Where to Eat Now 2005
At this year’s crop of the best new restaurants in Texas, you can dine amid rustic charm or industrial austerity on food that’s down-home or upscale—or both at once. And the fish is delish.
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4) Lanny’s Alta Cocina Mexicana (Fort Worth)
Talk about a surprise: The chef-owner of one of the year’s most sophisticated new restaurants has Tex-Mex in his blood. Two years ago young Lanny Lancarte II, scion of the family that owns local legend Joe T. Garcia’s Mexican Restaurant, headed to Hyde Park, New York, to attend the Culinary Institute of America. He returned with a diploma and stars in his eyes to open a charming dining room tucked away inside Joe T.’s (he’ll move to his own space in late spring), where he combines the best of French and Mexican cooking. The dazzling results remind me of Southwestern cuisine when that movement was alive and kicking, twenty years ago. Roasted to a perfect rosy pink, slices of duck breast perched atop risotto studded with diced sun-dried tomatoes, mushrooms, and—aha—nopalitos. Veal stock subtly infused with pasilla chile jazzed up meltingly tender pepper-crusted elk loin. Looks like local legends may run in the family. Directions
5) Shade (Houston)
Shade reminds me of the house on the block where all the kids like to play; everything on its eclectic, globe-trotting menu sounds delicious, and usually is. If the soup sampler is offered, I’m having it, especially if the trio includes the fantastic creamy mushroom with duck confit. And somebody in the kitchen—probably chef and co-owner Claire Smith or chef Jeb Stuart—really knows how to cook fish: The grilled salmon is perfection, even when it cozies up to a cherry-balsamic reduction that’s a tad too strong. Weekends are a treat. I’ll raise myself from the dead any Saturday or Sunday morning for one of Shade’s terrific omelets, especially the smoked salmon with mascarpone, capers, and lemon zest. Occasionally a dish doesn’t come off—a battle raged among the competing flavors of butternut squash, sausage, mustard greens, and smoked mozzarella in a gummy risotto—but a few minutes later, as I lingered over coffee and the world’s best, crispest walnut baklava, I couldn’t wait to come back and play again. Directions
6) Pesca on the River (San Antonio)
Chef Scott Cohen is a fish fanatic—day in and day out he imports, scales, filets, and cooks the freshest denizens of the deep in San Antonio. Suppose I want to sample British Columbia’s Fanny Bay or Maine’s Spiny Creek oysters. No problem. Here they come, with a lively tamarind-chipotle-Tabasco cocktail sauce. Or maybe I’m craving Prince Edward Island mussels. But of course. A special tonight, they are cooked, beautifully, with Spanish chorizo in Portuguese vinho verde. Line-caught fish is the ticket here, like the grilled wild red snapper filets in a vanilla-laced citrus broth with bits of grapefruit and orange. Desserts can be lovely, witness pastry chef Mickey McPhail’s refreshing lemon-ginger crème brûlée with rich cornmeal shortbread cookies. If there is a problem at Pesca, it’s with the service—some of the sweetly bewildered young servers are clearly in over their heads—and it annoys me that the bustling, popular bar dominates the sleek dining room, with its accents of blond wood and limestone. Even so, if I want to go fish in San Antonio, this is where I’ll be. Directions
7) Hector’s on Henderson (Dallas)
This place is like the Frank Sinatra song “My Way,” and not just because agreeable owner Hector Garcia might materialize at the microphone to sing it in the middle of dinner. (Don’t worry—he’s got a nice baritone voice.) Hector’s is idiosyncratic in the best sense of the word. Its intimate feel and weekend entertainment (a low-key piano-and-trombone duo) are vintage supper-clubby. Its look is contemporary but comfy. And many of its offerings (cheddar grits, fried chicken livers with blackstrap-molasses vinaigrette, shoestring sweet potatoes) are down-home Southern. But young chef Todd Erickson (he’s 25 but looks about 15) knows his French techniques, so your grilled, bone-in Cowboy Steak comes with a green-peppercorn jus. And he likes to experiment, so his cream-infused succotash brilliantly substitutes edamame for the usual boring lima beans. Sometimes the experimentation veers off course—soggy pumpkin tempura, for instance—but more often than not, I can hardly wait to see what he’ll do next. Directions
8) 7 (Austin)
If the fish weren’t so interesting and the sauces so great, I might have given up on 7 long ago. The seafood restaurant’s mix-and-match, order-by-weight menu is confusing, the main dining room’s muddy-marine-blue color scheme is a downer, and your bill can mount up before you know what hit you. But chef-owners Sam Dickey and Will Packwood have raised the bar for Austin seafood places so high, offering such a variety of hard-to-find, beautifully prepared fish, that all is forgiven. At how many other restaurants in town can I get a whole roasted branzino—a moist, lean Mediterranean bass—with a choice of savory lemon-thyme beurre blanc, lush almond brown butter, or sprightly green-apple barbecue sauce (to name three of seven)? How many other local restaurants offer royal red shrimp, tasty little crustaceans so tender and sweet they put regular shrimp to shame? Now, if somebody would just tell the kitchen to put spoons in the sauce ramekins, so I don’t turn the tabletop into a Jackson Pollock, I would be back in a flash. Directions
9) El Chile Cafe y Cantina (Austin)
When in doubt, try the special. Unless you will die if you don’t have your enchiladas de mole rojo or your arrachera steak with melted Chihuahua cheese, you’ll thank me for this piece of advice. It’s how I discovered the wonderful beer-steamed salmon sitting atop mashed potatoes zapped with serrano-rosemary butter, all served in an opulent pool of roasted garlic, cumin, and cream (the filet was so cute in its banana-leaf jacket that I didn’t want to undress it). And it’s how I came to try the eye-rollingly delicious chile en nogada, a roasted poblano stuffed with shredded duck confit, almonds, green olives, currants, walnuts, and cilantro and encircled by a walnut cream sauce giddy with wine. I know, I know; El Chile’s regular Mexican dishes are so good it’s hard to pass them by. But the chefs at this cheery bungalow, co-owner Kristine Kittrell and Jeff Martinez, are putting their heart and soul into the daily specials. Humor them. Directions
10) Fireside Pies (Dallas)
Is “classy pizzeria” an oxymoron? Not anymore. Co-owner and chef Nick Badovinus has designed a pizza place that both adults and kids find user-friendly. Fireside Pies offers plenty to entice grown-ups: big, well-dressed salads, decent but not too expensive wines, and a handful of fun cocktails. The pizzas themselves appeal to all ages, and the ingredients are first-rate: Sonoma goat cheese, Parmigiano-Reggiano, chicken-pesto sausage from Dallas deli Kuby’s. The rustic setting, especially the shady terrace, with its fern-filled planters, is both inviting and indestructible, a bonus for those who arrive in SUVs. Finally, the perky, well-informed young servers act as if they’re in a nice restaurant, which they are. My Triple ’Roni pizza featured abundant pepperoni, cheese from Dallas’s Mozzarella Company, a drizzle of truffle oil, and—I’m not kidding—hand-torn fresh basil from Fireside’s rooftop garden. Try finding thatat Mr. Gatti’s. Directions
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