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July 2010
‘Yes We’re Open’ report: Counter Culture yogurt, 11th Street Station, Dogwood; bye-bye Blu and Pie Slice
- Open: Counter Culture, an extension of the Louisiana chain of frozen yogurt and sandwich shops, in Oak Hill at 6705 U.S. 290 W., Suite 610. 891-9400, www.countercultureyogurtaustin.com. The owner is Louisiana native Jordan Rosenblath (above), who came to Austin a year and a half ago. You might have seen him behind the bar at Momo’s, but now he’s making frozen yogurt specialties such as the Humphrey Yogart (granola, honey, grapes, bananas and strawberries) and a sandwich called the Pizzaletta, which puts the traditional muffuletta blend of cold cuts and chopped olives between two pizza crusts. The shop is not affiliated with the Counter Culture vegan trailer on North Loop Boulevard, but Rosenblath said the businesses have agreed this town’s big enough — and different enough — for the both of them.
Open: 11th Street Station, a Southern-style restaurant and bar at 1050 E. Eleventh St, Suite 100. Open 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. daily. 391-2331.
Open: The Dogwood (at right), a bar at the former site of Mother Egan’s at 715 W. Sixth St. But you won’t see a trace of the old Irish pub. The new place is contemporary and rustic at the same time, all tan and brown with sharp angles and stacked fieldstone columns. An employee outside the bar said food is a few months away.
Open: Chef Keem’s Bavarian Bistro, a German food trailer doing weekday lunches and Friday-Saturday late nights at Third Street and Congress Avenue. www.bavarianbistro.com.
Closed: Blu Cafe, the coffee shop and lounge at 360 Nueces St. A note on the door says, ‘Closed for remodel. Coming soon: www.facebook.com/trifectaon3rd.’ The Facebook page says the place hopes to open ‘around Aug. 15’ and carries this description: ‘Bourbon, martinis, and happy hour create the perfect Trifecta.’
Closed: Pie Slice Bakery at 2024 S. Lamar Blvd.
(American-Statesman photos by Mike Sutter)
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A Glazed Doughnut Manifesto
Ten years ago, this paper explored the O-shaped world of Austin doughnuts. For that issue, I wrote my Glazed Doughnut Manifesto. Here it is again, the document that helped shaped my All Night Doughnut Drive in this week’s Austin360 magazine.
Given the eat-them-now-or-just-forget-about-it nature of the glazed doughnut, these are the things you must know now:
A glazed doughnut must be full of fluffy, flaky doughnut air but have some presence, a density devoid of chewiness.
The size must be smallish and round. Increased size dissipates fresh-from-the-shop heat and robs you of doughnut repetition. Novelty shapes must be avoided.
The glaze must be uniform, a shell with no acrid-sweet lumps forming where the confectioner’s hand has lingered. The glaze must not soak into the doughnut, but form a gossamer crust when cool, a crust that yields to the hand in a delicate shower of snowflake glaze
In the mouth, the doughnut must not vanish like air, but must stay long enough to say, “I am worth every calorie, every gram, every minute I rob from the end of your arteriosclerotic life.”
The taste must be sweet but not smack of candy, must hint more at dough than at cake.
The glazed doughnut must go well equally with milk or coffee and must not be consumed with water or with juice of any kind, unless you count coffee as a juice.
And minutes after the doughnut is gone, your mouth must tingle with equal parts oil and sugar before it is dispatched to its final reward with the magic waters mentioned above.
And finally, your doughnut shop must offer glazed doughnut miniatures known as doughnut holes. If these survive the trip home, find another doughnut shop.
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Doughnut defense: Gourdough’s
Gourdough’s is not part of my All-Night Doughnut Drive in our Austin360 magazine this week. We cover Gourdough’s enough to be its Facebook page, and we need to spread the love around.
And with 300-plus reviews on Yelp, there’s plenty of love for this Airstream trailer frying gourmet doughnuts to order, then topping them with the things we love best in life: bacon, bananas, strawberries, fried chicken, Oreos.
My favorite doughnut at Gourdough’s is the Porkey’s (pictured above right, $4.25). Start with the base doughnut, dense and crumbly, blazing hot out of the fryer.
Top it with cream cheese and a generous slather of sweet jalapeno jelly with a slow afterburn. Seal the deal with strips of smoky Canadian bacon right out of the skillet.
It’s a late breakfast or a high-buzz snack. You will not confuse it with health food. Its mission is clear, unapologetic and delicious.
Men’s Health magazine wrote about Gourdough’s in its July/August issue, as part of a seven-city tour of trailer foods. Matt Goulding (pictured above with photographer Nathaniel Welch) put Gourdough’s Puddin’ doughnut in its rogue’s gallery of food that’s bad for you, saying, ‘This isn’t a doughnut; it’s a spare tire.’
Fair enough. Cream filling, bananas, cream-cheese icing, vanilla wafers, optional scoop of ice cream. Bad for you? Yes. But it hurts so good.
Gourdough’s. 1219 S. Lamar Blvd. www.gourdoughs.com
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Fire at Restaurant Jezebel: Update
Restaurant Jezebel’s chef and owner, Parind Vora, says the fire that put him out of business Monday morning won’t be the fire that puts him out of business for good.
Maybe for a few months, but not permanently, especially when so much of his life is tied up in the building at 914 Congress Ave. “This is an extension of me. This is what I love to do,” Vora said on Tuesday.
Early indications are that the fire might have been electrical. The city has released the site back to Vora, and now the adjusters will work out the details, the causes, the finances for making things right.
So what’s next? Vora also has the wine bar, Simplicity (4801 Burnet Road, 419-0200, www.simplicitywinebar.com), and a new mid-priced bistro called Braise (2121 E. Sixth St., 478-8700, www.braiseaustin.com). He’s finding work there for as much of his staff as he can.
From the optimism that might have been drawn from early Austin Fire Department reports of a small fire, the scene is surprising in its barren blackness, the smell a whirled incense of ash and dry aromatic spice, water dripping from wrecked conduits like movie scenes from a dragon’s cave.
Jezebel’s jezebels are gone, the gallery of nudes by Tom Darrah fallen from the peeling plaster walls, one canvas lying like the Shroud of Turin across the front entry, the features of a woman barely traceable through the soot.
And the wine. Tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of rare and collectible bottles, cult and quirky rarities, some listing for $1,000 a bottle on a wine list that had great values in the $30s and magnificent finds in the $40s and beyond. All of it’s gone, the bottles as blackened and ashenly quiet as a scene from Pompeii.
In the big scheme of things, it was a small fire, one that flashed into a fireball then died quickly after it ate all the fuel in the front room, died gasping for oxygen in the tight confines of the antique stone building.
The fire didn’t bring down the building or cause injuries, but the restaurant space is in ruins, with chairs and tables frozen in stages of twisted ember and Dali-esque melted cascades. The new blinds are cosine heat waves across the front windows. The light fixtures hang like stalactites from a ruined future.
Vora said it’s a stroke of luck that the front windows didn’t blow out. The draft might have fed a blaze capable of consuming the building, spreading to Little City next door and beyond.
Credit the Fire Department for keeping the damage contained to Jezebel, where it spared the kitchen and back spaces. But fine ash has layered everything in soft focus. All the stock will have to be thrown away. Everything in the coolers, the freezers, all the spices and sauce bottles, the cheeses gone to waste.
For now, Vora said he has to figure out how much has been lost before he can figure out what needs to be rebuilt. Already, he’s talking about what he can do better when Jezebel comes back. The sari cloth he uses under the white linens was untouched by the fire. It’s ready when he is.
(American-Statesman photos)
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Fire at Restaurant Jezebel
Fire struck Restaurant Jezebel at Ninth and Congress Monday morning. The Fire Department reported that the fire’s out, but they estimate several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage.
Updates coming as soon as they’re available.
Read the report from American-Statesman writer Claudia Grisales here.
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Requiem: A cigar with Michael Moriarty at Louie’s 106
It was April when I saw the sign on the door of Louie’s 106, abruptly announcing it had closed. In the days before kids, Louie’s was one of my favorite places, a swanky spot to go after a show at the Paramount or before a night in the nascent Warehouse District. And because Louie’s is still shuttered, I figured it was time to tell my story about having a cigar with the actor Michael Moriarty.
MICHAEL AND LOUIE AND ME
In 1995, I met Michael Moriarty.
My wife and I and her friend from Seattle were having dinner at Louie’s 106 in Austin. We had paella, some nice red wine. And we were having creme brulee and coffee in Louie’s cigar room.
Here’s this fancy Mediterranean place downtown, with an open show kitchen and architectural plating, and they’ve got a cigar room. (Remember, even the pretty people were smoking cigars in 1995. Cigars were the mojitos of 1995, but somehow they never got their own jellybean flavor.)
So this cigar room has a separate drink menu, with ports, single malts, calvados, cognac, armagnac and every other kind of “ac” you can think of. And Michael Moriarty is by himself in there, smoking a cigar. They were filming “Courage Under Fire” around Austin at the time, and he was in it.
Now, Michael Moriarty is no Denzel Washington, but he’s in there, and how often does that happen?
So we start talking to Michael Moriarty, and I think I’ve got a good case for talking to him, because my grandmother used to wait on him at this little red-sauce joint in Minneapolis called Cafe di Napoli.
My grandmother, for heaven’s sake, and she used to wait on Michael Moriarty And this was like 30 years ago, so I figured this was one of those small-world-ain’t-it moments, and that Michael Moriarty would tell me what a great lady my Grandma Edith was, and how he missed those hungry days before “Law and Order” and “Pale Rider” and all that.
But you know what? Michael Moriarty was not interested in small worlds. He was interested in my wife’s friend, who’s cute and funny and completely unafraid of talking to Michael Moriarty, and besides, she’s way more into Michael Moriarty than we are.
And so he’s trying to set things up. But the hitch is this: Michael Moriarty’s already lined something up with a hostess at another fancy restaurant, and he’s positioning my wife’s friend as a backup in case the hostess cupcake doesn’t work out.
And my wife’s friend, she goes along with it. Here’s somebody who takes flak from no man, but she’s going along with the idea of being the on-deck hitter in case all-star Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone strikes out.
So Michael Moriarty leaves, and my wife’s friend is all glowing and giddy, because after all, she’s just met the famous Michael Moriarty. And so she calls the cigar-room attendant over and orders two Davidoff Anniversario No. 2 cigars at $18 a pop. And I’m thrilled, because they’re for me, and they’re spectacular.
In 2010 money, a single Davidoff Anniversario No. 2 runs more than $25 without the restaurant markup, even if you buy 25 at a time, and regardless if Michael Moriarty just put your wife’s good friend in the backup reserve pen.
And Michael Moriarty’s got nothing big in the works, and my wife’s friend hasn’t visited in a very long time. And I haven’t got $25 for one cigar, and the pretty people are gone from the cigar room at Louie’s 106.
So long, Louie. Here’s to better times.
(TOP: Louie’s 106 photo by Tammy Perez for the American-Statesman. INSET: NBC photo of Michael Moriarty in the ‘Law & Order’ days.)
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A new chef at Bess
Camden Stuerzenberger (at left, with sous chef Janelle Reynolds) has taken over as executive chef at Bess Bistro on Pecan, the French and Cajun-influenced restaurant owned by actress Sandra Bullock.
He replaces Mizael Saucedo, who left in April.
Stuerzenberger has been the executive chef for another of Bullock’s enterprises, Walton’s Fancy and Staple. He’ll continue in that role at Walton’s as well. He trained at the Texas Culinary Academy (now Le Cordon Bleu) and has worked at the Hyatt Lost Pines Resort and the Oasis.
Stuerzenberger will keep Bess standards such as Creole Shrimp Bess and smoked bacon mussels and add more seafood choices, a spokesperson said. He’ll be assisted by sous-chef Janelle Reynolds.
They’ll draw from the talents of Walton’s pastry chef Sandi Reinlie, who’ll be crafting Bess’s dessert menu, and by Walton’s baker Dawn Paulson, who’ll continue baking the breads served at Bess (500 W. Sixth St. 477-2377, www.bessbistro.com).
(American-Statesman photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez)
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Salad days: Farmers’ Market Salad at Annies
Annies is our most urban of downtown lunchrooms, its vaulted brick space resounding on weekdays with the chatter of a full house and a line to the door.
Lunch is when you order this $7.95 salad, anchored by the roasted, earthen sweetness of roasted red and yellow beets. From that base, the peppered tones of arugula and radish smack a little personality into creamy bites of goat cheese.
The horseradish vinaigrette is good, made even better by the $2 option of topping this salad with a seared fillet of salmon rather than chicken.
At night, you’ll have to settle for the fried calamari or seared duck salads, although you can’t really call that settling.
Annies Cafe & Bar. 319 Congress Ave. 472-1844, www.anniescafebar.com.
(American-Statesman photo by Mike Sutter)
- In our Austin360 magazine: Nine more summer-worthy salads.
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Salad days: Apple Buzios at Rio’s
Almost any sit-down place with burgers will have a green salad with apples, cheese and candied nuts.
At Rio’s, they don’t bother with a burger and they don’t bother making that salad, at least not the way you’d expect.
Sharing a name with a Brazilian resort town, the Buzios ($8) shows off by placing at its center a peeled green apple, roasted in and saturated by red wine. It’s small but surprisingly heavy, hollowed just enough for a dose of tangy goat cheese and a candied walnut.
The apple’s flavor cascades through spinach and Romaine, propelled by a sweet white balsamic dressing that weaves through raisins and more walnuts and cheese.
It’s an outdoor salad, a summer picnic on a plate, a roasted suckling pig with an apple stuck in its mouth, minus the pig.
And Rio’s is the right place for it, a low green-and-yellow cinderblock casinha with Brazilian salgadinho pastries, friendly service and dense, gooey cheese breads made with yuca flour.
Rio’s Brazilian Cafe. 408 N. Pleasant Valley Road. 828-6617, www.riosofaustin.com.
(American-Statesman photo by Mike Sutter)
- Coming July 22 in our Austin360 magazine: Nine more summer-worthy salads.
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Salad days: Heirloom Tomato Salad at the Grove
Reed Clemons is a restaurant survivor. The Granite Cafe, Mezzaluna, the Bitter End, Reed’s. All his.
As the last doors closed and the noise died down, he quietly opened the Grove just west of West Lake Hills in 2008.
There’s hardly a night when the parking lot isn’t overflowing. They come for an encyclopedic wine list and the food that goes with it: pasta, pizzas, a few grill plates, nine kinds of bruschetta.
And salads. Particularly the $11 Caprese-style collection of greens and basil and mozzarella — and heirloom tomatoes. A light green one with cascades of dusky jade, a ridged beauty of blushing salmon rouge, tiny sweet teardrops of bright red.
They rest on a mix of arugula, strips of fresh basil, even the red-veined leaves of beet tops, drizzled with sweet balsamic and basil oil.
I asked for a wine pairing and out came a cool glass of Feudi di San Gregorio falanghina, a balanced white from southern Italy with enough fruit to soften the herbs and the right acidity for the milky mozzarella.
At $10 a glass, it falls midway on the price scale of the Grove’s 50-some wines by the glass, ranging from $5 and $6 glasses of sparkling Louis Pedrier rose and Robert Oatley sauvignon blanc to $15 for a muscular cab from Chappellet.
Flights of three glasses matched by country or style make exploration convenient. Now if they could just help me find a closer place to park.
The Grove Wine Bar and Kitchen. 6317 Bee Cave Road. 327-8822, www.grovewinebar.com.
(American-Statesman photo by Mike Sutter)
- Coming July 22 in our Austin360 magazine: Nine more summer-worthy salads.
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Anthony Bourdain thinks you’re cute
Anthony Bourdain’s “Heartland” episode debuted July 12 on “No Reservations,” the episode that catches Austin in the patronizing embrace of the New York-centric cultural misanthrope.
“But he travels all over the world,” you say, “where they have snake whiskey and barbecued tree rodents! Misanthrope? I think not, for he loves all peoples and things.”
Yes he does. And then he smiles and pats them on their little heads, so proud of how far they’ve come for being so far away from Manhattan.
This, as with so many things Bourdain, I secretly enjoy. The lanky middle-aged hipster casting bloodshot eyes over the chirpy terrain of televised travel and food, the anti-Samantha Brown. Not everything is beautiful, Tony reminds us, not even in its own way.
That’s all fine when he’s riding shotgun on a scooter in Saigon or canoeing in South America. But when that bemused combination of smile and eye-roll turns on Middle America, where I live? The spell is broken, the charm of the chronically unimpressed suddenly not so charming.
The ‘Heartland’ episode bakes Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Denver, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Austin into a rambling casserole of charcuterie and pizza savants, sous-vide and cassoulet iconoclasts and trailer-food revolutionaries.
There’s an elegance at work here, a dodging of regional stereotypes. No defining each city by its prevailing immigrant heritage or its cowboy mystique or its chief agricultural export. And in Austin? A break from chicken-fried steaks, cheese enchiladas and barbecue.
So why you cry, little man? It’s the thought (and the premise of the opening monologue) that any of this would seem surprising to anybody, that’s why. It’s this line: “Believe me, we’ve got nothing to sneer about in New York anymore.” That anybody was sneering in the first place, that’s why.
Actual food? In the middle of the country, the part crawling with Wal-Marts and peopled by pre-industrial chuckleheads only recently introduced to closed-trench plumbing and free-range chicken? If “No Reservations” hadn’t discovered it, would it truly exist?
If the primordial scratch of land between New York and San Francisco were a race of people, that attitude might be called a pre-racist basal cell. But I’ll offer the show a plea on the lesser charge of cultural regionalism, with probation, provided Bourdain wear a forehead bracelet to monitor open-mindedness.
But then Tony wouldn’t be Our Tony, would he? The Speaker of Truths in “Kitchen Confidential,” the Maker of Apologies in “Medium Raw.” He’s the guy we forgive for being mean, even when we think he’s wrong, because he’s as funny when he’s mad as we think we are when we’re drunk.
Austin does all right in the “Heartland” episode. Bourdain shares bleeped observations and a roasted red snapper with Larry McGuire and Tommy Moorman Jr. at Perla’s.
And there’s a rush of adrenaline under Bourdain’s appreciation of our food-trailer uprising. “We’re talking about some seriously quirky food from young chefs using the relatively cheap overhead of a kitchen on wheels to do wonderful, wonderful things,” he says.
The show does a sticky pass by Gourdough’s, with a food-porn zoom of Canadian bacon tumbling over jalapeno jelly on a buxom blond doughnut.
Bryce Gilmore’s Odd Duck trailer flexes with a slider of caramel-colored pork belly, some grilled quail with goat cheese and a toss of Brussels sprouts with rabbit belly.
“I am lower than whale (bleep),” Bourdain says. “This is street food in Austin?” I don’t know what that means, exactly, so I’ll pretend it’s contrition.
“Japanese drunk-food fusion” is the show’s brilliant distillation of what Paul Qui and Moto Utsonomaya are doing at East Side King, the trailer on East Sixth behind the Liberty bar.
“Beef tongue sticky bun? Yes! Of course I want to eat that,” Bourdain says. “Roasted beef tongue, peanut curry, fried buns? Basil, mint, cilantro, chiles? Sweet chile fish sauce? Yes! Yes!” A cigarette for you, Mr. Tony?
Bourdain leaves us with the possibility of a sequel, Irony Man 2, trying real hard to be one of us, even though we can never be one of Them.
“Next time I come to Austin, I’m going to eat my way across town, going from trailer to trailer, until they find me in a quivering, semiconscious heap somewhere with a mouthful of kimchee and mustard-stained fingers, wondering, ‘What the hell happened?’ ”
(Video images from the Travel Channel. The next episode of ‘No Reservations’ runs Monday, Jan. 19, at 9 p.m. CST)
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Salad days: The Thumbalina at Jeffrey’s
The beauty of this long rectangular plate is that it looks like a bushel-basket landslide.
So much red Romaine, such big cross-sections of avocado and curled slices of thumbalina, that runty round carrot that looks like a creamsicle beet.
It’s a salad for the Southern well-to-do, big and brash and undeniable, not afraid to show off with a little feta, some marcona almonds, a splash of lemon-and-dill vinaigrette.
And like the South, it has secrets. Its secret? This $12 belle can be yours for half-price. You just have to know the time and place to ask. (That would be in the bar, from 5 to 7 p.m. Sundays-Fridays and 9 to 11 p.m. Saturdays.)
Jeffrey’s. 1204 West Lynn St. 477-5584, www.jeffreysofaustin.com.
(American-Statesman photo by Mike Sutter)
- Coming July 22 in our Austin360 magazine: Nine more summer-worthy salads.
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Salad days: The Mexi-Cobb at Chuy’s
Low-carb dementia pushed me to this salad in 2002.
Dragged me away from my No. 4 with a shrimp relleno and a cheese enchilada, my blue corn tortillas, the dizzy head-rush of starch converting to sugar.
But the Mexi-Cobb ($7.99) is a good place to land, still a fine vehicle for Chuy’s tomato-and-carrot table sauce or creamy jalapeno dressing.
It’s a Christmas pageant of red tomatoes and green avocados and roasted chiles, filled out with stripes of shredded cheese and a ribbon of smoky grilled chicken fajitas.
Taken solo or as a gang, this Cobbled crew never stopped me from craving chips and swirled margaritas, but it beat having another hamburger without the bun.
Chuy’s. Multiple locations, including 1728 Barton Springs Road. 474-4452, www.chuys.com.
(American-Statesman photo by Mike Sutter)
- Coming July 22 in our Austin360 magazine: Nine more summer-worthy salads.
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‘Yes We’re Open’ Report: BBQ in the Frost tower, more Gumbo
Open: Blue Ribbon Barbecue, at the base of the Frost Bank building at 120 E. Fourth St. 369-3119, www.brbbq.net.
Open: Gumbo’s of Lake Travis, part of the small chain of Louisiana-style restaurants, at 12823 Shops Parkway, Bee Cave. 263-2771, www.gumboslaketravis.com.
Open: Max Parfait, a trailer doing hamburgers, portobello burgers, chicken sandwiches and Belgian-style fries in the complex of food trailers in the 1600 block of South Congress Avenue. www.maxparfait.com.
Open: Asi Es Colombia, a Colombian restaurant at 13717 MoPac Blvd. (Loop 1). 244-7006.
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Review: Get Sum Dim Sum
In Austin360 this week, I’m reviewing two casual Asian restaurants that feel franchise-ready (in a good way). Here’s a look at Get Sum Dim Sum, the concept developed by Foo Swasdee, the owner of the restaurant Satay.
I’ve made a dozen marks on the dog-eared erasable menus at Get Sum Dim Sum, circling letter and number combinations for little purses of dough, for domes of starch, for pockets of rice and half-moons of shredded meat.
I tested my memory to see if I could write down all 12 dishes without looking at the receipts. And … done. It’s not that my memory is all that great. It’s a statement about how expansive the simple catch-all notion of ‘dumplings’ can be, how many forms the union of starch and protein can take.
For $1.75 to $3.95, we ordered jeweled green spinach dumplings, a trio of clamshell-shaped bites of shrimp (har gao) in sticky dough and three dumpling cylinders densely packed with pork and shrimp (siu mai). They came to the table in round bamboo steamers, stacks of them like skyscrapers from the Far East.
None of them had big, challenging flavors. They were as much about shape and texture and temperature, like the chicken potstickers (wor teep) with pan-seared crunch, chewy dough and filling like a tight ball of rocket-hot steamed protein.
You want personality? Get it from sweet and spicy barbecued pork (cha siu), a punchy street-vendor standby that we ordered in three forms: rolled in sheets of stretchy rice noodles (churng fun) and stuffed into doughy rolls (bao), one steamed for a sticky, Wonder-bread sensation, the other baked to a loafy thump.
Another steamed bao made for a pillowy finale, this one filled with gooey egg custard, part of a sleepy one-two punch finished with crunchy balls of sticky rice filled with sweet red bean paste, then rolled in sesame seeds and fried crisp.
Rice played a background role in one unfortunate dish (law mai gai), tossed along with shredded chicken and gamey sausage and packed into a brittle lotus leaf that defied unwrapping and cutting, the shards of leaf leeching bitterness like spent tea.
The parade of starchy plates was interrupted by a simple dish of pickled carrot, daikon and cucumber, just sour and crisp enough to act as palate cleansers. Texture and big flavor ganged up in a dish of tofu wrapped in seaweed, then deep-fried and garnished with a saute of onion and peppers.
That dish says something about Get Sum Dim Sum. It says the place is fast. You try plating 12 distinct orders at a time in less than seven minutes. It says the ‘Dim Sum 101’ approach works. Mostly it says that after more than a year in business, maybe Get Sum is ready to get some more.
Get Sum Dim Sum
4400 N. Lamar Blvd. 458-9000, www.getsumdimsum.com
Rating: 7.0 out of 10
Hours: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.
(American-Statesman photos by Mike Sutter)
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Review: Tarka Indian Kitchen
In Austin360 this week, I’m reviewing two casual Asian restaurants that feel franchise-ready (in a good way). Here’s a look at Tarka Indian Kitchen, the concept developed by the current and former owners of the Clay Pit.
The furniture is boilerplate suburban bistro, the decorations studiously nonspecific. Nothing costs more than $10, and the menu boards hang in the foyer like mall directories. Want a curry, a kabob, a ‘Naanini’ sandwich? You are here.
And ‘here’ is a good place for vegetarians. Packing spices with the whiff of incense and the colors of a sari, Indian food can make you forget about meat, at least for samosa chaat ($3.50, at right), a crisp puff pastry stuffed with potatoes and dappled with chutney, garbanzo beans and chopped tomatoes — a Mumbai burrito of sorts.
A bowl of madras soup ($3.75) is a restorative brew of tomato and coconut, and for something more substantial, dhingri mattar paneer ($7.50) brings together mushrooms and soft cheese in an onion curry with a tomato bite.
Let’s talk drinks, too. Mango lemonade ($2.25) is one of the best summer drinks you could want, the glowing yellow-orange color of filtered sunlight with that throat-tingling mango sweetness balanced by citrus acidity. Overstating the case? Maybe, but it’s the rare soft drink with the what-the-hell panache of a cocktail.
A guava lassi, on the other hand, was like sucking refrigerated cotton batting through a straw. I wanted more frost and more fruit for my $3.25, but that’s as much an indictment of the lassi in general as it is Tarka’s interpretation of it.
At Tarka, the heat levels for curries, rice-based biryani stir-fries and vegetarian dishes are your call: mild, medium or hot. But I kept wanting more punishment, even from the ‘hot’ version of tikka masala with lamb ($8.25), with otherwise solid tomato and curry flavor and generous cuts of meat.
And I could have done with less sweetness in most of the sauces, a sweetness I guessed might be a concession to mass-market palates. But my guess felt pretty thin, given the number of people with Indian heritage eating at Tarka during a full-house lunch rush.
How much of a role authenticity plays is hard to gauge. What’s hard to disagree with at Tarka is value. Nine bucks will buy two skewers of grilled chicken kabobs and two patties of shish kebab (above) made from lamb and chicken, served with crisp sauteed veggies, cardamom-flecked rice and a yogurt sauce bursting with mint and the grapey sweet-sour of tamarind. Some of the main dishes here cost 40 percent less than their sister plates at Clay Pit.
It’s all in service of the uniform, re-createable, value-oriented experience. But maybe what you gain in predictability you lose in personal connection. I like the informal and sometimes gruff interplay of a family joint, of moms and daughters and cousins and fathers directing their dysfunctional energy toward feeding strangers.
But hey, Dr. Phil. Just shut up and eat your lunch.
Tarka Indian Kitchen
5207 Brodie Lane, No. 120. 892-2008, www.tarkaindiankitchen.com
Rating: 7.7 out of 10
Hours: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, until 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
(American-Statesman photos by Mike Sutter)
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Austin trailers make Men’s Health ‘Best’ and ‘Worst’ lists
As part of a stomach-churning one-week, seven-city tour, the two visited Austin for about 24 hours in April. They were focused, wired and one walkup window away from coming fully unhinged. Also, they fed me seven times.
I acted as their guide to the places we could hit on an Easter Sunday and an early Monday: Flip Happy Crepes, Gourdough’s, the Mighty Cone, Muck-N-Dave’s, G’raj Mahal, Sushi-A-Go-Go and Izzoz Tacos.
That means we missed two of the best — East Side King and Odd Duck — but Goulding and Welch got a mouthful of Austin character, especially decent sushi in a gas station parking lot and the one stop I missed, barbecue from a school bus (Old School).
Goulding went on to name Izzoz’ crispy taco and Old School’s brisket as two of the country’s 10 Best Street Eats, in company with New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
But this being Men’s Health (Kellan’s Full-Body Blast!), Austin also made the Unhealthiest Mobile Meals list with the Puddin’ doughnut with ice cream from Gourdough’s: “This is not a doughnut; it’s a spare tire.”
(TOP: The opening food-trailer spread in the Men’s Health story on food trailers by Matt Goulding. The photo of Flip Happy Crepes on the left was taken by Nathaniel Welch. INSET: Writer Matt Goulding outside the Mighty Cone. American-Statesman photo by Mike Sutter.)
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Ciola’s in Lakeway changes hands
After almost a decade of red sauce, lasagna and Big Nights, Dan Ciola has sold Ciola’s Italian-American Restaurant in Lakeway.
New owner Dave Staab (above) makes no bones about what customers can expect: “The only change is going to be that when they walk through the door, they’re going to see somebody a lot taller.”
Staab has spent a lifetime in and around restaurants, from childhood when his parents ran them to his career as a food-company executive to having his own bar and grill in his native Kansas.
But when the search for a new place brought him to Austin, where his son lives, Staab said the numbers, the food and customer satisfaction pointed to Ciola’s (1310 RM 620 S., 263-9936, www.ciolas.com).
Ciola (at right) said he’s selling because his job as a bond trader and other obligations are keeping him away from the restaurant. “I’m just handing off the baton to somebody who’s not going to drop my baby on its head,” he said. “This guy’s right.”
Chef Louis Ciola, who is Dan Ciola’s nephew, will be staying on at Ciola’s through the next Big Night dinner (named for the film about an Italian restaurant) in October with colleague Gordon Johns. Dan Ciola’s son, Tony, owns a coal-fired pizza shop called Tony C’s at the Hill Country Galleria.
Staab acknowledges that the place will change without the Ciolas, cosmetic things, but he said the recipes of patriarch Dominick Ciola will stay the same. “The food will be as outstanding as it’s always been.”
(American-Statesman photo by James Brosher)
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Parkside and Best Wurst in a sidewalk turf dispute
A sidewalk turf dispute is creating a gulf between two East Sixth Street food businesses that operate within feet of each other.
The fine-dining restaurant Parkside is opposing the renewal of a permit allowing the Best Wurst food cart to operate on the sidewalk outside Parkside.
Jon Notarthomas has owned Best Wurst since the mid-’90s. “We had a great relationship with Dan McClusky’s,” he said of the steakhouse that preceded Parkside, which opened in 2008. “We did know that (Parkside) didn’t want us there from the get-go. But I figured over time, they’d see that we’re good neighbors,” he said.
Notarthomas’ permit, which expired in mid-June, is being extended until the city investigates Parkside’s complaints, said Jason Redfern, manager of the city division that governs right-of-way usage. He didn’t have an estimate for when that process would be completed.
Those complaints are enumerated in letters to the city by Parkside chef-owner Shawn Cirkiel and his parents, Martin and Pamela Cirkiel, who own the building at 301 E. Sixth St.
Their complaints include contentions that the cart violates space restrictions, sells similar products, attracts crowds that leave debris and block the sidewalk and that it will conflict with Parkside’s balcony, construction of which is scheduled to begin later this month. Notarthomas disagrees with those contentions.
Shawn Cirkiel said the dispute is about property rights. “Am I out to close Jon’s business? No. Do I want Jon to move? Yes,” he said.
Simply moving the cart isn’t a comfortable option for Notarthomas. “People say, ‘Why don’t you just go work in one of the trailer-park eateries or why don’t you go to South Congress?’ ” he said. “I feel like our brand is Sixth Street.”
For now, the cart will remain outside Parkside, but during balcony construction, it will have to move. Notarthomas said he arranged with the city and the nightclub Vice across the street to operate outside the club last week, when construction was originally planned.
Noise from the club made it difficult to take orders, he said, calling the drop in business “disastrous.”
The Best Wurst operates a second cart at East Sixth and Red River streets, but Notarthomas said 85 to 90 percent of his business comes from the cart outside Parkside.
Shawn Cirkiel said he respects his neighbor’s business, but “if your neighbor had a party every night, and every night they left trash at your front door and smeared mustard and sauerkraut and ketchup on your door and windows, what would you do?” Parkside also has applied for a sidewalk cafe permit that would make the space in front unavailable for vendors.
More than 1,200 people have joined a “Save the Best Wurst” group on Facebook. People posting on the site have called Cirkiel a bully and a snob. Cirkiel said e-mails have included boycott threats and personal attacks.
“It’s like when people talk about how I can go back to New York,” he said. “It’s just funny. My family’s been in Austin since ’43,” he said.
(American-Statesman photo by Thao Nguyen)
From the archives: Food in the SXSW Zone: Best Wurst
From the archives: Three courses at Parkside
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Jaime’s Spanish Village to close July 30
Jaime’s Spanish Village, the Tex-Mex restaurant at 802 Red River St. known for its low-slung ceilings and margaritas, is closing after losing its lease.
John Kelso will write about the closing in tomorrow’s Statesman and on statesman.com.
Here’s an excerpt:
Jaime’s, which opened 79 years ago when Hoover was president, shut down temporarily on June 30 at the landlord’s order, said Charlie Tames, the current owner.
But Tames has reopened the place for most of the rest of this month so he can give the proceeds made at the restaurant during those weeks to his employees. The place was back open Thursday, but the last chips and salsa will be served on July 30. Tames has to be out by the next day.
“I have a day job,” said Tames, who runs the international department for Merrill Lynch here in Austin. “The easiest thing for me would be to turn off the lights and go back to my day job. But that’s just not right.” They’ll also take donations for the workers.
“If somebody donates, say, $15, to the employee fund, we’ll give ‘em a free jar of hot sauce,” Tames said.
Jaime’s is known for its hot sauce and queso, and for decades was a hangout for University of Texas students, and politicians wandering over from the Capitol.
- From the archives: The Spanish Village dinner at Jaime’s, a One-Dish Wonder
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The Thundercloud jingle, in French
It seems like only a blog entry ago that I mentioned the radio station playing Thundercloud and Toyota commercials at a French bistro in Lakeway.
Laureen Sicart (at right in the photo above) was clever enough to see through my veiled reference to Artisan Bistro in Lakeway, the restaurant she owns with her husband and chef, Cesidio d’Andrea (center), and their friend and wine authority Gloria Parker (left). (Read my full review here.)
Laureen responds to the blog post about restaurant soundtracks:
“Thanks to your latest blog, we have not only changed the music but I have been singing the thundercloud sub commercial to myself all day in french :) If you are curious, it goes something like this…”Quand j’ai faim et je veux quelque chose de bon, je vais au thundercloud dans mon quartier…” It’s not quite as catchy for sure but I am sure our patrons will appreciate the change in background music.
(American-Statesman photo by Larry Kolvoord)
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The soundtrack of your lunch
There’s music that goes with your food like butter on bread. Then there’s the rest of it.
At Eastside Cafe, you get alternate acoustic versions of songs from Robert Earle Keen, Indigo Girls, even the unplugged “Lawyers, Guns and Money” from Warren Zevon, sad and distant now that he’s gone.
It sounds right for the place and time, echoing through rooms with softly creaking wooden floors, a sonic baseline for appreciating the unfussy, garden-style food and calm, steady service.
On the other end of the dial, a French place I liked quite a bit otherwise ran the radio all through lunch. Not XM or Sirius. Some middling pop station complete with Toyota and Thundercloud commercials.
A French place would be so easy to soundtrack. The formula? Anything in French, including Thundercloud commercials.
I have similar feelings about reggae in Italian restaurants. Read about Marley and me here.
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The euFOURia of July
My father, Jon Sutter, is a grill master.
My mom can cook anything, but Dad can coax magic from a Weber with gas or charcoal or sheer force of will. He can turn the humblest sirloin into a marbled masterpiece, seared a crusty mahogany on the outside, just a trace of blood in the middle. It’s not like he stops there. Corn on the cob, ribeyes, T-bones, foiled potatoes, sweet onions. Perfect every time.
I learned to grill by watching him. He’s not one to invite collaboration, but we could watch at his elbow all we wanted. He marinates with teriyaki, onion powder, pineapple, onion, garlic, whatever. And then his primal instincts kick in over the flames, everything sunset bronze outside, sunrise pink inside.
Because of him, I can grill, man. And for July Fourth, I cooked one of the best meals of my life. Three kinds of sirloin tips and a filet mignon from a real-life butcher shop right in my own extended neighborhood: The Meat House, a destination that sends my 11-year-old into Disneyland fits. Three marinades: sweet barbecue, maple bourbon and a Meat House blend balanced with herb, savory and salt. I could pick them blindfolded. Thanks to George LaCava and his mercenaries in black butcher aprons, we turned $31 worth of righteous beef into holiday nirvana.
The meat, I paid full price for that, surrendering to temptation honed from days driving past the place every day on my way to work, idly visualizing the cooking process, blasting first with afterburner heat, then gauging by feel the doneness of the meat, using tongs I took as a souvenir from my last grill shift in 1988.
The wine, that came to me by mail the same way music writers get CDs from record labels. Mumm Napa Cuvee M sparkling wine, sweet and intoxicatingly yeasty in an elegant blue-labeled bottle, then a 2005 cabernet sauvignon from Trefethen, almost $100 a bottle retail, a giant red to battle and then embrace seared soul-bites blow for blow.
The champagne, that was for prep and cooking, for the time cleaning the grates and knocking the spiders out of the burners, grooving to a cook’s iPod mix of Dylan and Kiss and “Mystery Babylon.”
The red was for dinner, surrounded by my wife and daughters, enraptured by the bounty of it all, the C-note cab bringing home the reasons why life is best lived at the edges of when your money screams “Stop!”
It’s the wine you pull for your next-to-last Cuban cigar, a baby Cohiba, because even in that tongue-tied mash of heat and spice, the wine still wins, black fruit kicking ass on black leaf every time.
My cowboy Zippo. My daughter with a taste for the serious grilled arts. My wife, who can turn a handful of baby portobellos into a pas de trois of garlic, butter and onion. The Cold War gospel of the Louvin Brothers. The promise of artillery shells on July Fourth’s dusky denouement.
This is what we live for. Everything else is just practice for it.
(American-Statesman photos by Mike Sutter)
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‘Yes We’re Open’ Report: Don Dario’s, Takoba, Homefield Grill; Green Mesquite in Oak Hill closes
• Open: Don Dario’s, a Mexican restaurant and bar at 8801 S. Interstate 35. 479-8105.
• Open: HomeField Grill, at 2000 S. Interstate 35. 388-4663, www.homefieldgrill.com.
• Open: Takoba, a Mexican restaurant and bar at 1411 E. Seventh St. 628-4466.
• Open: SoCo To Go, a downtown lunch service and catering company that delivers southern comfort foods such as chicken fried chicken, brisket sandwiches and hash brown casserole. 970-8646, www.socotogo.com.
• Open: Dos Batos, a tacos and tortas place open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily at 252 W. Anderson Lane, Building 1, Suite 175. 452-0001, www.dosbatos.com.
• Opening soon: Green Mesquite BBQ & More, the second location of the popular Barton Springs Road barbecue place, at 9900 S. Interstate 35, Suite M700, in South Park Meadows. 282-7100, www.greenmesquite.net. (Wait a minute, wasn’t there already a second location in Oak Hill? Read on …)
• Closed: The Green Mesquite BBQ & More location at 7010 Texas 71 W. in Oak Hill.
• Coming soon: Zandunga Mexican Bistro, 1000 E. 11th St.
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A dozen places for sushi
You don’t have to spend a whole paycheck for sushi, but maybe you should dodge the ‘discount sushi.’ Here are 12 places I’ve reviewed or visited that fall comfortably between the two extremes. (The ratings in parentheses are awarded after full reviews. Limited visits and single-dish reviews don’t carry ratings.)
Finn & Porter. This main room at this surf-and-turf cathedral, its upward sweep broken by light s as big as the spaceship in ‘District 9,’ might make you feel small. But at the intimate sushi bar, the Goii Roll will make you feel smart. Wrapped in white rice paper, it starts with crunch and pop: carrot, frisée, cilantro, cucumber and flying-fish roe with wasabi. Meaty hamachi and shrimp give it substance. Tangy ponzu and chive aïoli give it spice. 500 E. Fourth St., in the Hilton Austin hotel. 493-4900, www.finnandporter.com/austin.
How Do You Roll? (photo, above) Like Subway for sushi. Pick the base of your roll (seaweed or soy paper with rice), choose your meat (grilled beef or chicken, shrimp tempura, eel, raw fish and so on), then add vegetables, sauces and toppings. 10515 N. MoPac Blvd. (Loop 1), Suite A165. 243-8298. Also at 454 W. Second St. 320-8400, www.maki.us.com. (Reviewed April 2009: 5.9 out of 10)
Izumi Japanese Sushi & Grill. Some of the most elegantly cut fish in the city, the flavors as clean and fresh as the presentation, especially in translucent Japanese snapper and silky albacore. The Westlake Hill Roll is a tall sail of cucumber , drawing flavor from crab, tuna, salmon and yellowtail. 701 S. Capital of Texas Highway (Loop 360), Suite 550. 328-3333, www.sushiizumi.com. (Reviewed December 2009: 7.8 out of 10)
Kenobi Restaurant and Sushi Bar. Japanese surf and turf . Standouts from the two camps: a ‘Seven and a Half’ sushi roll with a light tempura batter and three kinds of fish and a rich, coffee-rubbed New York steak. 10000 Research Blvd., No. 138A in the Arboretum. 241-0119, www.kenobiaustin.com. (Reviewed February 2009: Two stars.)
Kyoto. The lunch menu reads like a picture book: 10 pieces of nigiri sushi for around $10, sushi combos, double-roll specials. But I marveled at every corner of a sushi-sashimi bento box with snapper, yellowtail, tuna and salmon nigiri, all of it firm and fresh, plus six pieces of sashimi with shredded daikon. Crisp tempura bites included sweet potato, zucchini, broccoli and shrimp. With rice and miso soup, this is a reason to drive downtown. 315 Congress Ave., No. 200. 482-9010, www.kyotodowntown.com.
Mizu Prime Steak and Sushi. A lavish place for upscale rolls like the McLovin’: crab, avocado, peppered tuna, serranos and balsamic vinegar. An impressive wine list, a full grill menu and sweeping views of the hills around Lake Travis. 3001 S. RM 620, Lakeway. 263-2801, www.mizuaustin.com.
Nagoya Steak & Sushi. Clean and friendly, with comfortable booths, big Japanese teppanyaki grills and a few too many TVs. Some of the nigiri sushi was fine, but poor technique and bad flavors sabotaged the rolls and tempura. 11630 RM 620 N., Cedar Park. 258-9888, www.eatnagoya.com. (Reviewed December 2009: 4.5 out of 10)
Piranha Killer Sushi. A franchise with specialty rolls such as a Love at First Sight (charbroiled fish over a California roll) and Marry Me (shrimp tempura, ginger cream, avocado, tuna and strawberry). Best appreciated on a two-sake buzz. 207 San Jacinto Blvd., No. 200. 473-8775, www.piranhakillersushi.com.
Silhouette Restaurant and Bar. The button-down sushi - nigiri with briny salmon eggs, silky-fleshed salmon and tuna, smoky eel and sweet octopus - plays wingman to the bar’s aloha-shirted drinks . 718 Congress Ave. 478-8899.
Sushi A-Go-Go. Raw fish from a trailer? Trust Kayo and Také Asazu to turn out respectable rolls (the Fat Samurai) and colorful surprises (seaweed salad, sushi balls). 4001 Medical Parkway. 560-1655. Also at 801 Barton Springs Road. 423-7170, www.sushi-a-go-go-austin.com.
Sushi Zushi. This San Antonio and Dallas export is well-designed, from the blond wood to the cushy curving banquettes and zen-tasteful booths. The menu is what the Facebook page would look like if a sushi bar married a Japanese cafeteria. 1611 W. Fifth St. 474-7000. Also at 3221 Feathergrass Court at the Domain. 834-8100, www.sushizushi.com.
Tomo Sushi. A tight space with a mixed crowd, from ‘you-might-be-a-yuppie-if’ couples to tattooed Goths. Single-entendre, PG-13 rolls abound: Sex on the Beach, Double D, Say My Name . But the Who’s Your Daddy Roll rocked, with spicy tuna and asparagus, wrapped generously with salmon and spicy sauce. 4101 W. Parmer Lane, Suite E. 821-9472, www.tomosushiaustin.com. (Reviewed December 2009: 6.2 out of 10)
For more photos, see the gallery here.
