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"Everything you want to know about me is @ http://www.geochu..."
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Location
Austin, TX
Yelping SinceMarch 2008
Find Me InAustin, TX.
My HometownCincinnati, OH.
My Blog Or Website When I'm Not Yelping...I work my nuts off.
Why You Should Read My ReviewsBecause you'll become a more edumacated person.
My Second Favorite Website The Last Great Book I ReadAnything by George RR Martin
My First ConcertRush. Yep. I'm a dork.
My Favorite MovieThe Godfather
My Last Meal On EarthChicken Tikka Saag from Baba India in Cincinnati, OH. Mmmmm......
Most Recent DiscoveryTorchy's Tacos. Mmmmm.....
Current CrushMy extremely hot wife.
Date
4310 James Casey St
Austin, TX 78745
(512) 448-4588
Austin, TX 78745
(512) 448-4588
Austin Gastroenterology
Category: Health and Medical
Couple of things. Concerning the part about the health insurance/Dr's office contact debacle, I found out it was definitely the health insurance and not the Dr's office staff that was at fault here. So...I'll keep the experience here for reference.
Secondly, I have to say that, despite some of the other things I'd change...Leanne, one of the scheduler/staffers (don't know her official title) has really stepped it up. She has been very cool the past several times I've had to get things scheduled/deal with insurance/etc. And...in defense of Heather in the post below, she has been good to me as well.
Secondly, I have to say that, despite some of the other things I'd change...Leanne, one of the scheduler/staffers (don't know her official title) has really stepped it up. She has been very cool the past several times I've had to get things scheduled/deal with insurance/etc. And...in defense of Heather in the post below, she has been good to me as well.
1 Previous Review: Hide »
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6/3/2008
Cutting to the chase, I have a digestive disease called ulcerative colitis that requires the services of specialists like Austin Gastroenterology.
For the past year and a half, I've gone to see Dr. Chia-Wen Hsu (Kevin Shoe) and his band of merry staff members. Dr. Hsu has been, at the most, a fairly competent guy. He lacks a little in the area of 'bedside manner'. The times that I've gone to see him and ask questions. This causes me to not want to go see him when I probably should because instead of feeling like a patient, I feel like an imposition.
But I can suck it up and deal with that.
What I cannot deal with or feel like I can tolerate is most of the staff there. Getting anyone from there to call you back is a task. Let's take, for example, last week. I called in because I needed to A) find out some information on medication, B) schedule an appointment and C) check on the status of a pre-qualification letter with my new insurance that I had asked them to file almost a month ago. After waiting on hold for 10 minutes, I finally got through to someone. Scheduling was fine, but the earliest date that had was 6/17. At the time I called it was 5/28. Finding out the information on the medication and potentially getting a prescription apparently required a little consultation from Dr. Hsu, so the nurse said she'd have to get back to me. And the letter...they said they hadn't heard anything from my insurance.
First, I never received a call back. I had to call today. While the request for help was apparently in my chart, nobody had bothered to call back. As for the letter, I was told that I should go ahead and call health insurance myself. I've never experienced that before. I thought I was the patient, and I thought it was someone's job at the Dr's office to go and chase those things down. I want to be taken care of...not worry about whether or not I'm going to get the treatment I need because someone doesn't have the time to care for me. The sad and disturbing thing is that it's a pretty hefty treatment I have to have, and I get them once every 6-8 weeks. If I don't get one, I start going downhill pretty rapidly...
Upon calling my new health insurance provider, they proceed to tell me that no one had sent anything in until last Thursday. Talk about infuriating...
And then about 20 mins after that conversation, someone from Austin Gastro calls me to tell me how mad they are the insurance provider told me that, and that it wasn't true, and that they sent the paperwork quite some time back...blah blah blah. The girl was nice enough, and frankly, I don't care who did or did not do what. What I do care about is how I'm going to get this next treatment without having to pay an arm and a leg for it. And more importantly, stay as healthy as I can be. This girl should have been on it in my opinion. I should not have to be taking time out of my day to do what I perceive as someone elses responsbility.
Also a couple of disturbing things happened when I actually went in to have a treatment done. The male nurse had just started a week or so previously. He's an older guy. He's nice enough, but two things happened where I said, "WTF."
1. When they take your temp, they use some kind of electronic doohickey thermometer. You're supposed to put a plastic thermometer cover on it (a thermometer condum?) before cramming it into your patient's mouth. I didn't notice he didn't do that until he pulled it out of my mouth...and then PRETENDED to throw it away in the trash. No joke.
2. He asked me if I wanted anything to drink. I said I'd like a cup of coffee. He brought me coffee, sugar and cream...but nothing stir it with. He dissappeared for a little but and came back empty handed. At that point, he turned around, grabbed a syringe (it was new and in the plastic, so it was sterile and unused), handed it to me, chuckled a little and said, "Here you go. You can use this. It should work fine." At first I thought he was joking and I laughed a little. To my dismay, shock and chagrin, he was deadly serious.
I'm on my way to finding another provider, as this is just too much. What it comes down to is this...
When you have a chronic illness, one that requires constant monitoring and effects your life on a daily basis, you tend to become very cognizant of how that affects your life. You become empathetic towards others that might have something wrong. Likewise, when you're healthy, you don't necessarily have a need to be thinking about sickness. But the issue here is that these are people who are supposed to careful with the patients they see, who are supposed to make it easier for you so you can live a somewhat more normal life, and who are supposed to be the ones you are able to turn to do all (or even ONE) of those things. You take for granted your health and I think at some point you cease to see your patients as real people with real problems.
718 Congress Ave
Austin, TX 78799
(512) 478-8899
Austin, TX 78799
(512) 478-8899
Silhouette
Categories: Japanese, Sushi Bars
Neighborhood: Downtown
Once upon a time about 10.5 hours ago, the word silhouette conjured up images of shadowy refinement, tasteful darkness and perhaps a tinge of mystery.
Now I'm starting to think that perhaps in some ancient language it actually translates into the word 'crapfest' or 'dungpile' or 'foulfactory'...because you could use all of those words to describe the restaurant Silhouette and you still wouldn't come anywhere close to how utterly nasty this place is. Where do I even begin?
Let's start with walking into the place. One's olfactory senses are assaulted....like, full on castle siege in the medieval times, complete with battering rams and catapaults and dudes in heavy plate mail armor that haven't showered in months...by the smell of aged dead sea-faring animal, 4 day old damp cloth that is just starting to go moldy, dripping old air conditioning and wet stone.
Aw hell...let's just throw in the smell of unwashed-and-ready-to-go athlete-style foot and your favorite animal's breath after it has eaten and then burped.
And a little bit of oven-roasted bile for good measure. Poured over going-sour curded milk. In a bowl full of liquid squeezed from one of those heavy-duty plastic floor mats in a bar at the end of an 18 hour day.
And even then I feel like I'm being nice.
I ordered Lunch Box F. F stands for failure. F stands for flop. F stands for foul, freakish, floundering, funk-flavored f**king raw fish in a plastic box. If Lunch Box F actually meant all of those things, Lunch Box F is aptly named. It came with three hand rolls, one of which I know was some kind of shrimp. One had what looked like a bunch of avocado in it. And one had tuna...I think. There was a vegetable roll (rice & cucumber, more or less). And there was some miso soup.
The hand wraps looked like mini fish-flavored ice-cream cones. Unfortunately, where ice cream is cold and is generally guaranteed to taste good, this stuff was lukewarm and tasted like polyurethane.
Luke can stay at home locked in his room when it comes to sushi, because you know when he's there with his friend 'warm', something is definitely amiss. I want my sushi cool and fresh...not luke nor warm.
I tried taking a bite of one...specifically the one with the shrimp...but the seaweed was chewy and plasticky. That made me take a bigger bite of the sushi ice-cream cone, and that, in turn, made my stomach turn a little bit. My stomach turned because the shrimp tasted like it had been sitting for a little while and then rolled around some kind of spicy stuff mixed in with a creamy textured sauce. And let me again remind you that this was lukewarm.
Let's do a little exercise of putting words together that should not be together when you're thinking about food.
Luke-warm. Creamy. Chewy. Plasticky. Shrimp.
Friends, if that does not induce a gag reflex, then I don't know what will.
I tried the second one with what I thought was tuna and got the same experience.
Big "How 'bout nooooooooo" on attempting to eat anymore of the handrolls.
I moved on to the vegetable roll. How can you screw up something with rice and cucumber and seaweed? Apparently it's possible. It was falling apart. And again, the seaweed felt like it'd been sitting for awhile. Despite this, I still managed to choke it down.
Miso soup = liquid salt. I like salty flavored soup, but this stuff was quite literally pure salt.
I paid $8.00 for this. I feel like if I would've just eaten the eight bucks, I would have gotten a better meal.
The only reason why this place gets even one star is because it's a cool restaurant space and because they were playing Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai" up on a huge screen.
This place was, hands down, the worst food I have had in my 1 year and 9 months I have lived here. Do yourself a favor and walk about 4.5 more blocks south down Congress and go to Kyoto. You could not pay me to eat at this place ever again.
Now I'm starting to think that perhaps in some ancient language it actually translates into the word 'crapfest' or 'dungpile' or 'foulfactory'...because you could use all of those words to describe the restaurant Silhouette and you still wouldn't come anywhere close to how utterly nasty this place is. Where do I even begin?
Let's start with walking into the place. One's olfactory senses are assaulted....like, full on castle siege in the medieval times, complete with battering rams and catapaults and dudes in heavy plate mail armor that haven't showered in months...by the smell of aged dead sea-faring animal, 4 day old damp cloth that is just starting to go moldy, dripping old air conditioning and wet stone.
Aw hell...let's just throw in the smell of unwashed-and-ready-to-go athlete-style foot and your favorite animal's breath after it has eaten and then burped.
And a little bit of oven-roasted bile for good measure. Poured over going-sour curded milk. In a bowl full of liquid squeezed from one of those heavy-duty plastic floor mats in a bar at the end of an 18 hour day.
And even then I feel like I'm being nice.
I ordered Lunch Box F. F stands for failure. F stands for flop. F stands for foul, freakish, floundering, funk-flavored f**king raw fish in a plastic box. If Lunch Box F actually meant all of those things, Lunch Box F is aptly named. It came with three hand rolls, one of which I know was some kind of shrimp. One had what looked like a bunch of avocado in it. And one had tuna...I think. There was a vegetable roll (rice & cucumber, more or less). And there was some miso soup.
The hand wraps looked like mini fish-flavored ice-cream cones. Unfortunately, where ice cream is cold and is generally guaranteed to taste good, this stuff was lukewarm and tasted like polyurethane.
Luke can stay at home locked in his room when it comes to sushi, because you know when he's there with his friend 'warm', something is definitely amiss. I want my sushi cool and fresh...not luke nor warm.
I tried taking a bite of one...specifically the one with the shrimp...but the seaweed was chewy and plasticky. That made me take a bigger bite of the sushi ice-cream cone, and that, in turn, made my stomach turn a little bit. My stomach turned because the shrimp tasted like it had been sitting for a little while and then rolled around some kind of spicy stuff mixed in with a creamy textured sauce. And let me again remind you that this was lukewarm.
Let's do a little exercise of putting words together that should not be together when you're thinking about food.
Luke-warm. Creamy. Chewy. Plasticky. Shrimp.
Friends, if that does not induce a gag reflex, then I don't know what will.
I tried the second one with what I thought was tuna and got the same experience.
Big "How 'bout nooooooooo" on attempting to eat anymore of the handrolls.
I moved on to the vegetable roll. How can you screw up something with rice and cucumber and seaweed? Apparently it's possible. It was falling apart. And again, the seaweed felt like it'd been sitting for awhile. Despite this, I still managed to choke it down.
Miso soup = liquid salt. I like salty flavored soup, but this stuff was quite literally pure salt.
I paid $8.00 for this. I feel like if I would've just eaten the eight bucks, I would have gotten a better meal.
The only reason why this place gets even one star is because it's a cool restaurant space and because they were playing Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai" up on a huge screen.
This place was, hands down, the worst food I have had in my 1 year and 9 months I have lived here. Do yourself a favor and walk about 4.5 more blocks south down Congress and go to Kyoto. You could not pay me to eat at this place ever again.
Finally...FINALLY...I can put a burning question in my mind to rest. That question was, "Is Tres Amigos is actually good?"
Why would I have that question on my mind, you ask? When I first moved here, I used to take 360N to work from the downtown area. I'd pass Tres Amigos on 360 every day. Then, we moved up north for a little while. There's a Tres Amigos off of 183 near Anderson Lane. Finally, we moved back down south. Sure enough, while exploring the area, we discovered yet ANOTHER one off of Slaughter.
I thought for certain after seeing it three times, it was a sign. And so we finally went. I'm now able to answer this question.
No. No Tres Amigos is NOT very good.
The Tres Amigos on Slaughter is a veritable cheesefest. Not as in cheese all over the food...we're talking cheese as in 'cheeseball'. I should've known by the signs, which had the name of the restaurant and, underneath the name, were the words, "Fiesta Room'.
Generally, when a place implies that, inside, it's going to be some kind of giant party inside...it's quite the opposite. There are no people. There is no party. The only way that there will be a party is if you go back out into the parking lot, get into your car and drive away.
If the words "Fiesta Room" really translated into, "Big open room devoid of people that isn't quite clean with a color scheme that could potentially induce vomitosis," that is what you'd have at Tres Amigos.
If "Fiesta Room" translated into, "Less-than-mediocre food served by The Worlds Slowest Waitstaff," you'd have that too.
And...if "Fiesta Room" somehow managed to translate into, "Weird wet dog smell coming from the general vicinity of the bar area:"...yeah...there'd be that as well.
I swear to all that is Rastafarian and green that our waiter was as high as George W. Bush in his coke-snorting days. His eyes wouldn't quite open all the way, and he had this stupid grin plastered to his face every time he'd talk to us. There was one point where he asked if everything was OK and then, literally, turned around and started doing something else before we could answer.
We were one of approximately 5 people in there, and it took, easily, 15-20 minutes for our food to come out.
I had a tamale, a cheese enchilada, some spicy black beans and some queso. The beans and the queso were good. I probably would have been better off making and then eating something looking like a tamale out of construction paper. And the cheese enchilada could have come out of a frozen dinner box.
Then there were the 'puffy tacos' Incredibly Hot Wife ordered. So I was under the impression that a puffy taco wold actually resemble a taco or something. Wrong. What came out were two large puffed-up, round, empty fried balls with cheese, lettuce, beans and tomato on them. I'm no expert or anything, but that sure doesn't seem to be what a taco should look like, you know? Upon trying to pick the thing up, everything on TOP of it went tumbling through the bottom, resulting in Incredibly Hot Wife holding a fried halo and a plate full of toppings. Or perhaps 'bottomings'...
There are a million other places in Austin one could go to and get better Mexican than here.
Why would I have that question on my mind, you ask? When I first moved here, I used to take 360N to work from the downtown area. I'd pass Tres Amigos on 360 every day. Then, we moved up north for a little while. There's a Tres Amigos off of 183 near Anderson Lane. Finally, we moved back down south. Sure enough, while exploring the area, we discovered yet ANOTHER one off of Slaughter.
I thought for certain after seeing it three times, it was a sign. And so we finally went. I'm now able to answer this question.
No. No Tres Amigos is NOT very good.
The Tres Amigos on Slaughter is a veritable cheesefest. Not as in cheese all over the food...we're talking cheese as in 'cheeseball'. I should've known by the signs, which had the name of the restaurant and, underneath the name, were the words, "Fiesta Room'.
Generally, when a place implies that, inside, it's going to be some kind of giant party inside...it's quite the opposite. There are no people. There is no party. The only way that there will be a party is if you go back out into the parking lot, get into your car and drive away.
If the words "Fiesta Room" really translated into, "Big open room devoid of people that isn't quite clean with a color scheme that could potentially induce vomitosis," that is what you'd have at Tres Amigos.
If "Fiesta Room" translated into, "Less-than-mediocre food served by The Worlds Slowest Waitstaff," you'd have that too.
And...if "Fiesta Room" somehow managed to translate into, "Weird wet dog smell coming from the general vicinity of the bar area:"...yeah...there'd be that as well.
I swear to all that is Rastafarian and green that our waiter was as high as George W. Bush in his coke-snorting days. His eyes wouldn't quite open all the way, and he had this stupid grin plastered to his face every time he'd talk to us. There was one point where he asked if everything was OK and then, literally, turned around and started doing something else before we could answer.
We were one of approximately 5 people in there, and it took, easily, 15-20 minutes for our food to come out.
I had a tamale, a cheese enchilada, some spicy black beans and some queso. The beans and the queso were good. I probably would have been better off making and then eating something looking like a tamale out of construction paper. And the cheese enchilada could have come out of a frozen dinner box.
Then there were the 'puffy tacos' Incredibly Hot Wife ordered. So I was under the impression that a puffy taco wold actually resemble a taco or something. Wrong. What came out were two large puffed-up, round, empty fried balls with cheese, lettuce, beans and tomato on them. I'm no expert or anything, but that sure doesn't seem to be what a taco should look like, you know? Upon trying to pick the thing up, everything on TOP of it went tumbling through the bottom, resulting in Incredibly Hot Wife holding a fried halo and a plate full of toppings. Or perhaps 'bottomings'...
There are a million other places in Austin one could go to and get better Mexican than here.
Let's just get it out of the way right now that I'd give this place a 3.5 and not a 3 if there were such things as half-stars here...
Brick Oven...what a swell place. At first, I thought this was going to be another regular old run-of-the-mill chain restaurant...reason being that, from the outside, the Brodie Lane location is housed within a lovely little carbon copy shopping strip. Glad I ended up shoving down my inner food snob, because this place actually ends up being well above average.
Stepping into the Brick oven on Brodie, ones olfactory glands are assaulted by a pleasant little Italian Mafia family's worth of good smells. They wield litte tommy guns that shoot out a barrage of oven-fired pizza, calzone, stromboli and pasta smells. The pain from the bullet wounds is oh-so-good. As the big enforcer-esque guys hold you down while another shovels tasty food into your ugly mug, you can't help but think, "Gee, 'dis ain't so bad...dis' woody-tasting stuff, ya' know?" Go ahead; garrote me with the mozzarella. Pry at me with the pepperoni and slug me with the sausage. Rail on me with the spinach-stuffed ravioli. And...when you're done...you can cover my bruised and battered body with a bunch of tasty flame-kist pizzas. My headstone'll read, "Andrew G: Lover. Eater of Food. He wasn't a Rat Bastard Like We All Thought. He Actually Kind Of Had Good Taste In Food. So You Should Listen to Him When He Says Go Have Some Brick Oven."
Or something like that.
The Brick Oven Brodie Lane location has pretty decent ambiance. It's big and open, with the brick-oven part of the kitchen in sight upon entry. There are two huge open eating areas to the left and the right. The high ceilings are nice, but it does lend to a noisy eating environment.
One thing I noticed right off the Louisville Slugger(tm) is there are a lot of young'ns in the staff line-up, from the host group to the waitstaff. Not a big deal, as they are friendly enough, but it's just kind of funny in the sense that it seems like this might be a more 'adult-ish' kind of place.
My first trip there was to get some carry-out pizza. I ordered a half-Margherita, half sausage and green pepper, and a half Mediterranean (a "hearty grouping of herbed meatballs with roasted garlic pesto, green and black olives, feta and mozzarella cheeses, red onions, oregano, and olive oil") and a half standard pepperoni pizza. When I got home, I was displeased to find that my half sausage and green pepper was missing, and in its place was another half of a standard pepperoni. So...that's weird. Why would I order two halves of a pepperoni pizza? Wouldn't that just mean I'd want a whole pepperoni pizza or something? I guess that happens when you place your order with a hormones-are-raging teen-ish aged kid. Strombolis all of a sudden become some sort of phallic symbol. And I guess the calzones could make one think of boobs if the hormones are at particularly mind-altering levels. I just don't know.
Despite the mistake, I'd say the pizzas were above average. The oven-fired thing lends a lot of weight here. The crust leaned more towards the thin side, but I wish it was a little more well done. Of particular note was the Mediterranean; I was expecting overpowering, but it wasn't. That was impressive for a pizza with the kind of stuff it had on it.
We decided to go in and sit down on the second trip there. I ordered a stromboli (pepperoni, sausage, super light mushrooms, riccota and mozzarella) and Incredibly Hot Wife ordered baked spinach-stuffed ravioli. The dough used to make the stromboli was pretty awesome...but it maybe could have been just a tiny bit less doughy with more fillings on the inside. It was certainly giant. I like to use baby arms as means of measurement when it comes to things of this shape, and I'd say it was probably one-and-a-half...almost two...baby arms worth of food. The sauce it came with was average. I needed to add some pepper flakes to make give it a little kick. The stuffed spinach ravioli was really good. When something has spinach in it, I tend to avoid it because I don't like slimy green vegetable things unless it's covered in lots of unhealthy-but-really good tasting something-or-other foodstuffs. In this case, the spinach foulness was wrapped in the ravioli pasta shell, mixed with cheese and covered in red sauce. That's a good combo. It fools me into thinking that it's something I could eat regularly.
The Brick Oven is a place I will most likely continue to eat at when I want either good standard Italian fare that isn't from some awful chain that has the words Olive or Garden in the name or a more unique-tasting slightly-overpriced pizza.
Brick Oven...what a swell place. At first, I thought this was going to be another regular old run-of-the-mill chain restaurant...reason being that, from the outside, the Brodie Lane location is housed within a lovely little carbon copy shopping strip. Glad I ended up shoving down my inner food snob, because this place actually ends up being well above average.
Stepping into the Brick oven on Brodie, ones olfactory glands are assaulted by a pleasant little Italian Mafia family's worth of good smells. They wield litte tommy guns that shoot out a barrage of oven-fired pizza, calzone, stromboli and pasta smells. The pain from the bullet wounds is oh-so-good. As the big enforcer-esque guys hold you down while another shovels tasty food into your ugly mug, you can't help but think, "Gee, 'dis ain't so bad...dis' woody-tasting stuff, ya' know?" Go ahead; garrote me with the mozzarella. Pry at me with the pepperoni and slug me with the sausage. Rail on me with the spinach-stuffed ravioli. And...when you're done...you can cover my bruised and battered body with a bunch of tasty flame-kist pizzas. My headstone'll read, "Andrew G: Lover. Eater of Food. He wasn't a Rat Bastard Like We All Thought. He Actually Kind Of Had Good Taste In Food. So You Should Listen to Him When He Says Go Have Some Brick Oven."
Or something like that.
The Brick Oven Brodie Lane location has pretty decent ambiance. It's big and open, with the brick-oven part of the kitchen in sight upon entry. There are two huge open eating areas to the left and the right. The high ceilings are nice, but it does lend to a noisy eating environment.
One thing I noticed right off the Louisville Slugger(tm) is there are a lot of young'ns in the staff line-up, from the host group to the waitstaff. Not a big deal, as they are friendly enough, but it's just kind of funny in the sense that it seems like this might be a more 'adult-ish' kind of place.
My first trip there was to get some carry-out pizza. I ordered a half-Margherita, half sausage and green pepper, and a half Mediterranean (a "hearty grouping of herbed meatballs with roasted garlic pesto, green and black olives, feta and mozzarella cheeses, red onions, oregano, and olive oil") and a half standard pepperoni pizza. When I got home, I was displeased to find that my half sausage and green pepper was missing, and in its place was another half of a standard pepperoni. So...that's weird. Why would I order two halves of a pepperoni pizza? Wouldn't that just mean I'd want a whole pepperoni pizza or something? I guess that happens when you place your order with a hormones-are-raging teen-ish aged kid. Strombolis all of a sudden become some sort of phallic symbol. And I guess the calzones could make one think of boobs if the hormones are at particularly mind-altering levels. I just don't know.
Despite the mistake, I'd say the pizzas were above average. The oven-fired thing lends a lot of weight here. The crust leaned more towards the thin side, but I wish it was a little more well done. Of particular note was the Mediterranean; I was expecting overpowering, but it wasn't. That was impressive for a pizza with the kind of stuff it had on it.
We decided to go in and sit down on the second trip there. I ordered a stromboli (pepperoni, sausage, super light mushrooms, riccota and mozzarella) and Incredibly Hot Wife ordered baked spinach-stuffed ravioli. The dough used to make the stromboli was pretty awesome...but it maybe could have been just a tiny bit less doughy with more fillings on the inside. It was certainly giant. I like to use baby arms as means of measurement when it comes to things of this shape, and I'd say it was probably one-and-a-half...almost two...baby arms worth of food. The sauce it came with was average. I needed to add some pepper flakes to make give it a little kick. The stuffed spinach ravioli was really good. When something has spinach in it, I tend to avoid it because I don't like slimy green vegetable things unless it's covered in lots of unhealthy-but-really good tasting something-or-other foodstuffs. In this case, the spinach foulness was wrapped in the ravioli pasta shell, mixed with cheese and covered in red sauce. That's a good combo. It fools me into thinking that it's something I could eat regularly.
The Brick Oven is a place I will most likely continue to eat at when I want either good standard Italian fare that isn't from some awful chain that has the words Olive or Garden in the name or a more unique-tasting slightly-overpriced pizza.
Everything about moving to Austin has been positive minus three things:
1. It's hotter than holy hell, although I'm not too unhappy about that.
2. The Thai food here is fairly pathetic.
3. The Indian food here is fairly pathetic.
...and then on my culinary journey, I found Rangoli. Or rather, I was directed to it, because I honestly I don't think I would've ever known about it unless a couple of friends had directed me there. It's pretty far up North Lamar near Parmer. I try to stay away from the north part of Austin because it makes me feel like a sellout. Case in point, Rangoli is in the same generic shopping center parking lot as a Wal-Mart, and Wal-Marts make me feel like I'd like to yank my tongue out with a pair of rusty pliers.
I believe Rangoli is new...about 3-4 weeks old. We were there on a Friday night, and I felt like perhaps we had hit the jackpot because there were a lot of Indian folks there. It wasn't incredibly busy.
It has slightly-better-than-generic innards and a lot of flat screens throughout the place with cricket and soccer playing on them. Strike one there, because it takes away from the overall ambiance of the place.
Strike two comes from the fact that the waiters pretty much sucked. They were nice enough dudes. However...to put it bluntly...they are slow and pretty damn clueless. Slow in that they had a hard time understanding that people need some drinks on a regular basis. Clueless in that we had a table of 5, and they only brought out one small bowl of rice. Come on, fellas...you should know that the ol' Indian cuisine isn't as awesome without a giant plate of rice. We had to wave, wink, yell, scream and do things just short of throwing butter knives at them in order to come back over to give us another bowl of rice. And even then, it took about 5 minutes to bring it over.
That's where the strikes stop and the only reason this place gets a three in my book. The food was excellent. I had some of the best saag I've had since moving here. I ordered chicken tikka saag (which isn't on the menu, but you can request it) and it was some of the best stuff I've had...the perfect combination of spicy, richness, and sweetness in one fine creamy spinachy package. The chicken could have maybe possibly been a little more firm, but I'm not complaining because it's the sauce that houses the magic.
Incredibly Hot Wife ordered a paneer dish that had onions, bell peppers and potatoes in an orangish colored sauce. It may've been tomato-based with a bunch of curry in it. She ordered it medium, but I think maybe the cook slipped and dumped an entire jar of chili powder and curry in it because it was burn-your-nuts off hot; fill-your-tear-ducts-up-with-liquid-hot-magma hot; arse-over-a-spit-cooking hot; devil-prying-open-your-mouth-and-massaging-your-tongue hot. But it was still good.
We had several different kinds of naan at our feeding frenzy disposal as well...some plain, some garlic and some kind of potato-filled...and potato filled is truly a little bit of a magical mystical experience. There is some magician that sits in kitchen the dressed in a turban who's eyes glow snapping his fingers and making little chunks of potato appear in the naan. He then blesses it with a little bit of awesome powder and then sends it out to hungry patrons. I loved it. It made me happy.
I live approximately 30 mins away from this place, and I'd feel good about driving there to eat again, although the service has absolutely got to improve. I think it'll get better as it's open longer.
1. It's hotter than holy hell, although I'm not too unhappy about that.
2. The Thai food here is fairly pathetic.
3. The Indian food here is fairly pathetic.
...and then on my culinary journey, I found Rangoli. Or rather, I was directed to it, because I honestly I don't think I would've ever known about it unless a couple of friends had directed me there. It's pretty far up North Lamar near Parmer. I try to stay away from the north part of Austin because it makes me feel like a sellout. Case in point, Rangoli is in the same generic shopping center parking lot as a Wal-Mart, and Wal-Marts make me feel like I'd like to yank my tongue out with a pair of rusty pliers.
I believe Rangoli is new...about 3-4 weeks old. We were there on a Friday night, and I felt like perhaps we had hit the jackpot because there were a lot of Indian folks there. It wasn't incredibly busy.
It has slightly-better-than-generic innards and a lot of flat screens throughout the place with cricket and soccer playing on them. Strike one there, because it takes away from the overall ambiance of the place.
Strike two comes from the fact that the waiters pretty much sucked. They were nice enough dudes. However...to put it bluntly...they are slow and pretty damn clueless. Slow in that they had a hard time understanding that people need some drinks on a regular basis. Clueless in that we had a table of 5, and they only brought out one small bowl of rice. Come on, fellas...you should know that the ol' Indian cuisine isn't as awesome without a giant plate of rice. We had to wave, wink, yell, scream and do things just short of throwing butter knives at them in order to come back over to give us another bowl of rice. And even then, it took about 5 minutes to bring it over.
That's where the strikes stop and the only reason this place gets a three in my book. The food was excellent. I had some of the best saag I've had since moving here. I ordered chicken tikka saag (which isn't on the menu, but you can request it) and it was some of the best stuff I've had...the perfect combination of spicy, richness, and sweetness in one fine creamy spinachy package. The chicken could have maybe possibly been a little more firm, but I'm not complaining because it's the sauce that houses the magic.
Incredibly Hot Wife ordered a paneer dish that had onions, bell peppers and potatoes in an orangish colored sauce. It may've been tomato-based with a bunch of curry in it. She ordered it medium, but I think maybe the cook slipped and dumped an entire jar of chili powder and curry in it because it was burn-your-nuts off hot; fill-your-tear-ducts-up-with-liquid-hot-magma hot; arse-over-a-spit-cooking hot; devil-prying-open-your-mouth-and-massaging-your-tongue hot. But it was still good.
We had several different kinds of naan at our feeding frenzy disposal as well...some plain, some garlic and some kind of potato-filled...and potato filled is truly a little bit of a magical mystical experience. There is some magician that sits in kitchen the dressed in a turban who's eyes glow snapping his fingers and making little chunks of potato appear in the naan. He then blesses it with a little bit of awesome powder and then sends it out to hungry patrons. I loved it. It made me happy.
I live approximately 30 mins away from this place, and I'd feel good about driving there to eat again, although the service has absolutely got to improve. I think it'll get better as it's open longer.
So here's how Cannoli Joe's got started...
There was a fine kind-of-redneck-but-not-quite couple, names of Joey & Sue, sitting around one evening in their double-wide eating carry-out Chinese and watching "Under the Tuscan Sun". At that moment, the fluttering fluorescent light in Joey's brain kicked on to full flare. He looked at the carryout Chinese, looked at the scene playing out before him, and thought, "Hey...what if I went ahead an' opened up one them there Chinese buffet-like rest-ow-raunt things...but instead of Chinese, we'll have EYE-talian food there?!" Joey spoke his mind to Sue, and Sue that that was a fantastic idea.
Joey & Sue sold off their double-wide to make their dream come true and bought an old abandoned VFW hall. They started renting all of the Italian-esque flavored movies they could find to get ideas for what kinds of food they'd have in their eatery. However, the problem was that neither Joey nor Sue could cook worth a damn. That's when the 1990's halogen lamp in Sue's head spread forth it's glorious glow, and she thought, "Hey...what if we head on down to a grocery store, use the last of our cash to buy a buncha' frozen EYE-talian, and we'll use that to serve on up!" Sue spoke her mind to Joey, and Joey thought that was a fantastic idea.
And so they setup their restaurant, microwaved a veritable crapton of the frozen food, set it out, invited all of their friends and family over for a grand opening...and it was a giant awesome success! They opened up a bunch more all over the country and quickly became rich enough to buy back their double wide AND several more for their friends and family! Hooray!
However, their success did not go unnoticed by the mob. This little slice of the American Dream ends in the demise of Joey & Sue when Frankie "Fish Lips" Fonzorino came down from New York and promptly shot them both in the skull. He took over their chain of restaurants, used his connections in the grocery business to give him frozen food and raised the prices by 3x what you should normally pay for crap-ass food. But you see, by that point, restaurant regulars were so used to coming in and stuffing their faces from the human trough buffet line that they didn't even notice the hefty increase in price, and so everything went along, business as usual, and Fish Lips...to this day...still banks on the insanity that has become Cannoli Joe's.
Cannoli Joe's is...at best...a place where one can get a variety of Italian food in buffet form. If there is something you've never had before in the Italian form of cooking, then you'll most likely find it here. That's good and bad. It's good because if you're curious about something, you've already paid a horrendous amount...for a buffet..., so you might as well try it, right? But it's also bad because this'll be your first impression of that dish, and everything at Cannoli Joe's is probably about 4-5 out of 10. Even the spaghetti and meatballs. How in God's sweet name are you supposed to run an Italian joint without having the staple spaghetti and meatballs down to at least ABOVE average?
The little story I made up framing the whole frozen food thing pretty much sums up everything there. You're probably better of heading down to your local grocery and picking up some kind of frozen 'family style' Italian thing. While you'll see all of these cooks in their respective hokey little "Villagio" workstations (the pizza station, the pasta station, the desert station, etc.), and it certainly looks like they're doing something crazy stuff, what with flames jumping around like crazy and food flying through the air, I'm convinced it's a front. It's a front for an army of small children in the back area who have been specially trained to operate industry-grade microwaves to make sure all of the frozen food comes out looking good and tasting bland. The breadsticks even tasted freezer-burned. The cannoli's, part of the name of the place, were even BELOW average. My feelings are if you're going to name your place after some food, then you better make whatever that is absolutely amazing.
The real kicker was getting stuck in the same room as a table full of old, overweight school administrator ladies. They were loud, obnoxious and kind of rude. They looked like they'd been through the buffet line six or seven too many times. They had also been drinking. Heavily, it appeared. I wanted to smack all of their grubby old hands with a meter stick and tell them to shut up.
There is really no reason to go here. It was $15.99 a person for an 'all-you-can-eat' bufffet (trough) experience, and that is probaby a couple times too much what I would've felt good about paying for the quality of food I got. I wouldn't have gone if I would've known that it was a buffet. Nothing to see here. Move along, friends. Move along.
There was a fine kind-of-redneck-but-not-quite couple, names of Joey & Sue, sitting around one evening in their double-wide eating carry-out Chinese and watching "Under the Tuscan Sun". At that moment, the fluttering fluorescent light in Joey's brain kicked on to full flare. He looked at the carryout Chinese, looked at the scene playing out before him, and thought, "Hey...what if I went ahead an' opened up one them there Chinese buffet-like rest-ow-raunt things...but instead of Chinese, we'll have EYE-talian food there?!" Joey spoke his mind to Sue, and Sue that that was a fantastic idea.
Joey & Sue sold off their double-wide to make their dream come true and bought an old abandoned VFW hall. They started renting all of the Italian-esque flavored movies they could find to get ideas for what kinds of food they'd have in their eatery. However, the problem was that neither Joey nor Sue could cook worth a damn. That's when the 1990's halogen lamp in Sue's head spread forth it's glorious glow, and she thought, "Hey...what if we head on down to a grocery store, use the last of our cash to buy a buncha' frozen EYE-talian, and we'll use that to serve on up!" Sue spoke her mind to Joey, and Joey thought that was a fantastic idea.
And so they setup their restaurant, microwaved a veritable crapton of the frozen food, set it out, invited all of their friends and family over for a grand opening...and it was a giant awesome success! They opened up a bunch more all over the country and quickly became rich enough to buy back their double wide AND several more for their friends and family! Hooray!
However, their success did not go unnoticed by the mob. This little slice of the American Dream ends in the demise of Joey & Sue when Frankie "Fish Lips" Fonzorino came down from New York and promptly shot them both in the skull. He took over their chain of restaurants, used his connections in the grocery business to give him frozen food and raised the prices by 3x what you should normally pay for crap-ass food. But you see, by that point, restaurant regulars were so used to coming in and stuffing their faces from the human trough buffet line that they didn't even notice the hefty increase in price, and so everything went along, business as usual, and Fish Lips...to this day...still banks on the insanity that has become Cannoli Joe's.
Cannoli Joe's is...at best...a place where one can get a variety of Italian food in buffet form. If there is something you've never had before in the Italian form of cooking, then you'll most likely find it here. That's good and bad. It's good because if you're curious about something, you've already paid a horrendous amount...for a buffet..., so you might as well try it, right? But it's also bad because this'll be your first impression of that dish, and everything at Cannoli Joe's is probably about 4-5 out of 10. Even the spaghetti and meatballs. How in God's sweet name are you supposed to run an Italian joint without having the staple spaghetti and meatballs down to at least ABOVE average?
The little story I made up framing the whole frozen food thing pretty much sums up everything there. You're probably better of heading down to your local grocery and picking up some kind of frozen 'family style' Italian thing. While you'll see all of these cooks in their respective hokey little "Villagio" workstations (the pizza station, the pasta station, the desert station, etc.), and it certainly looks like they're doing something crazy stuff, what with flames jumping around like crazy and food flying through the air, I'm convinced it's a front. It's a front for an army of small children in the back area who have been specially trained to operate industry-grade microwaves to make sure all of the frozen food comes out looking good and tasting bland. The breadsticks even tasted freezer-burned. The cannoli's, part of the name of the place, were even BELOW average. My feelings are if you're going to name your place after some food, then you better make whatever that is absolutely amazing.
The real kicker was getting stuck in the same room as a table full of old, overweight school administrator ladies. They were loud, obnoxious and kind of rude. They looked like they'd been through the buffet line six or seven too many times. They had also been drinking. Heavily, it appeared. I wanted to smack all of their grubby old hands with a meter stick and tell them to shut up.
There is really no reason to go here. It was $15.99 a person for an 'all-you-can-eat' bufffet (trough) experience, and that is probaby a couple times too much what I would've felt good about paying for the quality of food I got. I wouldn't have gone if I would've known that it was a buffet. Nothing to see here. Move along, friends. Move along.
I hear gongs and zithers and pizzicato violin playing as a backdrop to a big old paper-walled Asian domicile. I see a shadow...the shadow of a what appears to be a shriveled little old lady who appears to be cutting up some fresh noodles into a giant wok. She stops...her head turns...she tenses...and quicker than you can say, "Holy crap, she just threw a knife through the air and killed the ninja that was going to assassinate her!"...
...she throws a knife through the air, killing a ninja that was sent to assassinate her. And that is the legend of Mama Fu's Asian house. Or not.
I wish the marketing team for Mama would've come up with something like that rather than just playing cutsie with the name. There are all kinds of clever little marketing stupidisms that one can come up with using it, demonstrated by the menu.Things on the menu with headings that read "Soup Fu You" and "Fu-Nomenal Favorites" are enough to make me want to turn my ass right back around and walk out the door. Or perhaps it's the happy little lame Chinese character pictures...characters that are supposed to read things like "Happiness" and "Tranquility" and "Joy". Why can't they have a character that says "Mama Killed Her First Ninja Here" or "Please Leave your Shurikens and Blow Dart Guns At the Front Door"....or "No Black Garb, No Split Toe Shoes, No Service."
God this place is boring.
Mama Fu's isn't really all that bad; it's just that I (obviously) get easily annoyed by the heavy handed attempts by Corporate America to make dumb people even dumber cows by saying, "Hey! We're so authentic! We have just enough Chinese in the Americanized food you're eating so you can feel like perhaps you're eating something ethnic, which in turn will make you feel cultured! And were going to charge you many times over what it's really worth! Hooray!"
I've had the Pad Thai and the Honey Glazed Chicken, and Incredibly Hot Wife had Red Curry Tofu. Pad Thai was a mistake. It was terrible. It tasted like what I'd think a refreshing glass of gasoline tastes like if I were into things like sipping on fuel. Maybe mixed with a few stale peanuts too. The noodles were too thin. The chicken was spongy. The sauce was bland. Crap, crap, and three more steamy piles of crap, I say.
The Honey Glazed Chicken, on the other hand, was good....if not just a tad bid sweet. It was mixed with some carrots and snap peas. It did leave the slightest odd aftertaste...like maybe the ninja blood used to make the special honey glazed sauce was just a few hours too old or something.
And I decided to be brave and 21st century-esque and took a few bites of Red Curry Tofu. It wasn't too bad at all. And the tofu was the way I like it. It's cut a little thicker and isn't all puffy and fried. It's actually quite substantial tofu, consistent like meat yet fresh and bean-curdy for one's health and well being.
I'll also give it to 'em on portions. They don't overload you with more food than you can possibly eat. They give you just the right amount.
Other than being a corporate shack, I'm OK with the place if I'm looking for some kind of decent standard Asian-esque faire and I don't feel like going to the local Chinese carryout dive.
...she throws a knife through the air, killing a ninja that was sent to assassinate her. And that is the legend of Mama Fu's Asian house. Or not.
I wish the marketing team for Mama would've come up with something like that rather than just playing cutsie with the name. There are all kinds of clever little marketing stupidisms that one can come up with using it, demonstrated by the menu.Things on the menu with headings that read "Soup Fu You" and "Fu-Nomenal Favorites" are enough to make me want to turn my ass right back around and walk out the door. Or perhaps it's the happy little lame Chinese character pictures...characters that are supposed to read things like "Happiness" and "Tranquility" and "Joy". Why can't they have a character that says "Mama Killed Her First Ninja Here" or "Please Leave your Shurikens and Blow Dart Guns At the Front Door"....or "No Black Garb, No Split Toe Shoes, No Service."
God this place is boring.
Mama Fu's isn't really all that bad; it's just that I (obviously) get easily annoyed by the heavy handed attempts by Corporate America to make dumb people even dumber cows by saying, "Hey! We're so authentic! We have just enough Chinese in the Americanized food you're eating so you can feel like perhaps you're eating something ethnic, which in turn will make you feel cultured! And were going to charge you many times over what it's really worth! Hooray!"
I've had the Pad Thai and the Honey Glazed Chicken, and Incredibly Hot Wife had Red Curry Tofu. Pad Thai was a mistake. It was terrible. It tasted like what I'd think a refreshing glass of gasoline tastes like if I were into things like sipping on fuel. Maybe mixed with a few stale peanuts too. The noodles were too thin. The chicken was spongy. The sauce was bland. Crap, crap, and three more steamy piles of crap, I say.
The Honey Glazed Chicken, on the other hand, was good....if not just a tad bid sweet. It was mixed with some carrots and snap peas. It did leave the slightest odd aftertaste...like maybe the ninja blood used to make the special honey glazed sauce was just a few hours too old or something.
And I decided to be brave and 21st century-esque and took a few bites of Red Curry Tofu. It wasn't too bad at all. And the tofu was the way I like it. It's cut a little thicker and isn't all puffy and fried. It's actually quite substantial tofu, consistent like meat yet fresh and bean-curdy for one's health and well being.
I'll also give it to 'em on portions. They don't overload you with more food than you can possibly eat. They give you just the right amount.
Other than being a corporate shack, I'm OK with the place if I'm looking for some kind of decent standard Asian-esque faire and I don't feel like going to the local Chinese carryout dive.
Who knew that ol' Joe D. was a pretty good cook too, eh? I can just see him now at the industrial-grade stove/oven right now, baseball bat in one hand and Marylin on his arm. Cows are brought directly up to him for his convenience by one of the friendly cook staff and Marylin decides if they're good enough to serve. He clubs the poor unassuming animal with a hefty homerun swing, carves it up and then serves it to his customers.
That's probably not how it really is. I mean, Joe and Marylin are both gone from the earth and it's just not sanitary to kill in the kitchen where you're cooking.
Nestled between a couple of other restaurants in The Domain, it doesn't jump right out at you. Once found, we proceeded inside and were impressed by how decked it was. They had a pianist and jazz singer doing some old standards up in the front bar area. It wasn't too terribly crowded for what I expected on a Saturday. The only thing I didn't like about the interior was the way over-used imagery of Joe D and Marylin Monroe. We're talking pictures ad nauseam, friends. There were also a lot of pictures with him and other women, which made me think Joe D must've been a hustlin' pimp as well as a baseball superstar/butcher/chef.
The evening was begun with a bottle of pinot noir (Caramel Road) and some crab cakes. The cakes were very good...well-battered, fried lightly, and served with some sort of tangy seafood-esque tasting sauce.
For the main course, I had an 8 oz. filet (cooked medium) and my incredibly hot wife ordered salmon with gnocchi. And, as a side (served family style) we ordered lobster mashed potatoes.
The filet was cooked pretty perfectly, though it wasn't the greatest filet I've ever had in my life. I imagine that when Joe clubbed the cow in the kitchen, he probably didn't hit it enough to tenderize the piece I got because it was just the tiniest bit on the tough side. You can tell when you have a good filet when your knife encounters just the slightest bit of resistance at first, and then it cuts through like you're cutting through a more-dense butter, and then finish off through the bottom with slight resistance. I'd say maybe 2 parts melting and 1 part chewing means you've got a damn great filet. This was more like 1 3/4 chewing and 1 1/4 melting.
While I didn't try the salmon, I did try the gnocchi, and I'll tell you right now that these are little potatoey/cheesy morsels of sweet excellence. These are not your typical gnocchi. They are rather large for one, and they are made with ricotta mixed in. They were fried a little bit, and so the results are a little different than the usually-dense, smaller sauce-covered gnocchi you'd get if you were to get them at a normal place. I'd say you could eat about 10-12 of these things and you'd have your meal right there. And the lobster mashed potatoes...oh man...imagine a nice creamy lobster bisque with large chunks of lobster mixed with mashed potatoes and you have what we had. If you're into stuff that, you know, tastes amazing, unique, and is super-freakin' good...and causes you to gain 10 lbs. just by looking at it...then these are for you. However...they are $20.00...and that's a pretty hefty price tag for some mashed potatoes and lobster bisque, you know...
To top things off, we ordered the chocolate souffl. I've mentioned before I'm not a desert guy, but this stuff could make me change my mind. This is naughty, filthy, dirty, stinking, religion-renouncing, porn-bass line inducing, slam your face directly into the plate and swallow it in two bites, take-a-year-of-my-life f**king ROCKING desert that is not to be missed. Out comes a little cake thing in a dish freshly fired from whatever hot surface you souffl things on/in. Out comes the server's little spoon where he readily punches a little hole in the top of the cake. Out pours some cream into the center of this choclatey orgasm. And down the chute this stuff goes. I have no other way to describe how perfect it is. Full compliments to the chef on this one; it's like nothing I've ever tasted.
So why the 4 instead of 5 stars? While everything was really excellent, our waiter was kind of amateur. He lacked the sophistication that a waiter would be expected to have at a truly 'fine dining' establishment. He presented the wine and then realized our glasses had spots on them. He took well over five minutes getting two new glasses instead of the 'right away' endeavor it should have been. He was a little less formal than I would have liked for him to be. He charged us $30.00 more for the bottle of wine than it should have been (he corrected it). The girl who presented our food was pretty terse and looked like she was having a bad night. All of these are little nit picky things and they wouldn't stop me from coming back, but they are certainly little things that keep this from classified as a 'fine dining' experience in my mind.
Overall, a great meal.
That's probably not how it really is. I mean, Joe and Marylin are both gone from the earth and it's just not sanitary to kill in the kitchen where you're cooking.
Nestled between a couple of other restaurants in The Domain, it doesn't jump right out at you. Once found, we proceeded inside and were impressed by how decked it was. They had a pianist and jazz singer doing some old standards up in the front bar area. It wasn't too terribly crowded for what I expected on a Saturday. The only thing I didn't like about the interior was the way over-used imagery of Joe D and Marylin Monroe. We're talking pictures ad nauseam, friends. There were also a lot of pictures with him and other women, which made me think Joe D must've been a hustlin' pimp as well as a baseball superstar/butcher/chef.
The evening was begun with a bottle of pinot noir (Caramel Road) and some crab cakes. The cakes were very good...well-battered, fried lightly, and served with some sort of tangy seafood-esque tasting sauce.
For the main course, I had an 8 oz. filet (cooked medium) and my incredibly hot wife ordered salmon with gnocchi. And, as a side (served family style) we ordered lobster mashed potatoes.
The filet was cooked pretty perfectly, though it wasn't the greatest filet I've ever had in my life. I imagine that when Joe clubbed the cow in the kitchen, he probably didn't hit it enough to tenderize the piece I got because it was just the tiniest bit on the tough side. You can tell when you have a good filet when your knife encounters just the slightest bit of resistance at first, and then it cuts through like you're cutting through a more-dense butter, and then finish off through the bottom with slight resistance. I'd say maybe 2 parts melting and 1 part chewing means you've got a damn great filet. This was more like 1 3/4 chewing and 1 1/4 melting.
While I didn't try the salmon, I did try the gnocchi, and I'll tell you right now that these are little potatoey/cheesy morsels of sweet excellence. These are not your typical gnocchi. They are rather large for one, and they are made with ricotta mixed in. They were fried a little bit, and so the results are a little different than the usually-dense, smaller sauce-covered gnocchi you'd get if you were to get them at a normal place. I'd say you could eat about 10-12 of these things and you'd have your meal right there. And the lobster mashed potatoes...oh man...imagine a nice creamy lobster bisque with large chunks of lobster mixed with mashed potatoes and you have what we had. If you're into stuff that, you know, tastes amazing, unique, and is super-freakin' good...and causes you to gain 10 lbs. just by looking at it...then these are for you. However...they are $20.00...and that's a pretty hefty price tag for some mashed potatoes and lobster bisque, you know...
To top things off, we ordered the chocolate souffl. I've mentioned before I'm not a desert guy, but this stuff could make me change my mind. This is naughty, filthy, dirty, stinking, religion-renouncing, porn-bass line inducing, slam your face directly into the plate and swallow it in two bites, take-a-year-of-my-life f**king ROCKING desert that is not to be missed. Out comes a little cake thing in a dish freshly fired from whatever hot surface you souffl things on/in. Out comes the server's little spoon where he readily punches a little hole in the top of the cake. Out pours some cream into the center of this choclatey orgasm. And down the chute this stuff goes. I have no other way to describe how perfect it is. Full compliments to the chef on this one; it's like nothing I've ever tasted.
So why the 4 instead of 5 stars? While everything was really excellent, our waiter was kind of amateur. He lacked the sophistication that a waiter would be expected to have at a truly 'fine dining' establishment. He presented the wine and then realized our glasses had spots on them. He took well over five minutes getting two new glasses instead of the 'right away' endeavor it should have been. He was a little less formal than I would have liked for him to be. He charged us $30.00 more for the bottle of wine than it should have been (he corrected it). The girl who presented our food was pretty terse and looked like she was having a bad night. All of these are little nit picky things and they wouldn't stop me from coming back, but they are certainly little things that keep this from classified as a 'fine dining' experience in my mind.
Overall, a great meal.
So it appears that the past several people here have not dug the ol' Grille. I decided to try it for the first time after having passed it to go to Kerbey Lane every weekend. I thought to myself, "Self, I think I'd like to try that sometime, even though it looks like it could be a recipe for disaster from the outside."
Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised. I wasn't knocked out of my booth or anything, but it wasn't nearly as bad as some of these fine folks have stated.
Upon entry, there was a moment of discomfort in the sense that, instead of asking if we'd been before or even just stating a friendly 'Hi'...the girl asked us if we wanted something to drink. My incredibly hot wife and I looked at each other and looked at the girl and were like, "WTF, mate?" After we got the weirdness out of the way, a young white teenage kid continued to show us what we were supposed to do in a pretty un-enthusiastic way...and then started to walk away BEFORE he showed us where we could sit. Huh?
Forgetting to show someone where to sit in a dining establishment by the host = ONE STRIKE. Of course, the kid looked like he had maybe diffused a few brain cells by huffing on some glue or permanent markers...but it's still no excuse.
Anyway, so the actual putting-your-food-together was a pleasant experience. We must've gotten there right when they put the food out because there were piles of it and it all looked fresh. The broccoli was all green and broccoli-looking. The baby corn was a nice mutant yellow. There was a lot of chest in the water chestnuts (whatever that's supposed to mean...I made that up). The meat was pleasantly and sanitarily frozen so that if you were a boxer from the olden days, you'd be inclined to reach out and grab some to go for your next fight to slather on your banged up bruised face. There were several different types of carb-o-licious noodles to choose from. There were some ramen-esque type noodes, and some rice noodes, and some udon noodles...but then there was linguini...which made me want to hurt someone. Why is it that Asian restaurants feel the need to offer odd and random things from other countries on their menu? Is it just me, or have others noticed this as well? Be proud of what you serve, dammit. It just looks weird that you have linguini there. And sausage. Seriously...sausage?
And then the sauce. I like the way they have all of the different sauce ingredients out in front of you along with a giant board that shows you what ingredients you need to add in order to make a sauce you like. I did not like the fact that all of the sauces are close together so that any heathens plowing through the line can potentially slop different kinds of sauce into the adjoining sauce container.
I had the Thai Red Curry sauce, and it was tasty, although in retrospect I wish I would've put more in there because my meal was a tiny bit dry.
Strike two comes here at the cooking part of the experience. First off, they didn't clean the grill. If you're a strict vegetarian, don't come here. Your meal gets cooked in the leftover juices and stuff from whomever came before you. And the Mexican guy wielding the sword-like grill tool wasn't exactly the most exciting, fun, friendly, authentic nor clean fellow I've ever encountered. I want to see an Asian cook doing some ninja stuff. This guy should be dressed and ready to do battle against the herds of hungry customers. He needs to have the look of the warrior, the eye of the freakin' tiger, and he needs to be slicing and dicing and flipping around and screaming Asian war-cries about chestnuts being chesty and meat becoming unfrozen so that it can be eaten. He needs to be attaching baby corns to noodles and using them as mini nunchucas WHILE he's flipping over the grille dicing the tofu into more edible chunks. Then I want to see him toss down a smoke grenade, and while everyone is distracted, he would attach grille pads to his split-toed boots and hands and proceed to spider walk across the unclean grille so that by the time he re-appears to do battle again, the grille is all clean and shiny and you have no idea how that happened in a quick puff of smoke.
No. Instead I get Fredrico. And believe you me when I tell you that he's nowhere near as fun as what I've just laid out above.
Returning to the table, you'll find some soup, a couple of dumplings, some rice, and these tasty thin hollow 'bread strips' that taste a tiny bit like biscuits. But they're damn good. All of the food I had was good. As I said, the main course I made for myself was a bit dry. And the soup tasted reminiscent of chicken noodle. But overall...good.
If you don't set your hopes super-high for this place, you'll be satisfied. If they ever add ninjas to the mix, then I'll consider re-evaluating.
Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised. I wasn't knocked out of my booth or anything, but it wasn't nearly as bad as some of these fine folks have stated.
Upon entry, there was a moment of discomfort in the sense that, instead of asking if we'd been before or even just stating a friendly 'Hi'...the girl asked us if we wanted something to drink. My incredibly hot wife and I looked at each other and looked at the girl and were like, "WTF, mate?" After we got the weirdness out of the way, a young white teenage kid continued to show us what we were supposed to do in a pretty un-enthusiastic way...and then started to walk away BEFORE he showed us where we could sit. Huh?
Forgetting to show someone where to sit in a dining establishment by the host = ONE STRIKE. Of course, the kid looked like he had maybe diffused a few brain cells by huffing on some glue or permanent markers...but it's still no excuse.
Anyway, so the actual putting-your-food-together was a pleasant experience. We must've gotten there right when they put the food out because there were piles of it and it all looked fresh. The broccoli was all green and broccoli-looking. The baby corn was a nice mutant yellow. There was a lot of chest in the water chestnuts (whatever that's supposed to mean...I made that up). The meat was pleasantly and sanitarily frozen so that if you were a boxer from the olden days, you'd be inclined to reach out and grab some to go for your next fight to slather on your banged up bruised face. There were several different types of carb-o-licious noodles to choose from. There were some ramen-esque type noodes, and some rice noodes, and some udon noodles...but then there was linguini...which made me want to hurt someone. Why is it that Asian restaurants feel the need to offer odd and random things from other countries on their menu? Is it just me, or have others noticed this as well? Be proud of what you serve, dammit. It just looks weird that you have linguini there. And sausage. Seriously...sausage?
And then the sauce. I like the way they have all of the different sauce ingredients out in front of you along with a giant board that shows you what ingredients you need to add in order to make a sauce you like. I did not like the fact that all of the sauces are close together so that any heathens plowing through the line can potentially slop different kinds of sauce into the adjoining sauce container.
I had the Thai Red Curry sauce, and it was tasty, although in retrospect I wish I would've put more in there because my meal was a tiny bit dry.
Strike two comes here at the cooking part of the experience. First off, they didn't clean the grill. If you're a strict vegetarian, don't come here. Your meal gets cooked in the leftover juices and stuff from whomever came before you. And the Mexican guy wielding the sword-like grill tool wasn't exactly the most exciting, fun, friendly, authentic nor clean fellow I've ever encountered. I want to see an Asian cook doing some ninja stuff. This guy should be dressed and ready to do battle against the herds of hungry customers. He needs to have the look of the warrior, the eye of the freakin' tiger, and he needs to be slicing and dicing and flipping around and screaming Asian war-cries about chestnuts being chesty and meat becoming unfrozen so that it can be eaten. He needs to be attaching baby corns to noodles and using them as mini nunchucas WHILE he's flipping over the grille dicing the tofu into more edible chunks. Then I want to see him toss down a smoke grenade, and while everyone is distracted, he would attach grille pads to his split-toed boots and hands and proceed to spider walk across the unclean grille so that by the time he re-appears to do battle again, the grille is all clean and shiny and you have no idea how that happened in a quick puff of smoke.
No. Instead I get Fredrico. And believe you me when I tell you that he's nowhere near as fun as what I've just laid out above.
Returning to the table, you'll find some soup, a couple of dumplings, some rice, and these tasty thin hollow 'bread strips' that taste a tiny bit like biscuits. But they're damn good. All of the food I had was good. As I said, the main course I made for myself was a bit dry. And the soup tasted reminiscent of chicken noodle. But overall...good.
If you don't set your hopes super-high for this place, you'll be satisfied. If they ever add ninjas to the mix, then I'll consider re-evaluating.
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"Never judge a book by its cover."
"You are not your khakis."
"Don't compare yourself with others."
Blah blah blah. All of these lame quotes are bullshit when it comes to finding a good Thai joint.
ALWAYS judge a Thai joint by it's pad thai.
A Thai joint IS it's pad thai.
ALWAYS compare one Thai joint's pad thai with another's.
That's the way it goes down, friends. And I have to say that good pad thai in Austin is kind of like finding good seafood in Montana.
Let me just say that I've visited a number of ultra-crapola Thai joints since moving here a little over 2 1/2 years ago. Actually, they're not bad...they just don't have good pad thai, and that makes me angry. Come on, Austin. Cinci-effing-nati, Ohio has BETTER Thai places than you do. Get with the GD program, please.
Pad thai is NOT made with vermicelli noodles like it's made at Thai Passion. Nor does it taste like a semi-sweet & spicy dry urinal cake covered in ground-up peanuts.
Pad thai is NOT made with "sweet pickled radish" like it's made at Madam Mam's, which consequently makes you wish you had a nice douche-for-the-mouth upon ingesting.
Pad thai should be simple with an ever-so-slightly creamy consistency, combining the perfect amounts of egg, bean sprouts, carrots, a tasteful amount of scallion, your chosen meat (or tofu) and covered with a little bit of ground peanut. Squeeze a lime on it if you want. Throw on some of that swell Thai sweet-&-sour chili sauce. Add some chili flakes if you will. But that's it. The artistry lies in its simplicity.
Thai Kitchen on Wm. Cannon gets it close. Real close. A chance viewing of it tucked away within strip mall on Wm. Cannon and the consequent carry-out visitation resulted in this glorious discovery. Incredibly hot wife & I had chicken & tofu varieties of pad thai excellence, and we were both pleased. Very pleased. I ordered a side of peanut sauce and some pork egg rolls...even though egg rolls are really not a 'Thai delicacy'...but they were pretty good.
Points come off for the sweet & sour sauce being lame. It reminded me of the stuff you'd get from a cheap toy dispenser. You know...pay a quarter and get some slimy goop in a plastic container? That's what it was like. Sweet and sour foot and armpit is what I'm talking about.
Points also come off for ambience...as in there is no ambience. It feels like it could be a prison cafeteria. It feels like Swiss Family Redneckson coming out to 'expand their culinary horizons' might find the ambience pleasant. It feels slightly uncomfortable, kind of like a taking a shower at a public campground facilities.
OK...so it's not THAT bad, but it's just plain boring. If you're going to be a server of foreign cuisine, then you could at least try to spice your place up a little.
However, where they lack in ambience and sweet & sour awesomeness they certainly make up for in menu selection. I mean, seriously...when you see those stupid Apple commercials for the app store, I immediately think, "Hmm...there could be an app for the Thai Kitchen menu." Creative names too. AND a decent vegetarian menu to boot. That's kind of important when you're a carnivore and wife is a vegetarian. But that's OK. Her inherent hotness allows me to look past this one tiny flaw.