Garden Variety

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.

Blue Dahlia Bistro

The Five Soups You Meet in Heaven

linq: Dahlia Bleu

If you were to compile a list of the five finest soups ever consumed by human-kind, those which improved lives and created strength where none existed, if you were to rank soups from best to worst, unmercifully and without regard for source, only content, Blue Dahlia Bistro on 11th would be a fine place to sit and eat while you did it.

The fare is fresh, and the atmosphere is pleasant inside. They sport an apron of relaxed tables in front and a small garden patio to the rear. Inside, the place practically bustles. In fact, I will go so far as to say that it does, indeed bustle. It bustles. Blue Dahlia bustles like a Victorian dress. Movement is apparent. Life is happening there.

And life walks past the front. The area of 11th street is pleasant, and has been recently repaved, at least mainly. There are a few old Austin landmarks still poking through the dentifrice of gentrification, and although I am one of the useless who decries their doom but has not sampled their wares, I strive often to branch out to them. I really do. Either way, it gladdens me to see them shining out of a new street’s growth, even as I commit the sin of hypocrisy by voting only with my mouth.

The food at Blue Dahlia hovers at the fresh side of human consumption. The vegetable matter is crisp and tasty, and the soups have been different at my every dining experience. There is a French quality to the food, without ever quite being daunting to order. If the word “Tartine” does not scare you, after you learn that it is a sandwich, you will find that you can order with either confidence or abandon, as the whim strikes you.

I have found that Blue Dahlia puts me strongly in the mood, hours after my visits, for a small and simple omelette with just a hint of salt and pepper, cooked slowly in a six-inch pan until fluffy and delicate, and topped with a single line of fine mustard. There is no logic for this urge, so far as I know, but that particular dish finds its way into the corners of my mind after Blue Dahlia enters my body. A puzzle, I suppose, but at least it is an itch easily scratched.

2 Cornichon and assorted Celery out of a Crudité platter

Blue Dahlia Bistro

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.

Hoover’s Cooking

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.

Hoover’s Cooking

A Place Whereby People Obtain Food
Linq:Hoover’s

I’m fond of Hoover’s. I know, that’s not a revolutionary opinion, and it’s not one that will start any fires out of spite, either, but I like to say it online and I like that, at least in theory, I am saying it to person or persons who did not have that information prior. Hoover’s is an establishment which can engender fondness.

Whew. Feels good to get out of that closet, let me tell you.

When I go to Hoover’s, I am not shy about ordering catfish. I’ve worked my way slowly around the menu from the chicken fried steak to the meatloaf, and I wind up back at catfish, because, really, the entree is kind of fungible. They make fine and tasty food which is precisely what you order. You will not be surprised. You will not order meatloaf and get a reduction of escargot au vin on a bed of crème anglaise. If you want adventure, go elsewhere. If you want solid food, that’s fine, but you go to Hoover’s for the side dishes.

I don’t, but you can. At any given moment, they offer between eight and twenty side dishes, any one of which will warm you to your cockles (if you roll like that) and complete your dish. There is no magic formula, although they try to suggest things, but you don’t need to be told that you want their macaroni & cheese. You know this, deep in your heart, and no coercion from an inanimate menu-type object will convince you more. Go ahead, get any one of them, and you’ll be happy. I won’t. I don’t roll like that. My favorite of the sides oscillates between the squash, because I never get enough squash, and the mustard greens, which rate their own paragraph.

The mustard greens are wonderful. They come in a little bowl, chopped all to hell and cooked in a sweet liquid that hovers among the flowers and tinkles raindrops of mildly-sweet greens over the fairy-flecked ground, swinging through the treetops of the (in my case) catfish filet and slamming, echoing, off the broccoli jungle.

I really dig the mustard greens, but they aren’t why I keep coming back.

I come back because I am one of the sad few who noticed that, in this world, the supply of really good pie is dwindling. If you don’t make it your damn self, and I do from time to time, you can get pretty hard pressed to obtain even a single slice of the wonderful stuff, unless you go to Hoover’s and ask the right question on the right day. That question is “what kind of pie do you have,” and that day is the one upon which the answer includes the words “sweet” and “potato.”

Need I continue? Must I extoll the virtues of the tight slabs of orange wonder dolled out by Hoover’s on a regular basis? Do you really need to be told that a fine pie hides behind the famously comfortable food at Hoover’s? Yeah, you do, and here’s why: Unless you keep the sapphire of the pie in your mind through your entire Hoover’s experience, you will try to save room, and you will fail. It will be a delicious failure, and until you’ve been whisked into the pie via the highway of your fork, you will be unconscious of its allure, but it is there, and now you know, and the rabbit hole goes precisely as deep as a pie.

I’m going to say it again: pie. Pie pie pie pie pie.

4 Grapes out of 7.