Titaya's Thai Cuisine

Eating Thai food is one of the most pleasurable activities I can undertake. The wealth of flavors and textures are staggering, and my best culinary fortnight was my time in Thailand last December. In Washington, D.C., I frequented three solid and one very good Thai restaurant, and I have been eager to fill the void in Austin. After my meal at Titaya's Thai, I feel that I am off to a very nice start.

Titaya's Thai Cuisine is located in North Austin in an unassuming building with an attractive and welcoming interior. I, of course, dined with Sweetmonger and our meal began with skewers of lightly breaded then grilled mushrooms topped with house sweet and sour sauce. It was one of, if not, the best appetizer that I have had in a Thai restaurant (America or otherwise). It was a perfectly balanced dish. The mushrooms were front and center, but the breaded exterior was expertly textured. The char from the grill added an outdoorsy feel and the sweet and sour sauce made the plate distinctly Thai. It was very good.

My entree wasn't quite as good. I've tried pad Thai twice in Austin and both times I have been slightly disappointed. The pad Thai here is redder in color and I don't know . . . less peanutty and more tomatoey than what I'm used to. I am not sure if it is more ethnically accurate or not, but it isn't at the top of my favorites list. However, Sweetmonger's entree may be. She had Pad Praram with brown rice, which is chicken and vegetables stir-fried and topped with with light but intensely flavorful peanut sauce.

Furthermore, the staff at Titaya's was extremely friendly. Service was great and our waitress ran out the front door with my left over pad Thai as I was backing out of my parking space. Very good food and extremely reasonable prices: I am very happy we went there and am eager to return.

Titaya's Thai Cuisine

www.titayasthaicuisine.com

5501 N. Lamar Blvd.

Austin, TX 78751

Crisp and Juicy

There are certain local restaurants that everyone knows (Clydes, Ben’s Chilli Bowl), and there are restaurants that everyone should know. Crisp and Juicy qualifies as one of those restaurants.

Located in the Lee Heights shopping center in Arlington, Crisp and Juicy offers the best rotisserie chicken in Washington. Please note the definitive use of the word best – this is not up for debate. The chicken is perfectly moist, the skin is perfectly seasoned and the house sauces served on the side could possibly be my favorite condiment (that may not seem like a big honor but I love BBQ sauce. For a side sauce to top a good BBQ sauce is an impressive feat). I usually opt for the hot sauce but the mild is just as popular.

Crisp and Juicy also offers a number of sides that come with your meal. I am not a big fan of rice and beans, but they’re supposed to be great if that’s your thing. I prefer to opt to make a meal as unhealthy as possible so I like to order the fried yucca. It’s nothing special but its serves its purpose as a flavorful complement to chicken.

Make the trip to Arlington to visit Crisp and Juicy. The chicken is as good as you'll find and that’s all I've got to say about that.

Wink - Austin, TX

I have a problem with expectations. To begin with, I think I am a pretty tough critic to please, especially at high-end restaurants. When I pay a lot of money for a meal, I expect perfection. In addition, I read way too much about restaurants before I visit them and I get myself psyched up for a possible exceptional meal. Usually though, my expectations are not met. Sometimes they are, like at CityZen, Komi, Town House and Michael Mina. However, just as often, the meal falls well below my expectations, i.e. at Le Bernardin, McCrady's, Citronelle and Daniel. Thus, when Sweetmonger and I visited Wink last night to celebrate our engagement, I made sure not to expect greatness. I simply wanted a good meal to contribute to our excitement. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised by what Wink put forth.

Choosing a restaurant in a new city (We've been here just over a week) to celebrate an engagement is difficult. I didn't want to do Uchi because we had already tried it, and the Driskill Grill was out because within the last year it has lost both its Executive Chef and his sous chef. Thus, I was not convinced its astronomical prices would be a wise investment. I settled on Wink because it specializes in the type of fine dining that I have been led to believe most represents Austin: allowing fresh, local ingredients to speak for themselves.

As mentioned above, Wink is about fresh and local. The menu changes everyday and according to the restaurant, "99%" of the menu's ingredients are sourced from two local farms. If this is true, it is quite impressive. After a glass of champagne courtesy of my cousin Cakemonger (who lives about 1,500 miles away), Sweetmonger and I opted for the five course tasting menu.

The opening course was a very nicely done scallop dish. A perfectly seared, large, juicy, silky and sweet scallop was served with a celeriac puree and house made pancetta. The puree balanced out the saltiness of the pancetta and they went great with the scallop. This was a very good dish.

Second, we had a bison tartare served with truffled toast, porcini mushrooms, pickled garlic syrup and one small sliver of tomato. This was another very good dish; however, I would recommend placing four or five more tomatoes on the plate. The tomato was fresh and burst with summer flavor. I just wish I could of had more.

The third course was braised, local rabbit with house gnocchi and shaved black truffles. This was essentially a very good stew. The rabbit was tender and delicious and the truffles added some luxury to what was otherwise a "homely" dish. As tasty as this dish was, I am not sure it was the best thing to serve on a Austin August night. Nevertheless, I had no complaints with the flavors.

Our entree was seared venison with onion rings, crushed potatoes and a butternut squash puree. Outside of the crushed potatoes (which was just a basic hash brown) that tasted fine but added nothing to the dish, the entree was great. The venison was cooked as well as it can be. It was tender and so very good, and the onion rings were worthy of the Dip Dog Stand. For those of you who don't know, the Dip Dog Stand (www.dipdogs.net) is the best food stand in the country. It is located in southwestern Virginia and serves corn-dogs unlike anything you have ever seen or tasted, and their onion rings are greasy and wonderful.

Our final course was a very good cheese plate, which we opted for instead of a sweet dessert. Nothing we had at Wink wowed us, but at the same time nothing was disappointing and we had few complaints. The meal was very good. Furthermore, Cakemonger had phoned the restaurant to let them know that we were celebrating our engagement. Needless to say, we were surprised when we got there and our service was excellent. Wink is definitely a restaurant to which we would return, but perhaps only for a special occasion because it is expensive and I am now a poor law student.

Wink

http://www.winkrestaurant.com

1014 North Lamar Blvd.

Austin, TX 78703

Town House Grill Redux

To break up the trip to Austin, Sweetmonger and I stopped at my current favorite restaurant, the Town House Grill in Chilhowie, Virginia. The flavors, textures and presentations are unique and fascinating and the meal was one of culinary amazement.

We ended up getting something like 14 courses and most were outstanding. I am more than confident in saying that Town House is one of the country's very best eateries and the best molecular restaurant I have been to (Minibar, Schwa and McCrady's being the others).

The meal started off with four delicious snacks highlighted by the Town House staple black olive "Oreo" cookie with Parmesan cheese. The first savory course of the night very well may have been the meal's best. It was without doubt the perfect opening course to a summer meal: frozen gazpacho with a small cucumber melon. This dish was intensely flavorful yet beautifully refreshing. The cucumber flavor was wonderful and the dish's texture, similar to a sorbet, was unique and interesting.

Our second savory course was peekytoe crab with grapefruit, muscavado, curry and a kaffir lime gelee. It is the only course in four meals at the Town House that I haven't particularly liked. It was o.k.

The next plate was billed as "tomatoes with traditional flavors," and after one bite you knew what they were: Italian caprese salad. Insanely fresh and delicious heirloom tomatoes were served with a basil sorbet, Parmesan snow, powdered olive oil and other intricacies that I cannot remember. The flavors were excellent and the contrasts of temperature, warm tomatoes with cold basil sorbet, was really fun to eat. An excellent dish.

Delicious smoked bonito wrapped in pickled watermelon and served with seaweed and ponzu followed.  Obviously Asian inspired.

The following "corn creme brulee" was nothing short of mind-blowing. Creamy sweet corn topped with a sugar-maple shell and Arctic char roe was served in a kind of martini glass. Simply put, Wow!

Oysters with lardo, daikon radish and borage.

Three savory courses remained. The first was lamb shoulder sous vide for 36 hours at 63 degrees. It came with manchego cheese dumplings served in a broth of bell pepper and cardamon. The lamb was tender beyond belief and a bite including the lamb, broth and dumplings was extraordinary. After I finished the lamb, I asked for a spoon so I could soak up every last ounce of the Southwestern broth. Delicious.

Wagyu beef with chocolate pecans, quinoa and morel mushrooms. Kind of like a forest floor. It was very good.

The final savory course was perfectly cooked squab served with a burnt leek, rhubarb and anise sauce with a Gorgonzola ring. Again, very, very good.

I have yet to mention that every course was served with wine, and Charlie, the Town House sommelier, got a little frisky with his pours. I am not complaining because the wines were excellent; however, by the time I got to the desserts, I had neither the taste buds nor the mental faculties to fully appreciate Chef Karen Urie's creations (which I consider to be the finest desserts I have ever eaten). 

Nevertheless, I greatly enjoyed all three, especially "breakfast:" Cappuccino ice cream, milk foam and fatty, flavorful bacon. I wish I could describe the tastes better but the best I can do is list the ingredients for the remaining desserts. The second dessert was cherry, chocolate, toasted bran, cassia and cherry wood ice-cream. The final dessert was Virginia blackberries, foie and a soft lemon crepe. From what I can remember, they were excellent.

The only bad thing about moving to Austin, Texas, is the distance it puts between me and the Town House. This place is truly exceptional and I wish I could eat there once a week, because I am absolutely positive that I would be wowed each and every time. 

Town House Grill

http://www.townhouseva.com/

http://townhouseblog.blogspot.com

132 East Main St.

Chilhowie, VA 24319

Restaurant August - New Orleans

I greatly anticipated my meal at John Besh’s Restaurant August. Besh is a former Food and Wine Best New Chef and August has garnered significant praise including being ranked by Gourmet magazine as the 22nd best restaurant in the United States. After my meal, I left August with three major impressions. First, the restaurant is absolutely beautiful. The formality of the crisp, white tablecloths, the impeccable hardwood floors and the formal place settings contrast perfectly with the exposed rustic brick interior walls and the young, approachable wait staff. This is a near perfect setting in which to dine. Second, the service at August is without flaw. This was my first time dining alone at a nice restaurant and I was treated as well as I could have imagined. My final impression of August is and I really hate to say this but “the 22nd best restaurant in a America, give me a fraking break.”

I ordered the five-course tasting menu, and the food was unbelievably underwhelming. No course came anywhere close to wowing me.The meal opened with an amuse of some type of seafood foam thing topped with caviar. The caviar was indistinguishable due to the exploding blandness of the seafood foamy mess.

My first course was the only one that I really enjoyed. It was a melon salad served with 30-year-old balsamic vinegar. The melons, of which one was very fresh and flavorful watermelon, were served on top of amazing heirloom tomatoes. These tomatoes are second only to those that I had at Schwa in Chicago. They were easily the best part of the meal. They were so good that I actually asked my waiter where they came from (the Louisiana north shore)

The second course was pretty much the definition of blandness. It was billed as shrimp consume but was really just shrimp served in slightly flavored water. The consume was so watery and light on flavor that it is really surprising the kitchen even serves it. The dish was not a total failure because the shrimp were very fresh and pretty tasty.

The third course was a quail salad. Grilled quail was served with arugula, fresh peaches and a fruit vinaigrette. The arugula, peaches and dressing were very nice but the quail was overcooked and slightly dry.

The main course of the evening was a substitution. The original menu called for Kobe short ribs, but I am one of only two people in America who dislike short ribs (the other being Sweetmonger) so I asked the chef to substitute whatever he would like. Therefore, I was served what was referred to as August’s signature dish. It was roast duck seasoned with Cajun spices and sugar and served with grits, seared foie, and something else. Given that this was the restaurant’s signature dish, it was the most disappointing of the evening. The duck was overcooked and the foie was near inedible. It reminded me of the awful foie I had at McCrady’s in Charleston.

With regards to dessert, it was fine, but I cannot remember it so I am not going to try to describe it.

Restaurant August is certainly an overrated restaurant, but the setting and the service were so perfect that I still enjoyed my time there despite the tone of the above review. However, if I ever visit New Orleans again, this will not be a place to which I return.

Restaurant August

http://www.restaurantaugust.com/

301 Tchoupitoulas St.

New Orleans, LA 70130