Offbeat Eats

(Closed) Like Austin to the Northeast, San Antonio has a growing food truck scene. While nothing like Austin at present, it has a few up and coming areas, like the Boardwalk on Bulverde food court, a rather substantial cluster of food trucks, for some food truck action… (located adjacent to, and run by, a company that makes food trucks, btw). The Boardwalk is a Thursday-Sunday operation, with about a dozen food trucks all located at this one spot in Northern San Antonio. It’s a rather nice little outside area, with the obligatory random selection of seating, a mechanical bulls, and a few other oddments. And, as I mentioned in my review of Erick’s Tacos, it’s only open Thursday-Sunday, so we had to make a separate trip back here to try it out. But on Friday, we finally made it to the Boardwalk, where Stop #1 was Rickshaw Stop, a well-known San Antonio Food Truck serving up delicious Pakistani kebab.

(Closed) So, after a decent day of exploring the Riverwalk and downtown San Antonio, we decided that was a good time for dinner. And we were craving Mexican food. Well, San Antonio, particularly the Riverwalk, is probably one of the densest concentrations of Tex Mex places in existence, with at least a dozen Tex Mex places (mostly with some sort of “Cantina” motif) accessible either directly on the river, or a short staircase away. Well, we didn’t go to any of those places. Instead, we headed up to street level, and walked several blocks south to the edge of the King William District to El Mirador. El Mirador is one of the elderly statesmen of San Antonio Mexican Places, having been there since 1967, when the owners built the place to be near the HemisFair ’68 World Fair a few blocks to the east, and it’s been doing steady business ever since. It’s also relatively popular with the locals—there’s even a room in the back called the “City Council Room”, since the San Antonio City Council has a tendency to hold informal lunchtime meetings there. In any case, El Mirador was a nice little destination for u to get a nice dinner away from the Riverwalk crowds.

(Closed) When I started blogging, I decided that my blog would be pretty focused, with just restaurant reviews. Well, over the years I’ve made a few exceptions, like blogging a few special events, and some places that aren’t really restaurants. But during my trip to San Antonio, I finally went to a bar that was “offbeat” enough that it made me ask myself, “Why haven’t I reviewed any bars yet?” The reasons were twofold: while I’ve been to a lot of great bars that I have reviewed here, I still always reviewed them for the food. And the second was my self-imposed rule. Well, the greatest thing about making your own rules is that you can change them… So I’m presenting my first bar review. Last Friday, I was in San Antonio, having joined Carol for a conference. After tooling around the outskirts of town, we ended up going down and doing a fair bit of walking on San Antonio’s pleasant Riverwalk. After a bit of walking and seeing the sights, we decided we were thirsty, and a quick check of online reviews gave really mixed results for places on the riverwalk… but pointed us to one particular place that’s off the Riverwalk. Located in a converted bank building on Crockett Street just barely off the Riverwalk at street level, it’s actually the sort of place you could walk by without much notice (indeed, I didn’t originally think it was open when we first approached it). Inside, it’s rather a funky space: what normally would be a really spacious bar area is broken into two spaces by the presence of the old bank vault, which currently serves as Soho’s wine cellar. The result is a main, but somewhat crowded, bar area, and two quieter seating areas.

(Closed) It’s been several years since I reviewed Wasp’s Diner, and since it had been quite a while since I’d even been there, I decided on a recent trip over into Vermont that it might be a good idea to check in on them and see if things are still going strong. My previous review focused on their breakfast (in particular, the rather good eggs Benedict I ended up having, with a top-notch Hollandaise sauce on it), so this time we ended up getting lunch. I opted for the grilled cheese and ham, and Carol opted for the shepherd’s pie…

(Closed) Well, sometimes the combination of work and personal travel means that there literally is no rest for the weary. I had barely done laundry from the back-to-back-back Chicago, Dayton, and Austin trips, when my travels again had me heading out for 5 days to the DC are for a conference. I rather like going to DC (and do so a lot, usually 4-5 times a year), but it’s never convenient getting there from my house in New Hampshire; I either have to deal with planes, trains, and metros (BWI), a long bus ride (BOS), or inconvenient flight times (DCA). This time I opted for the last of these, since I was staying in Crystal City. Indeed, my with 6:45 am flight, I arrived at DCA and was out the door with my bags by 8:10am on a fabulous Sunday morning, with nothing on my slate until 1:45 in the afternoon (yes, my client scheduled things for Sunday…). After a nice, pleasant walk to the hotel (Yes, Crystal City is only about a 20 minute walk from DCA), I realized I had the better part of 4 hours to get something useful done. So I grabbed a bike from Capital Bikeshare (which is one of those bike rental services that’s just perfect for a visitor like myself), and decided to take a scenic ride north on the Mount Vernon Trail to Arlington, and Ray’s Hell Burger.

(Closed) For those that have been following along with my travels in May/June, it was a rather hectic time, especially when I found myself having just gotten back from Austin and having to turn around again and leave for Washington, DC. Since the pace was so hectic, I decided it would be a good idea to take an evening off (albeit an evening on my way to the airport) and have a nice dinner with Carol. We ended up picking Mint Bistro in Manchester, which has been on my hit list for a while. Located on Elm street, just a little around the corner from Red Arrow Diner, Mint Bistro is basically a “contemporary fusion bistro”. It’s a rather nicely decorated space, centered around a prominent bar, with a reasonably good amount of seating. Menu-wise, Mint Bistro is one of those fusion places that seems to take a bit of the “shotgun” approach to fusion cuisine, in that they’ve got both “Tapas” and “Sushi” on the same menu with upscale pot roast. This approach always makes me a bit skeptical, but I’ve read several good reviews of the place, so we figured it was worth a try…

(Closed) After our weekend of wandering around Austin eating BBQ and sampling several of Austin’s many food trucks, you’d think that we’d start to be a bit worn out on food trucks. Well, we weren’t. About a week after we got back from Austin, we decided that the weekend weather was nice, and we wandered over to White River Junction, Vermont to check out Streats, our area’s latest food truck. That’s right, the Upper Valley actually has several food trucks (some of which I’ve even review here, like Wicked Awesome BBQ, but I’ll admit I’m way overdue for reviewing Vermont Crepe and Waffle and Mama Tina’s Tamales), of which Streats is the newest arrival. Billing themselves as a “mobile canteen”, Streats is currently located in a mostly vacant lot at the corner of Prospect and Bridge Streets, just west of the bridge to West Lebanon, New Hampshire (for those familiar with the area, it’s across the street from the Listen Center)…

(Closed) After our breakfast at Flaco’s, the 2012 Central Texas BBQ run began in earnest on May 11th with a visit to JMueller BBQ (That’s pronounced “J. Meller”, btw). JMueller was definitely one of the most anticipated places on our 2012 itinerary, since it is one of the up and coming BBQ spots of the Austin area, and has been getting favorable reviews from the standard sources like Full Custom Gospel BBQ, who give it a solid 5 star rating. Since none of us had been there, we made it our first stop. Carol and I were the first of our group of eight diners showing up that Friday morning. And, true to our expectations, JMueller is still a relative newcomer to the scene, running out of a modest cart and smoker on South 1st St (in much the same sort of setup Franklin was running a few years ago). JMueller has been “discovered”, but hasn’t yet gotten the crazed following that several of the other area places (again, like Franklin) have gotten, so a mere five minutes before their official opening, there was actually no line at JMueller. Yup, we showed up, and managed to even sit and relax at a table waiting for the rest of our party to arrive. So JMueller might be getting some good press, but it’s not yet attracting the massive throngs of BBQ-seeking fanatics that some of the other places have….

(Closed) So, the morning of May 11th, we officially embarked on the 2012 Austin BBQ tour. But I’ve found that it’s best not starting your day beginning with a bunch of barbecued brisket and ribs; despite the fact that most of the day was going to be dedicated to eating large quantities of meat, we both decided that it would be a good idea to start things out with some breakfast. And Austin has a rather good breakfast taco scene going on, particularly since it’s a town that already has a large population of taco joints and taco trucks. The previous night’s stand, Torchy’s Tacos has quite the breakfast menu, for example, as does Maria’s Taco Xpress over on South Lamar (we’ll get back to Maria’s in a few posts, I promise!). But between our hotel and our first BBQ joint (JMueller) was a fairly simple Austin taco joint: Flaco’s Tacos (aka “El Flaco”, as it is still named on some of the signage).

(Closed) We walked. We ate. We drank. We even suffered a bit. But 22.6 miles after starting our journey, we hit the end of the Death March by arriving at Great Lake Pizza. The interesting thing about “pizza” and “Chicago” is that most people instantly assume that if you are talking about both of these in the same sentence, you’re talking about deep dish pizza. And hey, while I like a good deep dish pizza (although it’s not necessarily something I mentally file with my other pizza thoughts, to me, deep dish pizza and regular neo-Neapolitan pizza are like lasagna and spaghetti; there’s a lot of similarity, but it’s really a different foodstuff…), there actually is quite a bit of excellent pizza activity going on around Chicago that doesn’t involve deep dish. For every Lou Malnati’s or Gino’s East, there’s a decent place in Chicago that’s also churning out a classic thin-crust pizza, and doing a great job at it. One of the best is Great Lake Pizza.