Tag: tre trattoria

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.

Stepping out our door smack into First Friday

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When we first bought our loft in King William, we walked over to the patio at Azuca for lunch. It immediately hit us that we were going to live in the exact spot we would want to stay if we were on vacation in San Antonio – a block off the river, a quick walk into downtown, in the midst of an emerging restaurant scene.

Last night, we strolled through Southtown’s First Friday for about 20 minutes before sitting down with banh mi sandwiches from the Duk Truck at Alamo Street Eat to listen to a set by Mitch Webb and the Swindles. I snapped a few – well, a lot of – photos on the way, all taken within about a three-block radius of our house.

I would recommend any of the food stops in the photos, and I cheated by throwing in our favorite weekend lunch spot – Tre Trattoria Downtown.

Books so flavorful you can taste them

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A sold-out barge full of women laughing their way around the river bend launches the San Antonio Public Library Foundation’s 2010 round of Literary Feasts, which translate literature into words you want to eat.  Diane Mathews and JoAnn Boone are hosting tonight’s floating feast based on the ultimate feel-good book for women, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  Ironically, though, Rubin recently blogged that she is far from being a foodie:

I must confess that I have very little interest in the ruling passion of Julia Child’s life. Food has never been very interesting to me. I love certain foods, of course, but I like very plain food best. I don’t get much of a kick from visiting new restaurants, or from eating a wonderfully cooked meal. Some people love exploring farmers’ markets or learning about how foods’ origins or cooking – not me. One of the sad aspects of a happiness project, for me, was to Be Gretchen and to admit to myself that this area of experience, so vibrant for so many people, leaves me cold.

Fortunately, JoAnn and Diane are, and so is Jason Dady.  Dady is opening four of his restaurants for feasts, with the first one at Insignia in the Fairmount on Tuesday, March 23, focused on a book firmly fixated on food, High Bonnet: A Novel of Epicurean Adventures by Idwal Jones.  According to Publishers Weekly:

This is a novel about food with a capital F, about meals, extravagant meals, had in fine dining rooms, country gardens and filthy taverns alike. As Anthony Bourdain (author of Kitchen Confidential) says in an introduction, in this book “everyone” from Jean-Marie’s confectioner uncle to the Gypsy coppersmith who mends the kitchen pots “is a gourmet or a gourmand, racing through life oblivious to all creature comforts but the pursuit of flavor.”

Celtic music, Irish food and plenty of spirits will be featured in the feast hosted by Joan Cheever and Trisha Tobin on April 15.   McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland serves as the inspiration for the dinner.  MacMillian describes author Pete McCarthy’s approach to his journey:

…traveling through spectacular landscapes, but at all times obeying the rule, “never pass a bar that has your name on it,” he encounters McCarthy’s bars up and down the land, meeting fascinating people before pleading to be let out at four o’clock in the morning.

Erasing the stereotype that all children are picky eaters is the thrust of Nancy Tringali Piho’s My Two-Year-Old Eats Octopus, the theme of Dady’s family-friendly feast on April 17 at Two Bros. BBQ Market.  AP writer Michele Kayal described Phio’s book:  “If you’re bent on raising a gourmet, this is your Dr. Spock.”

In a Publishers Weekly post, Frances Mayes writes,  “The happiness that suffuses my Tuscan days drove my pen.”  It drove her pen to describe many a good meal in Under the Tuscan Sun, the theme for a feast at Dady’s Tre Trattoria on May 18.  Note to self:  After returning from Merida, head to Tre for my favorite meal to split with Lamar –  grilled radicchio; goat cheese, pistachio and balsamic cippolini pizza; and, for dessert, a grilled peach with marscapone.

Other dinners include South Pacific on May 6 at Zinc Wine and Champagne Bar; Napa: the Story of An American Eden  on June 22 at Bin 555; and The Great Gatsby on July 27 at The Lodge.  Jill Giles Design created appetizing “bookplates” as the online invitations for each feast.

The Lavenders and the Molaks are hosting a feast on May 6 at Zinc.

Proceeds from the Literary Feasts benefit the San Antonio Public Library Foundation.