Texas – Gastronomy Domine

Beef brisket from Lambert's. Not the prettiest picture, but it's a good example of the smoke ring (the pink layer beneath the charred crust - call that crust a "bark" if you wish to impress Texans) that you should look for in good smoked meats.

Is there any food whose “proper” preparation gets people more worked up than America barbecue? Regional styles differ all over the continent, but most dedicated barbecuers you meet have a strong opinion that their favoured way of doing things is the only right one – witness Yelp reviews on pretty much any barbecue restaurant in the country, where arguments on vinegar sauces versus sugary ones, Memphis versus Texas, wet versus dry brining and mesquite versus oak rage beyond all relevance to whether the food’s actually any good or not.

Austin’s a great place; it’s very unlike the rest of the state, in that it’s leafy, humid and green rather than dusty and dry, and packed with hipsters rather than cowboys. It feels a bit like a West Coast college town plopped in the middle of Texas. With added barbecue. Passions run high – my friend G, for example, complained at the top of his voice on finding I’d booked us lunch somewhere other than the Salt Lick, a small barbecue chain which, he says, “does a proper sauce”. All traditional Texas barbecue sauces are sweet, tomato-based, thick and spicy, but there’s a world of variation within that definition.

Mexican Coke — Mexican Coca-Cola. This is Coke made for the Mexican market, and you'll find it in a lot of Texan barbecue restaurants and ethnic groceries. It's made with cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup, and has a distinctly different (and I think nicer) flavour than regular Coke. It's also a great accompaniment to barbecued meats.

No amount of asking would get G to tell me what he meant by “proper”; every barbecue joint in town has a different saucing and rub, which is also on sale at the counter so you can anoint the food you grill at home with it. I’ve a good, and pretty faithful, Texan barbecue sauce recipe you can use here if you want to have a go yourself; use it as a marinade, or pour a dollop on the side of the plate for dipping.

I found that there are two ends of the barbecue spectrum in these parts: traditional, pile-em-high casual eating where you use your fingers and get sauce on your elbows; and “fancy barbecue”, with cutlery and (whisper it) salad. Everywhere we tried offered a regular sauce alongside an extra-spicy one; some also made their own sweet mustard. And there are standard accompaniments on offer everywhere: potato salad is a must, often sweetened and gussied up with a bit of the in-house sugary rub. You’ll also find baked beans everywhere, sugary, spicy and seasoned with bits of smoked brisket end.

Beef’s the standard in Texas, but most restaurants also offer some smoky porky bits and pieces alongside the traditional beef. Beef – brisket, ribs, or a good old-fashioned steak – is usually your best bet here. This is, after all, where longhorn cattle come from.

Beef ribs plate from The Ironworks. Note bottle of local root beer in background. Fizzy drinks are a way of life hereabouts.

For casual barbecue, all paper plates, chequered tablecloths and sticky fingers, my favourite in town was The Ironworks, on Red River St. This is one of those restaurants with celebrity endorsements plastered all over the walls. If it’s good enough for Chewbacca and The Fonz, it’s good enough for me. I was lucky enough to go for the first time in a group of 12, so we were able to order a sample of everything on the menu – which is to say, a honking great mountain of meat. Fat beef ribs, crisp, smoky and sweet from the rub, are the restaurant’s speciality, and were, to my tastes, the very best thing on the menu. These are a bit of a challenge to eat politely, but persevere. There’s a great home-smoked hot sausage on offer, pork ribs (much less good than the beef ribs), halved chickens, pork loin, wonderfully smoky ham – you can order these meats by the pound, or, if there are fewer of you, you can each get a platter of one of the meats with some traditional accompaniments heaped alongside on your paper plate. Potato salad mixed sweet, like so much food in Texas; pickled cucumbers; pickled chillies; slices of raw onion; baked beans; and a big slice of Wonder Bread are more than you’ll probably be able to manage in one go, but they’re great to browse on. There are big, ice-filled coolers out front, where you can pick up a local beer, a bottle of root beer (awesome, as they say out here, with the beef ribs) or a Budweiser if you have no tastebuds.

After something a bit more spiffy and shiny? You need to head to Lambert’s Downtown Barbecue, in the new Second Street shopping district. There’s a little stage upstairs where you can listen to live music, a fabulous Sunday brunch that’s part buffet, part waiter service, and a simply superb lunch and evening menu. And cutlery. And cloth napkins.

Lambert's interior — Settling in for a monumental Sunday brunch at Lambert's.

My first visit to Lambert’s was an evening one, when I was served a ribeye steak cooked with a mustard and brown sugar crust, much like you’d find on a crème brûlée. One made of solid meat. I know I’ve been complaining all week about the sugariness of Texan food, but it was hard not to notice that this was the first time in my life I’ve finished a whole ribeye. This steak was cooked over oak chips, served with a roasted head of garlic, and was so good that I’d have married it if I could. Dr W (to whom I am married, making any potential steak-marriage impossibly bigamous) ordered a slab of brisket, rubbed in brown sugar and coffee, and smoked until blissfully tender.

Staff here are impossibly hip. There are enough tattoos on the restaurant floor to upholster a really creepy three-piece suite. Everybody’s as nice as pie (specifically, a lovely little crescent-shaped, deep-fried apricot pie, served with some excellent ice cream); and in common with many places with ultra-hip servers, there are some ultra-good cocktails on offer. Try the tart cucumber gimlet, which is a great foil to the sweetness of some of the food.

Devilled eggs, asparagus — Devilled eggs and asparagus from the brunch buffet at Lambert's - an unusually non-meaty plateful.

We were back again for brunch, which gave me a chance to branch out into the rest of the menu a bit. There are actual salads on offer – asparagus vinaigrette, great coleslaw packed with coriander, the ubiquitous potato salad and a fruit salad for any health nuts who have stumbled through the wrong door. Great gravadlax, cured to a nutty tenderness then gently smoked, so the outside is barely cooked, is served with a Texan favourite, crisp fried capers. There are devilled eggs topped off with farmed caviar (I am a sucker for a devilled egg); grits, home fries, macaroni cheese and all the American carbs you could wish for; and a butcher’s block manned by a fella with a big knife who will lovingly slice some of the restaurant’s smoked meats for you. There’s also a long list of small plates you can order fresh from the kitchen, and a groaning table piled with patisseries. The coconut profiteroles, chocolate pie and a blueberry muffin so densely filled with fruit that it was more blueberry than muffin would have beaten a less dedicated group of diners, but Dr W, G and I manfully made our way through it.

After a week’s serious eating, Lambert’s comes out as my top Austin pick by far. Happily for me, more trips to the city seem to be in the offing; next time, I’m planning on ordering their cold-smoked, stuffed quail, and a slab of their thick strawberry Texas toast. It’s beyond me how anyone in this city can stay slim.

I write this at the Oasis, a café with an enormous terrace overlooking Lake Travis in Austin, TX. The sun is beating down, the water is blue, turtles (actual turtles) plash beneath me, and a nice man is coming in a few minutes with my bowl of guacamole. My mission here has been largely barbecue-oriented, and I’ll have a whole list of barbecue tips for you here next week. Last night, though, I realised I couldn’t take any more in the way of brisket, at least in the short term, so I headed out to Hudson’s on the Bend, a cottagey little restaurant out near the lake, famous for its game and rare meats.

My husband used to live in Austin in the summers when he was a student, and has always held Hudson’s up as a pinnacle of his early restaurant experience – the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia are a powerful thing. Enter through the back, from the car park, where you’ll find a patio strewn with white fairy lights, carpets laid out on the rock floors to soften things underfoot. And some very pretty food, some aloof and indifferent service, and more obnoxiously sugary glazes than I’ve ever encountered in one place.

(Oo. Here is my guacamole.)

Hudson’s menu is a positive circus of wildlife. It opens with a rattlesnake cake (“coiled atop a spicy chipotle cream”), taking a schizophrenic route through the plains of Africa (yak), America (buffalo) and Canada (elk) via a French flowerbed (escargots). You’ll be disappointed to learn that I simply couldn’t face that much meat after a few days’ hunting down the city’s best barbecued beef ribs, so I ended up with a portion of foie gras (I have still to meet the level of protein consumption that will stop me from finding a chunk of foie appetising) and a quail salad. Dr W also remained untempted by exoticism, and there’s plenty on the menu for those not up for a slab of yak, like the lobster risotto and Nieman Ranch pork chop he eventually settled for.

(Bleedin’ awful guacamole, this. I will give the Oasis café a bye; the view is good, the friend I’m with claims to be enjoying his veggie burger, and they do make a reasonable cup of coffee. There’s also a mural depicting twenty chihuahuas being served drinks by a longhorn cow, and a larger-than-life fibreglass parrot wearing a Hawaiian shirt, which is so fantastic that I’m hard-pressed to be down on them.)

Things started well, last night. A Margarita, puckeringly and curiously sweet, and some complimentary spring onion and dill bread with flavoured butters. The bread had reached great puffy, yeasted heights, thanks to a very generous amount of sugar in the dough. Sugary butters, too – chipotle-honey and some sweet herbs.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — Fresh spinach with hot pig vinaigrette topped with smoked quail in a honey cilantro ginger glaze

In concerningly short order, our waiter, facial expression suggesting his best friend had died recently, rolled out with starters. The foie came on a plate shaped like an artist’s palette; weirdly annoying, shaped plates and whimsy, but something I’m prepared to forgive. As it turns out, cornbread and foie is not the best textural combination – the gritty nature of cornbread, especially when, like this bit, it’s been drenched in oil, is compellingly wrong alongside silky, buttery foie. The richness of foie is a no-brain match with sweet accompaniments, but this cornbread, dense with sugar; the slippery, syrupy crust on the foie; and the red strawberry and balsamic sauce alongside were too overwhelmingly sweet to support this teeny a slice of liver.

I can’t comment on the lobster, thanks to an allergy in equal parts deadly and annoying. Dr W says “Toothsome, with plenty of saffron, and very sweet”. You may see a theme emerging here.

Quail, on a bed of spinach leaves. Hopelessly pretty, gently smoked, nicely boned, cooked to a lovely tenderness. And so tooth-hurtingly, pancreas-winceingly sweet, that I was hard-pressed to work out how, honey aside, the little bird had been flavoured. This was a dish so sugary that the baby tomato halves in the salad cringed into sourness against the sticky, sticky meat. I stole a chunk of Dr W’s chorizo-stuffed pork chop, and blenched. I’ve eaten ice creams more savoury.

Pork chop — Chorizo-stuffed Neiman Ranch grilled pork chop with mango jalapeno sauce

This is all such a shame, because the plating is gorgeous (as you can see from the pictures), and the environment at Hudson’s is so green, twinkly and romantic that you find yourself willing them to buck up a bit. I couldn’t face the dessert section of the menu – sculptural glasses full of custardy-looking concoctions kept coming past on the way to other tables, but my teeth were already vibrating with desire for a toothbrush, so we called it a night.

Perhaps this is not Hudson’s fault. Perhaps it is a Texas thing. After all; this is a place where sugary barbecue rubs and sauces are sold on every corner. Maybe after a while, your palate slips, and high-sucrose seasoning is merely standard. (I did have a steak at another restaurant a few nights ago – of which more later – with a crème brulée crust, which actually managed to be very tasty indeed.) All the same, If I succumb to some sort of diabetic crisis before I manage to get home, you’ll know who to blame.

Tag: Texas

Barbecue in Austin, Texas

Sugar shock at Hudson’s on the Bend, Austin, TX