Category: Flavors

Culinaria Restaurant Week ends: Time to head back to the gym

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We don’t dine out enough.

Correction, we dine out more than I should measured by the bathroom scale.

But, we don’t venture out often enough to support all the restaurants we love.

So, during the slowest week of the year, thank goodness Culinaria steps in with Restaurant Week to stimulate San Antonians to buck the end of the summer doldrums and Houstonians and Dallasites to drive on over for a culinary vacation. We love to see the restaurant community pull together in one joint promotion.

We did our best, but still missed so many offerings. Granted, no restaurant is going to be saved by three-course $15 lunches, but we did add a few bottles of wine to our tabs. We never manned up to experience dinner after these luxurious lunches, but here’s some of what we sampled midday this past week:

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All of these restaurants merit support:

For those of you who missed Restaurant Week entirely because you rely on the award-winning “Taste” section of the Express-News, sorry. Hope you will complain to the paper. I would be mad if I’d missed it. “Taste” boycotts Restaurant Week for some reason. Not even a tweet. There was a token mention in this morning’s paper, the last day of Restaurant Week. Normally, I applaud “Taste,” but how can a food section be worth its salt if it ignores an event this flavorful?

Thanks to Culinaria and all the participating chefs for stepping up to the plate.

As for us, we’re hitting the gym tomorrow morning and are trying to ignore the fact that several restaurants we didn’t get to are extending specials into next week. For a list of those, maybe you better depend on San Antonio Current.

*We picked the final day of Culinaria to say goodbye to Tre Trattoria Downtown. Within walking distance, Tre has been almost a weekly destination for us for the past five years. Getting in the car to go to Tre on Broadway won’t be the same, but I’m sure there will be times when we hear that goat cheese pizza with balsamic onions and pistachios beckoning us.

Postcard from Sintra, Portugal: Random Shots

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Lo! Cintra’s glorious Eden intervenes
In variegated maze of mount and glen.
Ah me! what hand can pencil guide, or pen,
To follow half on which the eye dilates
Through views more dazzling unto mortal ken
Than those whereof such things the bard relates,
Who to the awe-struck world unlocked Elysium’s gates?

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron

I must just observe that the village of Cintra in Estremadura is the most beautiful in the world.

Lord Byron in a letter, 1809

These photographs from our wanderings around Sintra did not fit in the earlier more focused posts. They range from a rally of classic Porsches crowding the narrow streets to flavorful contemporary Portuguese fare at Meia Tigela.

 

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Postcard from Lisboa, Portugal: Frankly foreign restaurants

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We never go long without “foreign” food in San Antonio or when traveling. “Foreign” in this case means not Portuguese. And particularly Italian. This post represents the final one of our “payback” food roundups from Lisbon: we depend so heavily on the internet for reviews that I feel obligated to provide feedback for those who follow.

We were bowled over by Riso8, mainly because we stumbled across it without reviews. We ate two weekday lunches there with a lot of “suits,” which makes you particularly happy you are traveling and don’t have to wear one and rush back to some office. Virtually no tourists were present. The black ink spaghetti was filled with seafood and broccoli and was wonderful, but beware of splashing the dark ink while twirling pasta. Both the sausage risotto and the calamari with saffron version were polished off happily.

When you view the pizza shots, you will think that’s all we ate in Lisboa. But we were there for four weeks. All of the ones mentioned here were good, but none were major homeruns. But we liked all these restaurants. As we were eating so much seafood, we generally ordered vegetarian pizzas.

Among the spots we hit were Esperanca, Limoncello Cucina Italiana, Momenti Italiani and Pizzaria Lisboa. Lunch specials are absurdly inexpensive at Limoncello, but the must-have dish to order is the grilled asparagus. The presentation of Momenti’s tomato salad was artful, and the chocolate mousse was wonderfully rich. The fresh-tasting stacked eggplant – not fried – was luscious at Pizzaria Lisboa, the casual option restaurant opened by a hot chef, Jose Avillez. The dish I plan on duplicating at home is his broiled pineapple with lemon basil sorbet for dessert. Totally refreshing.

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A block from our apartment, we kept watching as they put the finishing touches on Oui, Moules & Huitres. They opened our final week, and the mussels, with numerous options available not laden with cream, were perfect. Across the street from the touristy Cervejaria Trindade, it should be able to attract a following soon.

Another place seemingly new because the menu the French proprietors offered at lunch was radically different – now burger centric – than what online reviews indicated is Velha Gruta off of Largo de Camoes. Ignore those reviews. It is totally uncharacteristic of us to order burgers, but these were far more flavorful than most – whether veal, chicken or salmon – and were topped with interesting combinations of distinctive cheeses and grilled vegetables and served with frites. Expect locals not tourists, friendly owners and a nice, inexpensive liter of house red wine.

Gandhi Palace was good, not great, but sometimes you just need to spice things up….