision. It being a week ago, I no longer recall what he ordered, or what he thought of it; in any case, he didn't share it with me, so I wouldn't be reviewing it anyway. For my part, I went with the pot roast mac-and-cheese on the lunch specials menu, with a cup of baked potato soup. I'm sure the waiter, who had almost given up on us ordering, and who, I'm sure, was thinking about the turnover rate on his table, was relieved to finally start the little timer on the table and rush off to the kitchen.

What's that mean?
Last city inspection: August 2014
7 demerits

The food did indeed arrive within 20 minutes. I wouldn't call it particularly quick -- this isn't Burger King, after all. But it was prompt. The potato soup was not as hot as I think it should have been, but it was otherwise acceptable: a decent-sized cup, with decent quantities of potato and all the fixin's in a mild cream soup. 

The mac-and-cheese dish was, in some ways, quite good. Not in the same class as my late ex-mother-in-law's, whose version was enough to prompt me to marry her daughter*, but certainly better than what you would get at many restaurants, or out of a box. It had a crust of panko bread crumbs to give it a little crunch, and plenty of tender, moist beef, and of course the pasta and cheese that gives it its name. Though the cheese wasn't enough to give the serving the sort of cohesiveness I like to see in macaroni and cheese, it was flavourful, and enhanced the dish thereby.  The beef, though, detracted despite its exceptional tenderness: it had been prepared in a seasoning mix that I can ony describe as distracting and slightly unpleasant. The phrase that came to mind was that it got up my nose; I didn't like it, and would not order it again.

Today, for reasons not pertinent here, we were again on the hunt for an interesting lunch experience, this time on the inner loop. Years ago, there was a little café down near the county court house called Longhorn Cafe, from which my office-mates and I would sometimes order sandwiches or plate lunches. It was never a particularly good place, just convenient and cheap. Some time after that, this place opened up in town, and for a long time I thought it was the same place, gone upscale.  

But no: this is Longhorn Steak House, an outlet of an east-coast chain originating in Georgia. It occupies a building on the grounds of the old Central Park Mall once home to a Bennigan's, if memory serves. By the time we got that far, we were ready to settle for the sort of pasteurized fare one gets at chain restaurants; and neither of us had ever been there. So in we went.

The room is very much changed since it was a Bennigan's (or whatever). It is oriented left-to-right now, with the dining room on one side and the bar on the other. (Before, the bar was in the middle with dining areas around it like a theater-in-the-round.) The décor is all macho fake western: cheap reproductions of mediocre western art such as one would buy at those traveling hotel room "Art Shows" ("Nothing over $200!"), a few vaguely Amerindian vessels made, probably, in China; and some iron cut-outs of cattle and cowboys. The only things that weren't in keeping with the suburban western theme were the ubiquitous television sets showing sports channels over the bar, and the sign over the restroom door, which looked incongruously like it came from Disneyland's Raiders of the Lost Ark ride.

What the ratings mean
Last city inspection: May 2014
3 insignificant demerits

But the thing that struck us both about this restaurant was the degree of similarities it had to Houlihan's. The two chains don't appear to be at all related, but both possess the same vein of committee-designed ambience and the same vein of committee-designed menu selections (except, of course, at Longhorn the mac and cheese is steak instead of pot roast). These two restaurants are, in many significant ways, interchangeable.

We were given a bread basket while we waited, containing three thick slices of crusty bread that looked better than it was. It was baked slightly too long, rendering it crumbly and dry, and the butter was straight from the freezer and rock-hard.

This time, Rick was quicker to order, presumably as he had reviewed the menu the week before, at Houlihan's. He got the baked potato soup. It could have been from the same pot as what I'd had at Houlihan's, and it too was served not quite hot enough. He also ordered the "BPT special," a sandwich of bacon with pimento cheese and one thin slice of fried green tomato -- disappointing, given that the ingredient was touted as a significant component of the dish. It was served on Texas Toast, which constituted, he estimates, 80% of the food. He was served only a half-sandwich as part of a soup-and-sandwich combo, though he did not order that. The waiter offered to have the sandwich re-made whole, but Rick declined.

I toyed with the idea of ordering the steak mac-and-cheese, for comparison with what I'd had the week before at Houlihan's, but decided instead on an old-fashioned burger with swiss cheese. This proved to be a good choice. For starters, it actually looked like the picture on the menu: lots of meat -- almost too much, if you can believe that -- with fresh lettuce and a big thick slice of tomato. It had no mustard or mayo on it but was moist enough not to need it. The meat was cooked through, and the red onion used was crisp, and pungent enough to give flavour without overwhelming. All in all, a better than average burger.

I chose a baked potato as my side; this, like the bread, was slightly overbaked, but not so much as to warrant serious complaint; like the bread, it was just a little drier than it should have been. It was served with adequate condiments, though the butter was again too hard to use. Luckily, by this time the butter that had come with the bread basket had thawed enough to be cut with a knife.

* I did have other reasons, too; she also made a mean brisket.