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Click: East Side Cafe of Austin
It is a common enough poetic conceit that the dog dreaming on the hearth sees himself a wolf, that the prowling housecat dreams tiger dreams, that even we common mortals of clay dream ourselves soaring as angels. If restaurants are able to dream, and if they ever closed to catch a nap, then, all the little Kerby Lanes surely dream of being the East Side Cafe.
Despite being located in the same funereal neighborhood as Hoover’s — directly across the street from it, in fact — the East Side Cafe succeeds in drawing the visitor into its own milieu right from the parking lot, where one steps out between the restaurant itself and the associated cute little garden shop, with a view across at the celebrated garden itself and a yard full of chickens.
The interior of the restaurant is entirely residential in appearance, a collection of small cozy dining rooms lined with bookshelves and, in the room where we sat, a brick fireplace supporting the daily special chalkboards. The menus display photographs on the front covers of the latest new additions or recent produce in the actual garden outside, proud as parents showing off pictures of their progeny.
And as with new parents, it is impossible for a sentient being to stay in the presence of East Side Cafe without being reminded, several times through various media, that their menu revolves around the fresh output of their actual garden outside, and it may be tempting for a minute or two to find this pride of produce a bit pretentious — but then the food arrives and justifies it entirely, even perhaps makes it seem humble.
It is, in short, damn good food.
But ‘in short’ is hardly our stock in trade here at the Bisque, so to elaborate: we began with an appetizer of Baked Brie with Apple Chutney, a generous wedge of gooey cheese more than adequate for two, the chutney an ideal complement, and violating the laws of physics that usually seem to govern this sort of dish, it arrived with exactly the right number of toasted bagel chips to actually match the amount of cheese.
James’ Dad had the Plat d’Crudities, a large platter of rabbit food, while I opted for a couple of dishes featuring combinations I would never have thought of: Smoked Salmon Ravioli with a side of Chipotle Pecan Soup. The soup, unlike many chipotle-based food items to be found in Texas, focused more on the smoky flavor of the peppers than on searing the tongue with capsacin, with a thick pureed texture suitable to a pasta sauce as much as a dish in itself.
The ravioli were roughly the size of hubcaps, and the sauce so finely tuned to complement the smoked salmon as to avoid entirely the moment of deep unease I usually hit midway through any cream-sauced seafood dish, when the stomach suddenly realizes that it is loading up on both milk and fish at the same time, even as the tongue is insisting that the rest of the serving will be joining it soon.
And afterwards, there was that which my cohort would weep should I omit to mention, to wit pie. Lime Pie in my case, and oh me, oh my. It tasted exactly like I always hope a Key-lime pie will but they so rarely do, a miraculous contradiction, simultaneously cheesecake-rich and sherbet-light. The charm of the dish was only enhanced by the use of actual cream, whipped, rather than the fluffy white emulsion sprayed from a can, and the garnish of two small pink flowers which I hope were intended as edible, since I ate one.
Charm, authenticity, amazing food and — indeed — prompt refills on the hibiscus-mint iced tea: we need to start visiting some more notably mediocre or even bad eateries, or my ratings of five humorously chosen items out of five will stop having any meaning.
But there it is anyway: five garden-fresh radishes out of five, and only a passing warning that the prices certainly reflect the establishment’s awareness of its own value.
So Texas You’ll Plotz
Click: Moonshine
Moonshine Bar & Grill is an intensely pleasant place; the interior having a homey atmosphere in the sense of resembling an actual home which happens to consist entirely of dining room, the patio spacious and airy. There is a definite feel of special occasion about the place, of which J’s D. could tell you better than I whether it wears out with repeat visits.
We had with us a guest to whom I had not been introduced, but whose presence has already become known in some of The Dad’s reviews, that being a cell-phone sized camera with capacities that would have exploded my head back in the day, which is to say this entire paragraph has been spent on ‘this review has pictures’.
Here is one, of the Moonshine’s simple yet delight-filled menu:
The popcorn offers a deceptively light opening.
Note the important presence of popcorn on the table, which is brought free. It has a light dusting of some sort of peppery spice and what appears to be real butter, and even as a blatant effort to entice one toward ordering more drinks, it’s a nice touch, just the thing to nibble while considering your order.
Since the menu is only partially readable in the picture, yet I’m about to discuss it as though you know what I’m talking about, here’s a link to the website’s copy.
For my personal tastes, this menu has one of the highest percentages I’ve ever seen of things I’d actually order, so deciding between them was a bit difficult, but on the other hand, a random dart-board method would work in a pinch. We started with an appetizer of Beer Batter Asparagus:
The dipping sauce is house buttermilk ranch, pink with paprika. It is delicious, and heavy.
Perhaps inevitably, including one that was, as Terry Pratchett would say, humorously shaped. The asparagus was delicious, and cooked to just the right degree to be toothsome without being mushy, which can’t be all that easy to combine with the tempura-style preparation. The beer battering, however, provided a note which would soon become a theme: the simple fact is good asparagus in batter is a bit of a gilded lily, that is, the batter did not do much to enhance the asparagus, but did make it a somewhat heavier dish, the full significance of which will become apparent.
Following that, I made a random stab at the entree list and came up with the Grilled Pork Tenderloin with Charred Pineapple & Green Chile Salsa, and a side of Baked Macaroni,
The pork tenderloin. Note the salsa, and the brown sauce which is not very visible here. They are heavy.
while James’ Dad had the Horseradish Crusted Salmon with Lemon Dill Sauce and rather than a side, opted for a double helpin’ of vegetables, on account of he has a small computer telling him how may calories he may eat in a day.
And the salmon. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the lemon dill sauce is heavy.
At this point I want to reiterate that the food is excellent, the service friendly and prompt (by my only particular metric, which is that I didn’t have to wait for tea refills), and the atmosphere intangibly celebratory; because for both humorous and rhetorical value this review is inevitably going to dwell on the single substantial quibble — which is, itself, a quality hard to truly complain about in a restaurant.
I use the word ‘substantially’ quite deliberately here; to put it simply, Moonshine is not a place to go if you aren’t serious about eating, unless perhaps you intend rather to sit down and get serious about drinking. The sauces are heavy, the vegetables are heavy with butter, the baked macaroni, for all that it comes in a small cup, is deliriously heavy with cheese, the asparagus is batter fried.
And the desserts…
The Fudge Stout Brownie with Malt Ball Ice Cream, as seen by a tiny person standing on the table.
…weigh five hundred pounds apiece.
The Peanut Butter Mousse Pie with Oreo Cookie Crust, imported exclusively from Brobdignag.
Neither of your humble reviewers were able to finish these chocolate masterpieces, which is not a statement lightly taken. To be fair, the desserts are explicitly advertised as sized for sharing — indeed, the server warned Dr. Dad away from the Signature Skillet Apple Pie, as the serving is not a slice, but a pie (I also have to admire the sly tactic of slipping a combination dessert menu/comment card onto the table prior to bringing the check). They might do well to consider making smaller portions for people who are explicitly ordering for one.
But again, it’s hard to fault a restaurant for being too filling. It’s just not exactly a place for snackers or dieters; there are salads on the menu, but I’m willing to bet that the dressing is applied heavily, and it’s worth noting that one of the salads contains steak while another contains fried chicken. The sinister part is simply that this very filling fare will tempt you powerfully to indulge enough to spend a long time semidormant afterward.
So come hungry, leave having not quite finished a dessert.
Five Lone Stars and a shot of white lightning in a Ball jar.
Time to Play ‘Bistro or Supervillain?’
I can’t help it; at least I admit to my obsessions, and since the Blue Dahlia does not remind me of Disneyland, it must therefore bring to my mind an excellent name for a supervillain, or possibly for a glamourous international jewel thief — as well, of course, as evoking the infamous Black Dahlia murder of 1947, an association made all the less fortunate by the bistro’s proximity to the same funereal bleakscape that houses the previously reviewed Hoover’s.
To most Austinians, the phrase ‘downtown, just east of I-35’ does not precisely evoke ‘class’ or ‘upscale’ or even ‘fresh paint’, but don’t tell that to what the lightpost banners announce as the East End Ibiz District: a stretch about three blocks long by one block wide of aggressively modern and shiny architecture with the sort of garish, desperate Austin Is A Sound Investment Dammit gentrification that leads people to use terms like ‘Ibiz’ and ‘SoCo’ with a straight face. Not that there’s anything wrong with this in and of itself, but a very short walk past any of the East End Ibiz District’s facades leads one to wonder, if the area’s up-marketing takes hold, whether all these dead people all over the neighborhood are going to continue to be able to afford the real estate, or whether we’re going to end up with your basic Poltergeist scenario here.
The Blue Dahlia Bistro sits amid a blue steel and plate glass shopping center entirely too classy to be called a strip mall despite being one, and trades on one of the forms of high-class dining experience that’s been popular with the smart set at least as far back as Puccini — to wit, the dedication of considerable culinary art to creating the impression that one is eating the lunch of a penniless rural French shepherd.
Don’t let all this cranky class consciousness give the impression that I don’t like the place, however; I just have an instinctive rankling to a place that makes me feel as though I were using the wrong fork, even when in fact they only give me one fork and the dish I ordered was finger food anyway. Lunch at the Blue Dahlia was in fact a very pleasant experience and the food quite good, and less expensive than the number of French words in the menu might lead one to expect.
The Dahlia has a very nice back patio, not overly large, but not cramped with tight-packed tables in the manner of most coffee-shop patios either. The weather on the day we visited was very nice, which the bistro can hardly take credit for, but the artful arrangement of overhead canopies and unobtrusive space-heaters around the patio seem well equipped to make it a pleasant dining space in nearly any weather. After taking our seat, we were carefully inspected by a small calico cat who walked up, sat down a couple feet away, and watched us for about a minute with evident displeasure before walking away again. Fortunately, they served us despite the disapproval of the cat, but it was a close thing.
I had the meat and cheese platter, one of the more enthusiastically rustic dishes, to the extent that in addition to being arrayed on a bed of mixed lettuce, it was served on a slab of grey stone rather than a plate. The simple but filling assortment of meats and cheeses, along with olives and small spicy pickles, offered two standout surprises: the mustard, which looked like a creamy dijon but turned out to be much stronger than expected, pungent with horseradish or possibly Chinese mustard; and in the bread basket, a delightful cranberry-walnut bread that would have been suited as a dessert in itself. James’ Dad also reports that the cranberry-walnut bread works well with a tiny dab of the mustard and some of the balsamic vinegar found alongside the olive oil on each table, but I only tried it with butter. The bread assortment also included segments of French bread which were enhanced more than I would have expected by the addition of sesame seeds to the crust. Rarely is a basket of assorted breads a memorable highlight of a restaurant’s offerings, but the Blue Dahlia makes a very impressive production of it.
J’s. D. had the soup special du jour, a duck and sausage stew, which impressed him enough to order a second cup to go before we departed; though I didn’t try it, it smelled magnificent and I’m sure he shall elucidate you further to its charms in his own review of the Dahlia.
Good food, excellent atmosphere and presentation, and service that passes my rather minimal standard of expectation (prompt drink refills and no active surliness) — so, despite a lingering resentment for the Austintatious flavor of the immediate neighborhood, I can see no reason not to give the Blue Dahlia Bistro a full cinque etoiles.
“I’m a pretty good pretzeler.”
— from the last words of ‘Dutch’ Schultz
This quest for the secrets of soft pretzels began more or less by chance: I wanted to bake something to eat that same night, and soft pretzels happened to be the first thing that struck my eye as a bread product which I enjoy and which wouldn’t take any kind of overnight starter or sponge. Little did I suspect that while making acceptable crispy pretzels is relatively simple, making soft pretzels appears to involve some more subtle art. As James’ Dad points out, what I’m searching for is the making of pretzels that are more akin to a bagel in consistency; whether this turns out to be a matter of recipe, preparation, or both is the riddle which the Pretzel Log seeks to unravel.
For the first entry in this series, I’m going to be using a recipe which I know doesn’t quite work — it produces crunchy pretzels which, although nice, can’t be described as soft. I’ve made several batches of these already and they’ve worked out pretty well for what they are; today I’ll be making another batch and documenting my progress as I go, to create a record of what I’m doing already, for reference as I proceed to experiment with other recipes and methods.
This recipe I tried first simply because it was the first one I found after Googling ‘soft pretzel recipe’ that didn’t call for any ingredients I didn’t have. It’s called ‘Ballpark Pretzels‘, submitted by ‘Flora’ of Columbus, OH, on the site CDKitchen.com. Strictly speaking, though, I haven’t used exactly this recipe at all — while I was mixing the first batch, the dough was too dry, and instead of adding more liquid, I decided to add two teaspoons of softened butter instead, which worked so well that I’ve made this substitution in every batch since (I was amused to learn later that this inclusion of butter matches my variation up with Alton Brown’s soft pretzel recipe).
My version of the Ballpark Pretzel recipe will be posted under LNB’s Recipe section as soon as I get around to writing it up. This post is going to be a running description of the pretzelry process as I make today’s batch.
So, first things first: 1&1/4 cups warm water, 1 teaspoon sugar and 1 tablespoon active dry yeast combined in a mixing bowl and allowed to stand for fifteen minutes or so, until foamy. One thing that does distinguish today’s effort from previous batches is that I now have in my possession a set of measuring spoons, which reveals right off the bat that I’ve been consistently underestimating the volume of a tablespoon and a teaspoon — not by very much, but I’ve definitely been underdoing ingredients measured by spoonfuls. So we’ll see what difference that makes.
While that’s sitting and fermenting, I’ll be finishing up the dishes and cleaning off the counterspace for rolling pretzels later, and also putting the two tbsp. block of butter in a Pyrex measuring cup near, but not on, a lit oven burner to soften. I’ll also be watching Naked Gun 33 1/3 on Hulu, but that probably doesn’t have any direct impact on the pretzels.
(Later – a bit more than fifteen minutes) The extra yeast has certainly made a difference in the behaviour of the ‘foamy soup’ stage — thicker and sludgier, whereas previously it had been a bit more like the head on a pint of Guiness. The next step is to mix in 1&1/2 teaspoons of salt and half the flour (2 cups) to make a dough, then turn that out onto a floured surface and knead in the remaining 2 cups of flour and the softened butter.
All right, with the dough kneaded into a firm but slightly sticky ball, I’ve put it into an oiled bowl and turned the ball over to make sure the whole thing is oiled, then covered the bowl tightly with plastic wrap. Now for another half hour or so of waiting, while the dough rises to about twice its current volume.
(Still later, about half an hour) Okay, now with the dough good and risen, here comes the effort-intensive part: splitting the dough into twelve balls, rolling them into pretzels, boiling them in a mixture of water and baking soda, and then baking them.
The boiling part is probably the part that makes the most difference in the end texture, I’m guessing. The instructions in the Ballpark recipe helpfully say to boil each pretzel ‘until it floats’, which would be a more useful instruction if they didn’t float to start with. Approximately 30 seconds of boiling seems to be the consensus among several recipes.
The Ballpark recipe also states that, after being boiled and salted, the pretzels should be allowed to rise for another five minutes before baking, a suggestion that varies from recipe to recipe (others recommend letting them rise before boiling, or omit any further rising entirely). Since it takes far more than five minutes to roll and boil a full tray of pretzels, I’m not entirely sure how to manage this step, so I’m going to let them rise for just a couple of minutes before putting the tray in the oven and see whether there’s much difference, in the end, between the ones that were boiled first and the last to go on the tray.
Final update to come when the pretzels are baked, and their quality assessed.
(Approx. 1 1/2 hours later) Okay, review time. The pretzels were baked on two cookie sheets, in batches of six; since the second six were allowed to stand while the first baked, they got more time to rise before baking. This doesn’t seem to have affected their size any, but they did emerge generally softer and with a chewier crust. On the first tray, there doesn’t seem to be any notable difference between the first pretzel boiled and the last, so overall, it seems that allowing them to rise after boiling is a good idea, but it needs around fifteen or twenty minutes rather than five.
With both trays, I took them from the oven when they had reached a much lighter brown than any previous batches, which certainly contributes to a softer interior; however, it’s still the case that the bottom side gets crispy long before the topside is even mildly browned. On the whole, both trays have turned out a little softer and chewier than previous batches, which may be due to the increased proportion of yeast, the shorter baking time, or both. However, they still don’t have a genuine soft-pretzel texture — the second, more risen tray, although softer, does not have a very distinct crust and may simply be slightly undercooked.
They are delicious, mind you, but they don’t quite have that distinctive pretzel-y flavor, and the texture, although nicely crisp on the bottom, is still not quite what I’m aiming for. Today’s batch, however, was made simply as an ‘official’ start to this blog, to make a record of where I’m starting from; future editions of the Pretzel Log will feature more deliberate experiments with assorted variables, in pursuit of the elusive Perfect Soft Pretzel. Stay twisted!
Hoover’s Doesn’t Suck
And with that line out of the way, I’m going to spend less time on the food than on the restaurant itself, beginning with a couple of things that are not remotely the fault of Hoover’s and entirely unfair to bring up at all. The first of these would be the physical establishment itself, located in a sort of strip-mall-esque shopping center; everything about the tone and mood of the place screams that it ought to be located in something more like a, if not actually an old refurbished, barn, but unfortunately they’re stuck with a building more evocative of a former Payless Shoes.
The other unfair quibble is that the neighborhood around it is dominated — visually and seemingly spiritually — by the Texas State Cemetery, a necropolitan sprawl occupying several city blocks, not all of them contiguous, so that when you think you’ve passed the boneyard, another arm or annex suddenly turns up around the corner. Between blocks of tombstone residency are weathered, older, Chainsaw-evocative homes presumably for the living, and an unsurprising prolificacy of memorial carvers and mortuary services, giving the experience of driving around looking for the place an inevitably funereal feel difficult to shake off on arrival.
Once inside, though — and into the realm of things which are actually related to the eatery under consideration — the down-home charm is immediately, even aggressively apparent. From the six-pack condiment holders, including a jar of pickled peppers, to the brown butcher paper covering the tables in lieu of placemats and creating the impression that the foodservice might not involve plates, Hoover’s would like to cheerfully pin your shoulders to the floor and scream in your face that this is homestyle, SOUTHERN food dammit.
But at least they deliver on that. Unlike any number of other places in Austin, Hoover’s offers what they offer without trying to force a broadened palate upon us provincial Philistines — just solid, honest food of the type where the only problem is, seven or eight hours later you’re hungry again.
About the service I can’t comment, since the place was full near to capacity at the time we visited and I could hear behind me the steady drone of a manager getting on the servers’ asses, in that managerial way that helpfully slows the servers down and lowers their inclination to be friendly, so I’m driven to overlook any lapses of service that occurred at that particular hour, only to note that yeah, a couple of lapses did occur.
But none of it detracts in the slightest from the charm of Hoover’s we’re-sure-homemade attitude and the true attraction of the place, excellent homestyle food in decent portions for a reasonable price. So, four pickled peppers out of five, and a hearty recommendation to check the place out when you’re in a mood for a good no-nonsense lunch or dinner.
Live Nude Bisque! of Austin 