Annies Cafe and Bar

By Mike Sutter
AMERICAN-STATESMAN RESTAURANT CRITIC
Thursday, August 13, 2009

Few restaurants downtown bristle with the energy and potential of Annies Cafe and Bar, a tribute to Love Nance and Sherry Jameson, who lost their old lease on Apple Annies in a bank tower basement last year and put the best of that beloved lunch-and-catering enterprise into the historic Day Building on Congress Avenue in June. The place still embraces the lunch crowd with cosmopolitan zeal and four-salad sampler plates, but the mission has grown, with menus that run from sunup to past sundown. Eggs and grits and oatmeal for breakfast, salads and pizzas and hot plates for lunch, full-tilt bistro dishes from executive chef Mark Schmidt and old-school cocktails at night.

Talk about a place with different energies. Breakfast is its own world, the quiet broken only by the tattoo of kitchen sounds, the light dappling in from the banks of doors in front. The waitstaff is doing side work, folding napkins, putting down silverware. With the practiced grace of a 1940s movie star, a waitress puts on lipstick in the big mirror behind the horseshoe-shaped bar that anchors the ballroom-size space, a classy blend of exposed brick, bright oil paintings and towering ceilings, all of it set to the giants of jazz music.

The rhythms here are important. Getting to know them is no small task. For breakfast, table service starts at 7 and goes through 10:30 most days. In the lull before lunch at 11, you can walk through the cafeteria-style line to order breakfast. From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., lunch is served on that line, except on Saturday, when lunch service is seated. Dinner starts at 5 p.m. and runs through 10. Right now, the full dinner menu is available Wednesdays through Saturdays. On Mondays and Tuesdays, dinner is served from a different after-hours menu. And there's something to fill every gap around lunch, dinner and late-night. The place is dark on Sundays, but brunch is planned for the fall. I'm as confused as you probably are, but after four visits I still can't wait to go back.

At breakfast, the soft-poached eggs I ordered as part of a `Full English Breakfast' ($9.95 with eggs, sausage, creamy grits, grilled tomato, fruit, bread and a cup of astonishingly good coffee) were perfect, the yolks the deep orange of a well-sourced egg. The sausages were a meal unto themselves, like apple-sweetened roast chicken rolled into link casings. I ordered a pancake on the side for $2, fluffy and light inside with a slightly crisp shell, plate-sized like Kerbey Lane's beloved pancakes without the leaden thump.

True at breakfast, and true through all my experiences, the staff is cheerful, conversational, enthusiastic. Some are related to the owners, the chef, the night manager. They're young, they're older, they're Northeastern efficient without the attitude. And they need every skill they've got to work lunch, when the service line backs up to the door and the tables fill up like photos in a gallery exhibit called `The Urban Lunch Ideal.' The options hit fast. Besides the display cases with chicken bowtie pasta, Texas caviar with black-eyed peas, pesto pasta, oven-ready pizzas and the like, you can opt for a hot lunch. Mine was a tender roasted pork loin with a roasted vegetable salsa and two sides (Spanish rice and mustard greens with bacon) for $9.95.

I liked the chicken poblano soup for $2.95 and I liked the Thai salad with pulled chicken and peanut sauce for $7.95, but I loved the $7.95 farmers' market salad with salmon (for $2 extra). The freshness, color and texture of roasted yellow and red beets and true baby carrots, radishes, creamy goat cheese, spicy arugula and horseradish vinaigrette made me a believer in Annies' `Farm to Table' philosophy. But the salmon outshone them all, bristling hot and seared crisp outside, with fall-apart layers inside.

Of all my visits to Annies, I was the least in love with dinner. Maybe because the energy level had dropped off so severely from the full-house chatter of lunch. The big space is lonely at night, the spaces at the bar freighted with missed opportunities, the tables crying out for company.

Can I fault the roasted vegetable pizza ($10) for not being the style I like? The squash, zucchini and red pepper were cooked to the perfect bite, the green pesto artfully ribboned around the pie, the grana padano cheese fragrant and not overly salty. But the crust was soft, like thin, barely toasted focaccia, folding in on itself even with the small slices, eight from a pie 10 inches in diameter.

The rabbit ($24), roasted to a perfect crusty, salty and fleshy turn, made my eyes roll back, a peasant dish turned into something royal. I threw etiquette out the window and chewed every last bit right off the bone. The duck-egg spaetzle noodles were firm, even crunchy, served with peas and carrots (but cubed carrots, I don't care how well-sourced, have a canned, downmarket look ). A nice partner at first, the spaetzle became too salty to bear halfway through the dish.

I wanted to like the lamb T-bone chops ($25) every bit as much as the rabbit, seeing how the dish combined three of my favorite ingredients: lamb, coffee and vanilla. But the menu wording threw me off. It described polenta gnocchi and I got polenta wedges. The menu mentioned Deep Ellum Blue cheese, but didn't suggest where (on the polenta). The vanilla ratatouille, which I imagined as a more cohesive side, maybe even cooked in a dish of its own, was presented more as a loose tumble of al dente halves of button squash and sweet cherry tomatoes, some with a deep vanilla aroma, others picking up flavors from the elements around them. The two tiny T-bone chops were rubbed with coffee that came through at all the right times , but I was distracted by the gamey flavor of the fat.

True to bistro form, the menu promised mussels and fries ($12), and we were treated to a generous bowl of shellfish in a tomato and garlic broth. But like party crashers, thin slices of Spanish chorizo insinuated themselves into every corner of the dish, shouting down every other flavor. We chose not to spend our precious calories on the paper bag of limp, barely warm french fries that came alongside.

What the menu called a sweet corn summer soup was truly sweet, redolent with corn, but invoked summer to me mainly with its heat and its ? yellowness. With lump crab and a subtle lacing of fennel, it was a bargain no matter what the season at $7.

For dessert ($7 each), a modest crème brûlée had the right thin sugar crust and sweet custard, with a sprinkle of summer berries. I didn't know what to make of the pistachio parfait, soft on its edges but icy hard at the core, drawing most of its flavor from a generous dusting of crushed pistachios. My espresso was a dense marvel of bright acidity.

I wanted more help from the wine list. There weren't many choices by the glass (maybe 11, but I'm told that's about to double), but there were interesting bottles less than or at the low $30 mark, and we went with a Russian River Pedroncelli pinot noir, the only one a manager suggested when we asked for something that might go well with the lamb and rabbit. With soft fruit and moderate depth at $30, it worked. But I'd have liked a few more options, maybe a taste? There seemed to be a surplus of time and opportunity.

After two months, Annies is still a work in progress - but what fine work and what satisfying progress.

msutter@statesman.com; 912-5902

Annies Cafe and Bar

319 Congress Ave. 472-1884, anniescafebar.com

Rating (Dinner service is formal and certainly in the price range of fine dining, but the majority of Annies hours are devoted to casual dining, so the rating is based on our 1-to-10 scale for casual dining.): 8.5 out of 10

Hours: 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays through Wednesdays, 7 a.m. to midnight Thursdays, 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. Fridays, 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. Saturdays. Closed Sundays.

Prices: Breakfast: $2.85 (pigs in a blanket) to $5.85 (fried egg sandwich) to $9.95 (Full English Breakfast). Lunch: $6.25 (sandwiches) to $7.95 (entree salads) to $18 (steak frites). Dinner: starters $6-$12, main courses $14 to $28, desserts $7.

Payment: All major cards

Bar: Full bar service from a 30-foot European-style horseshoe-shaped bar topped with zinc. Cocktails include a Watermelon Tiki Masala ($10) and the French Legation ($10). The wine list is set to expand, but at this writing there were about 30 by the bottle ($20-$100) and 11 by the glass.

Wheelchair access: Yes

What the ratings mean: The average of weighted scores for food, service, atmosphere and value