Dolph "Subscribes to the Big Bang" W.'s Profile

When tasting the fruit of the vine,
I hate to disparage and whine,
  But grape-laden juice
  That cannot seduce
My palate I have to malign.

Crape Creek's promise of "Tuscany in Texas" is a great thought, but, unfortunately, they cannot deliver on it. Their facility is very attractive and their staff are knowledgeable enough and very friendly. There is just one very large elephant on the table: their wine is mediocre (in spite of all the awards they claim to have garnered). It appears their marketing is running ahead of their fermenting prowess.

We all know that Pierce's Disease has wrecked havoc with hill country vineyards and Grape Creek, like everyone else, is bringing all their grapes in from elsewhere. Perhaps they ought to upgrade their suppliers. I also am particularly fond of varietals and this place produces almost exclusively blended wine.

During our tasting ($10 for six wines), their 2008 "Bellisimo", a blend of three grapes, held up the best, but didn't deliver on its big bold potential.

I was disappointed and won't be returning.

This bed and breakfast looked very attractive on their website which is why we selected it from amongst the myriad of B&Bs in the Fredericksburg area for a two-night getaway. However, when we arrived and entered our rustic but very romantic Swiss log cabin, we knew we had hit the B&B jackpot.

This property is obviously a labor of love to its owner, Daniel Meyer. After purchasing the property in 2006, he has built a series of one-room cabins out of logs from an old tobacco-drying barn in Kentucky, and augmented them with windows and doors from a 250 year old country house in Switzerland. They overlook a man-made stream that runs the length of the 26 acre property. Each is named after a town in Switzerland. We stayed at the "Interlaken" and fell in love with the place and the meticulous attention given to every little detail.

Even though the cabins are rustic, this is a luxury accommodation. The spacious jacuzzi in the cabin combined with a good bottle of wine was a particular hit. Adjacent to Barons Creek less than 1/2 mile from Main Street on the East side of town, you are just minutes from the shops and restaurants. The only thing the property lacked, in my opinion, was breakfast prepared and served for you.

We spent our evenings on the porch and sitting by the creek, watching the stars and listening to crickets and other chirping insects. There is a small trail that leads down to the creek bed by a natural pool. You can walk along the creek and return to the cabins near a cantilevered overlook via a rope to pull you up fairly steep clay cliffs. Three friendly cats became instant buddies of ours. We were less enamored with but entertained by the two ducks who waddled around our cabin presumably looking for cat food. Other guests who knew the owner told us the cats' names were Mini, Gigi and Ruetschle (sp?).

If you have a larger party, there is a Victorian house that was moved to the property from Main Street and other accommodations. Midweek prices are very reasonable. We will most definitely be back.

Automobiles make the world go around for most of us. Without one, we'd be stranded and cut off from opportunities, work and pleasure. If you own one, you usually name it and establish an emotional connection with it. Cars tend to be a reflection of the personalities of their owners. So why is it that most services associated with automobiles usually have a veneer of shoddiness and even sliminess associated with them? Car salesmen, auto mechanics and body shops, for better or worse, are often found at the bottom of most people's trust scale.

Finding an excellent body shop is usually based on word of mouth from friends and colleagues. That is how I was lead to do business with Ted Nikoletopoulos, the owner of Memorial Collision Center. Ted is well known in the community and has worked on friends' vehicles as well as being highly recommended by my auto mechanic for whom I have a lot of respect.

( See my review of Cornerstone Automotive: http://www.yelp.com/bi... )

Earlier this year, my daughter's Mustang had an uncomfortable encounter with a concrete pillar in a cramped parking space under her apartment in Austin. The result was no more door handle on the right side and a very unsightly gouge in the door and the right rear panel. She managed to really trash one side of the car. As a "starting your junior year" present, I took her car to Ted's to fix the damage as well as a dent and scratches on the other side of the vehicle. Ted gave me an estimate I thought was very reasonable. He also said it would take a maximum of three days to do the repairs.

I brought the car in on Monday, expecting it back on Wednesday. Unfortunately, the repairs took a bit more time and I didn't get the car back until mid-day on Thursday. I had called Ted and told him he was impacting some vacation plans and, to his credit, he really tried to accommodate me. When I saw the car, I was impressed. The work was impeccable and there was no visual evidence there had ever been any damage on the two panels and the door. I was very pleased (and so was my daughter).

Ted has a small shop but he does around $500,000 to $1,000,000 worth of business a year according to the Manta website. He has been in business for over 15 years and I can now see why he makes a good living on this side of town. Bottom line: he does what he promises (with a small caveat for timeliness) and does a good job of it. The Better Business Bureau agrees with me. They've given Ted a grade of A-.

He gave me a bottle of Greek red wine as I walked out the door. It was a nice touch and the full-bodied fruity flavor enhanced some "jacuzzi time" later that week in a Bed and Breakfast in the Texas hill country. I hate to say, "I'll be back," when it comes to body work, but if I have to have some done in the future, I'll head to Ted.

ambiance was great
sushi was even better--
no roaches in sight

I firmly believe that this downtown location of Azuma has gotten a bad rap in Yelp. One of my favorite Yelpers is Adam O, yet I think it's time to lay his and his entourage's roach-laden series of 1's posted a year ago to rest. This place serves stellar sushi. My review is based on their "Sushi Combo A" dinner for $18 along with a side of Miso soup for an additional $2.50.

Sushi (5 stars): The combo I ordered featured a half-dozen varieties of nigiri including eel, shrimp and four different fish. The eel was outstanding, the shrimp was fine and all the fish were light and fin-flapping fresh. This was the best plateful of sushi I'd sampled in quite a while.
Rolls (4 stars): A California roll complemented the nigiri very well.
Service (4 stars): It was a Saturday night and we came with a large party of 14 with no reservations. We were quickly seated at two tables. The staff took our orders quickly, the wait was short and they accepted separate checks from all of us. You couldn't ask for more than that.
Price (3 stars): A bit steep, but it really was good.
Ambiance (4 stars): Understated and somewhat traditional. I personally much prefer this to the stark trendy places with the blaring music. The dinner table conversation was unimpeded and lively as a result.
Other (4 stars): The Miso soup was nice and the cooked entrees preferred by several of my friends were gobbled up enthusiastically.

Overall: 24/6=4. Downtown's sushi standout.

I'm raising a cleaning alert:
If craving a nicely cleaned shirt,
  Try using "Amazing"
  Whose prowess I'm praising.
My shirts are well-pressed and unhurt!

(And that counts for a lot)

This dry cleaner has been run by a very pleasant lady, Olinda, for 15 years under a variety of names. The latest is "Amazing Dry Cleaners" (I'm currently trying to get this Yelp entry to reflect that fact). It can be found in a strip mall on the Northwest corner of Memorial and Kirkwood behind the Shell station.

My wife has been dropping my shirts off there for years and I have been very happy with the results. Olinda currently charges me $1.20/shirt and I feel I'm getting ample value for money. My wife recently asked that I start dropping off and picking up my own shirts which seemed like a very reasonable request. I arrived with a bagful of shirts yesterday for the first time. As I laid them onto the counter, Olinda came out to greet me. She took one look at the coral-colored shirt on the top of the pile and said, "You're Mr. W!" I asked her, "How on earth do you know that?" She smiled and told me she recognized my shirt. Today, when I picked up the shirts I had dropped off, she welcomed me with a, "Hello, Mr. W!"

Amazing!

I was very impressed. Anyone who pays that much attention to her trade and her customers deserves your business. The only reason I'm not giving five stars is that this place suffers from a small case of the ubiquitous phenomenon known as "button cracking". In 25 years of sending shirts to cleaners, I've never found one who doesn't crack buttons when pressing shirts. Amazing does it occasionally, but usually replaces the button when they do. A sign on the storefront claims that they perform alterations and shoe repairs too.

The taste of Korean-style food'll
Result in a lingual flapdoodle
  That perks up your buds
  As piquancy floods
Your mouth while you're eating a noodle.

A group of six Yelpers converged on the Korean Noodle House for lunch recently. On arrival, we were greeted warmly and our order was taken promptly. The food was also delivered quickly. Their menu was quite simple, consisting of two columns of dishes (most of them containing noodles) on a laminated sheet of paper, one side in English and the other in Korean. While waiting for our entrees to arrive, we sampled the very spicy kim chi from a jar and an equally tasty pickled radish called daan moo ji that was so yellow it appeared to glow in a neon fashion.

I ordered a dish named Jja Jang Myun that consisted of noodles smothered in a very dark black bean sauce and containing bits of this and that of unknown identity. Armed with chopsticks, I soon found that there was no civilized way of eating it. As I pulled a chopful of noodles out of the pasty mass, bean flak spattered everywhere, creating a circular splash zone around my plate. I must have run through a half dozen napkins trying to retain a small semblance of decency with little success. No matter. It was delicious.

My fried pork dumplings arrived, somewhat humorously, in a boat-shaped dish. They supplied ample wind for my culinary sails as I happily cruised through all of them. I also sampled an order of Haemul Pajeon which is a seafood and green onion pancake. Yum! Luckily for the friends around me, I was able to down the dumplings and the pancake without creating more of a mess. The others in my party all ordered seafood noodle soups of some sort. While it appeared somewhat of a crap shoot as to just exactly what one would find in any particular bowl, there were satisfied smiles all around the table.

My serving is pictured here: http://www.yelp.com/bi...

The dumplings and the marvelously messy noodles totalled $13 before tax and tip. This place is guaranteed to please your palate at a very prudent price. Bring a bib though!

Their name says they aim to impress
And I have to sincerely confess
  That I floated on air
  As I watched them repair
My computer with low-cost finesse.

I'm issuing a geek alert to warn anyone who wishes to read further. A week ago, the fan on my Dell Dimension 4600 desktop computer began making noises akin to a threshing machine in a rocky field and I knew I'd have a problem on my hands soon. I opened up the computer, took out the fan, did a little research and found out I had a 92mm fan that attached to my CPU with a three pin connector. I also saw that they were being sold for around $30 on the Internet. Since I didn't want to wait, I began calling local computer repair stores.

The first place was closed on the weekend. The second was fairly certain they didn't have the part at the store near me. The third was Impress Computers and after hearing me describe the fan, they checked and said they had them in stock. I drove right over and waited about 10 minutes for them to help two customers in front of me. It's a small store, but they offer quite a range of services from selling ink cartridges and accessories to virus removal and disk recovery to hardware repair.

When it was my turn, we took off the cover, got the replacement part and quickly discovered it didn't have the correct three pin connector. Roland informed me they could hardwire it to the power supply but it would require an extra push of the F1 key every time I booted up because the CPU wouldn't know it was there. I didn't like that solution. No problem. Andrew to the rescue. He disappeared into the workshop for a few minutes and emerged triumphantly with a fan assembly he'd robbed from another system they were building. We took my machine to the back, booted it up and immediately ran into an error state. My CMOS battery had died. I hadn't noticed this myself because my machine had been running continuously for quite a while. Andrew rummaged around and stole a battery from another machine and - presto! - I was good to go.

The best part of the experience follows. Cost of the used fan: $10. Cost of the battery: $0. Labor (1/2 hour's worth): $0. I was so pleased with the result that I felt a bit guilty walking out of there after paying them only $10. I asked them to throw in generic B&W and color cartridges for my HP printer which cost me just over $30. Total bill with tax: $44.36.

Back home after reconnecting all sorts of devices to USB ports and turning on the power, I let out a happy sigh as the fan spun up and softly hummed away. Impress had definitely lived up to their name. I'll be back (hopefully, not too often)!

"Man who stand on hill with mouth open will wait long time for roast duck to drop in."
-- Attributed to Confucius on dating, inspirational, political and blog sites all over the Internet

This tongue-in-cheek call to action is a constant reminder to me that good food won't just drop into my lap. I've got to go seek it out. Usually when I'm acting out my fetish for eating duck, I try to meet my needs at a fine French restaurant. After two recent visits to P.F. Chang's, I now know I have an excellent alternate source.

PFC's is a national chain with its headquarters in the Phoenix area that boasts over 130 restaurants. Before eating at this location, I would have characterized their fare as dumbed-down Pan-Asian entrees guaranteed not to upset the sensibilities of a very unadventurous diner. It is not the kind of place I would normally go to experience five-star dining. However, because of my duck fetish, I've been seduced by one spectacular dish at PFC's.

This past Friday, my palate was experiencing four-star foreplay before I ever set foot inside PFC's to begin some "fowl play". This was courtesy of a lovely little wine bar named Vino 100 that is hidden behind PFC's in a strip mall. This location of PFC and V100 have an agreement that allows you to bring in wine purchased at the wine bar and enjoy it with your meal for a $10 corkage fee per bottle. You can get excellent yet affordable wine at V100 that beats the pants off of what PFC offers on their decent but limited wine menu (even considering the corkage fee). I brought in a sultry Syrah bottled by X Winery in California that was aptly named "Syrahtica". It really set the mood for what was to follow.

We had reservations for 8:00 and arrived at 8:10. The place was packed and we waited 10 minutes before the four of us were seated. We were given a table that accommodated six on the side of the restaurant near the kitchen and bar. This provided us with much more space than if we had been jammed into one of the tables in the middle of the restaurant.

PFC's signature lettuce wrap ($6.95) was shared between us as an appetizer. In addition, I had a very glutinous cup of hot and sour soup ($2.95) that teased my tongue gently with its mild flavor. So far, the evening was on a 3-4 star trajectory. Then my "VIP Duck" arrived...

I'd ordered this once before months ago but I was completely unprepared for just how good it was. It's a generous half portion of duck glazed in plum sauce accompanied by four pieces of flat bread, scallions and cucumbers. More plum sauce is provided to further lubricate your tonsils. My approach to the meal is to make four duck/scallion/cucumber "tacos" and then enjoy the rest of the duck on its own merit. I find it the culinary equivalent of hot monkey sex. My taste buds rose to the occasion and rode wave after wave of ducky-licious delight until only a few stripped bones were left on my plate.

One of my dining companions who was ooh'ing and ah'ing over her Mu Shu Pork remarked that I really seemed to be enjoying my meal. I gave her a bite of my duck. Her eyes bugged out of her head when the taste washed over her palate. If I hadn't been so protective of my fetish, we could have started a duck-eating orgy at our table right then and there. I did sample the 3-4 star Orange Peel Chicken and the Chang's Chicken entrees of my other dining companions. It was clear that the duck was far superior and, at only $17.95, it's a tremendous value for money.

Two other details that helped enhance our experience:
* Our waiter gave us a complimentary dish of snow peas (a $4.95 value)
* We all had one of their tasty "mini-desserts" served in a small glass ($2.00). I tried the Tiramisu and wasn't disappointed.

In summary, there are three things that make this PFC's five-star worthy:
(1) Their wine arrangement with Vino 100,
(2) A good table on the side of the restaurant (I'll specify this in my reservation in the future), and
(3) The VIP Duck!

If ever you have the good luck
Of dining on VIP duck,
  You'll feel a sensation
  That brings sweet elation
And rivals a hot monkey......fritter.

(You know what I mean)

When sampling the fruit of the vine
Good friends and great taste can combine
  To salvage a night
  Whose start wasn't right.
Thank God for "syrahtic" red wine!

I'd never heard of Vino 100 until a few weeks ago when I drove by it to make a purchase at Santa Barbara Cigar & Tobacco two doors down in a strip mall hidden behind P.F. Chang's on Westheimer. I'd asked Ken at Santa Barbara about Vino 100 and he had good things to say as well as a savvy diner tidbit: they have a reciprocal arrangement with P.F. Chang's that permits you to bring a bottle you've purchased at V100 to dinner with you for a corkage fee. You also can order food at PFC's, take the vibrating hand pager with you to V100 and pick up your meal when it's ready. I stored this piece of information away to use when the time was ripe.

Last night, we were planning to dine with a friend who had just returned from overseas and his wife. In an online talk thread that afternoon, Yelp member Stephanie B had mentioned a free wine tasting at V100. Everything clicked into place. We'd go over to V100 at 6:30, enjoy the free wine tasting and then saunter across the parking lot to PFCs at 8:00 armed with a few bottles of wine to accompany our dinner.

The plan was solid but, execution-wise, it didn't start out too well. The wine tasting featured a Pinot Grigio, a Pinot Noir and a Cabernet from a Dallas distributor. I sampled them all but found the experience akin to drinking cough medicine after gargling with Listerine. I was starting to get discouraged and asked Paul behind the counter to show me their wine menu. The item that caught my attention was a Syrah blend from X Winery in California. I was already a fan of their Cabernet and knew I had to taste it when I read the label and saw it was cleverly dubbed "Syrahtica". It was bold and sassy and more than salvaged the evening.

In a much better state of mind I had Paul tell me about V100. They feature wines for under $25. They have a large wall full of reds that meet that description and a smaller wall of discount whites. In addition, they have a moderate selection of higher-priced vintages. The wine bar itself has a quiet and simple ambiance that I found appealing. If you get the munchies, they have a cheese plate. There are a few tables outside, but we didn't want to deal with Houston's summer swelter.

My wife and friends are less snobbish about their palate than I and had enjoyed the Pinot Grigio they had sampled. Since it was approaching 8:00, we bought a bottle of the Pinot ($11.00) along with that sultry Syrahtica (a steal at $14.99) and left for PFC's.

The evening continued to get better, but that's the subject of another review.

iron chef sushi
requires an iron stomach
when eating tuna

This review is based on their lunch sushi menu selection consisting of 5 pieces of sushi and a California roll for $8.50.

Sushi (1 star): It was a blazing hot summer day when we arrived and I wondered whether the tuna had somehow gotten hot and begun to spoil even though it was served cold. It was bad enough to almost be gag-inducing. I sampled my friend's tuna sashimi and it was equally bad. The rest of the chef's selections were fine.
Rolls (3 stars): Run-of-the-mill yet pleasant.
Service (3 stars): Prompt and friendly.
Price (2 stars): By far the cheapest lunch entree I've encountered in a sushi restaurant in Houston yet. However, on a value-for-money basis, it wasn't worth the substandard tuna.
Ambiance (2 stars): A rectangular room found in a nondescript strip mall just to the west of Bear Creek Park. The ceiling is decorated with a cloud motif on a blue background that looks like it was painted by 2nd graders.
Other (3 stars): I had a choice of miso soup or a salad. I opted for the soup and it was indistinguishable from 90% of the miso soup being offered at cheap sushi establishments.

Overall: 14/6 = 2.3. I'm rounding down to 2.