October 13, 2012: The Pizza Bistro (North MoPac @ Gracy Farms).

Posted on October 25, 2012 by dwightbrown

The Pizza Bistro.
12001 Burnet Road @ Mopac
832-5550
30.40762°N, 97.713615°W
WiFi: Yes.
Pepper grinder rating: 1.
Men’s room: 2.5.

Dwight’s comments:

I won’t recap the history of how the Mangia on Gracy Farms and the one on Lake Austin turned into “The Pizza Bistro” (which I still think is a silly name): if you’re interested, that history is here. We debated whether we should do The Pizza Bistro this soon, but we figured they’ve been running a restaurant for a while now, even it was under a different name; surely, in this case, a month is sufficient.
How was it? Well, I liked it. It did seem that “The Pizza Bistro” was trying to be maybe a little more upscale than Mangia; the interior furnishings looked just a bit classier, and it seems they tried to class up the menu as well, with things like truffle fries. I was glad to see an expanded menu; not just sandwiches, but more appetizers, and you can even get a bowl of French Onion soup with your pizza.
And the pizza? It looks very much like Mangia’s, and tastes close to the same. I do think the crust and sauce are slightly sweeter, and the sauce is smoother than I remember Mangia’s being. I like it that way, but tastes may differ.
Will they make a run of it? Beats me, but if they don’t, I doubt it will be because of the quality of food; everything I had was quite good, and I’d be happy to go back. I’m curious about the brisket pizza…

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October 6, 2012: Amaya’s Taco Village.

Posted on October 15, 2012 by dwightbrown

Amaya’s Taco Village
5804 N IH-35
458-2531
30.319113°N, 97.70783°W
WiFi: Advertised, but not working.
Pepper grinder rating: 0.
Men’s room: 2.

Dwight’s comments:

I hate to say this, because I remember Amaya’s being good when it was in Capital Plaza. Sadly, I felt this was just generic and honestly not terribly good TexMex.

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Let’s go retro!

Posted on October 15, 2012 by dwightbrown

From Rob Balon’s website:

Slowly but surely, some restaurants around Austin and elsewhere are adding some dishes to menus that haven’t been seen in some time….I’m beginning to see a return of 60′s-70′s stalwarts like Oysters Rockefeller, Beef Wellington, Lobster Newburg, Veal Oscar, Chateaubriand, Coquille St. Jacques, Weinerschnitzel and many others.

Thanks a whole hell of a lot, Rob, for not naming any place that actually serves any of these dishes.

(Cafe Blue does a good Oysters Rockefeller. I haven’t been to Gumbo’s in Round Rock since they moved, but I remember theirs being good as well. Actually, I’d dispute Balon’s assertion that Oysters Rock ever went out of style. As for his other dishes, I’d love to know who locally is serving those. Except for Weinerschnitzel, as I have a fair idea where to go for that.)

Posted in Media | 2 Comments

September 29, 2012: VooDoo BBQ & Grill.

Posted on October 7, 2012 by dwightbrown


VooDoo BBQ & Grill
2601 S IH 35 Ste B100 (Round Rock, 78664)
238-7000
30.48367°N, 97.67246°W
WiFi: maybe. (They don’t have an open WiFi network, but you might be able to hit Home Depot’s WiFi across the parking lot, depending.)
Pepper grinder rating: 0.
Men’s room: 2.5.

Dwight’s comments:

Tyler Cowen argues that if you want good barbecue, you should look for it in towns of less than 50,000 people. I like Cowen’s work a lot: at some point, I still plan to write a longer review of An Economist Gets Lunch, and I do think he really gets Texas barbecue.
But sometime you find an exception. Or, if not a total exception, at least someplace worth noting.
VooDoo BBQ isn’t going to replace Stiles Switch or any of the places in Lockhart or even the Salt Lick at the Dell Diamond in my affections. But they do very reasonable “New Orleans” style barbecue.
From what I can tell, “New Orleans” style means more chicken and pork, and less beef. I thought their brisket was actually pretty good, thin-sliced, moist, and tender. The sausage was just kind of generic, like too many other barbecue places, but they do very good pulled pork and jerked chicken. They have a pretty good selection of sauces, including a vinegar-based one that reminds me of North Carolina. And they have a good selection of sides, including mac and cheese and a really good sweet potato soufflé.
What this reminds me of, more than anything else, is the late lamented Captain Tom’s BBQ on North Lamar. It isn’t true Texas barbecue, but it is darn good. I’m glad it exists, and I’m glad it is close enough to my office that it makes a convenient stop on the way home.

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September 22, 2012: Madam Mam’s (Anderson Lane)

Posted on September 26, 2012 by dwightbrown

Madam Mam’s.
2700 West Anderson Lane
371-9930
30.359732°N, 97.734795°W
WiFi: yes.
Pepper grinder rating: 0.
Men’s room: 2.5.

Dwight’s comments:

It is a well known fact that, for a long time, I ate at Thai Kitchen every Thursday night that it was physically possible for me to do so. In the past few years, though, the food at Thai Kitchen seems to have gone downhill, at least to me. I switched to this Madam Mam’s for a while, but lately I’ve gotten out of the Thai Thursday habit. I still go here, but sometimes weeks or a month pass between visits.

That said, Mam’s has what I believe to be the best Thai food in town (with the disclaimer that I have not made it to Sap’s yet). I’m partial to the thai spaghetti with squid, the NS14 noodle soup (if you have a cold, that will clear you right out), the pad thai, and the panang beef curry. The service is good (though not quite as overwhelming as Thai Kitchen used to be), and there’s plenty of parking (unlike the campus location). I do think they’re a little more expensive than I remember Thai Kitchen being, and there are some things I could do without (the tea menu, for example). But this would be my Thai choice, were I asked for one.

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Quote of the day.

Posted on September 26, 2012 by dwightbrown

I’ve just started An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, but I have a feeling I’m going to like this book.

As it stands, food writers, commentators, and foodies are misled by three doctrines, useless in Nicaragua, useless at home, and misleading almost everywhere else:

  1. The best food is the most expensive. (Assume time is money and it follows that slow food is better.)
  2. Our largest source of cheap food – large agribusiness – is irredeemably bad.
  3. Consumers are not a trusted source of innovation; rather, they are to be constrained, nudged, taxed, and subjected to the will of others – chefs, food writers, cultural leaders, and, especially, political officeholders.
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Openings and closings.

Posted on September 20, 2012 by dwightbrown

Where do folks get their news about restaurant openings and closings? Other, that is, than driving past some place and noticing a new banner or a “For Lease” sign?

The two major sources I use are:

  • Rob Balon’s website. Balon used to be pretty good about this, but he hasn’t been doing as many updates recently. Especially the closings, which haven’t been updated since late August.
  • The Statesman‘s “Relish Austin” blog. Much of the food writing in the Statesman these days makes me cranky, but they’ve been doing a pretty good job with the “Openings/Closings” entries.

What brings this to mind is an email from Lawrence yesterday stating that Hot Boiled at Parmer Lane and MoPoc closed. I confirmed this myself by the simple expedient of driving past it on my way home.

This is a shame. Hot Boiled was my favorite pho place in Austin. They had a simple and weird idea; a mix of Vietnamese and Louisiana cooking. You could get various types of fried seafood. You could get pho with crawfish and andouille sausage. You could get crawfish bun with andouille sausage, too. It was so good, I didn’t think it could last, but it stayed around longer than I thought it would.

Why did it close? I have a couple of theories:

  • Hot soup can be kind of a hard sell in Austin, except during the two weeks out of the year when the temperature drops below 40 degrees. They did sell things other than pho, but that was their most prominent item. Personally, I really liked their pho, but I have to be in a very specific mood (one which usually involves sinus congestion) for me to even want pho to start with.
  • I know I’m kind of contradicting myself here, but Austin is saturated with Vietnamese/pho places. (Austin is over-saturated with TexMex places.)
  • Hot Boiled’s service was…well, pretty typical for a pho place. Especially one with only the owners working.
  • Location? I don’t know what they were paying in rent, or how many tables they were doing a night, but I don’t think that center is cheap. And I suspect a lot of folks, faced with the choice of “Louisiana/Vietnamese fusion” or Panda Express (who should be sued for false advertising, as there is no dish with panda in it on the menu) a few doors down, went with the one their kids would eat.
Posted in Cajun, Media, Vietnamese | Leave a comment

September 17, 2012: Hemingway Restaurant and Bar.

Posted on September 17, 2012 by dwightbrown


Hemingway Restaurant and Bar.
500 Cypress Creek Road #170 (Cedar Park, 78613)
(512) 219-6400
30.495745°N, 97.82236°W
WiFi: No.
Pepper grinder rating: 0.
Men’s room rating: 2.5.

Dwight’s comments:

I wanted to like this place. And there’s a lot to like about it. The mostly wood decor is pleasant to look at, and makes the restaurant feel older than it actually is. I liked our waitress enough that I should have asked for her phone number. Our appetizers (especially the mussels and crab cakes) were very good. And the staff (including, but not limited to, our cute waitress) were very attentive.
Unfortunately, there were some early indications of problems. One of our party ordered soup, instead of salad, with his meal. No problem, right? You’d figure they’d bring it with the salad, right? Nope. When he asked about it, they gave him a kind of odd excuse (“We make the soup to order, so it takes a little longer.”) and then brought it out…with the meal…and brought him a bowl instead of the cup he asked for.
They did only charge him for the cup, but that wasn’t the only ordering screw-up. One of that other diner’s sides wound up on my plate. I ordered a baked potato, fully loaded with butter, sour cream, etc. and got one with just butter. I asked for sour cream and never got it.
And I ordered the “Beeves Galveston”, described as “Seared tenderloin topped with our own crawfish & shrimp whiskey pecan butter sauce”. When I think “tenderloin”, I think something that looks more like this. What I got was a rather undifferentiated mass of beef, with several medium-sized chunks of gristle in it. The sauce was okay, but I really felt let down by the dish.
I’d be willing to give them another shot, but if I did, I’d order a burger and see if it came out of the kitchen the way I wanted it. You fail that test, to restaurant purgatory you go.

Lawrence’s comments:

I liked my chicken fried steak a good bit better than Dwight liked his entree, and I thought the crab cake was a heck of a deal during the half-price appetizer window. The also kept my Diet Coke well refilled without asking.

My problem with the place is that it’s a bit more of a sports bar than I usually look for in a place to have dinner. And if I wanted a sports bar, there are nearer places than Cedar Park.

(Notice how manfully Dwight and I have  refrained from cheap Ernest Hemingway puns and jokes…)

Posted in American, Sports Bar | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Mangia Pizza.

Posted on September 13, 2012 by dwightbrown

Adding a link here cross-referencing this morning’s post at WCD on Mangia Pizza and the changes coming for the Mesa location (and the independently owned locations, which are now no longer Mangia).

Mangia is Lawrence’s top choice for pizza in Austin (the pre-Armadillocon pizza lunch is held there yearly). It used to be mine as well; recently, though, I’ve gone back to Milto’s deep dish Lone Star Special when I crave pizza. If you could combine Milto’s pizza with the parking lot of the Mesa Mangia, you’d really have something…

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March 24, 2012: Chagos Caribbean Cuisine

Posted on March 24, 2012 by lawrenceperson

Chagos Caribbean Cuisine
7301 N Lamar Blvd.
Austin, Texas 78752
(512) 275-6013
http://www.chagos.biz/

This is a nice, cheap, hole-in-the-wall restaurant on a stretch (north Lamar between Airport and 183) that has traditionally been hostile to any restaurant not named “Kim Phung.” Although the plantano and yucca chips didn’t grab me, the chicken appetizer was sort of interesting, the salad wasn’t bad, and my Bistec Encebollado was reasonably tasty.

My Tres Leches cake was quite deliciously sweet but undersized. Service was attentive and personal, but they weren’t particularly busy.

If you live nearby, and are in the mood for something both cheap and not bland TexMex, Chagos is worth a try.

Posted in Caribbean, Cheap Dining | Tagged , , | Leave a comment