Restaurant critic Mike Sutter says don’t call it a comeback for this British institution near the Dominion.
We owe a debt to British culture. The island gave us our language and forged our Revolution. It gave us the Beatles , the Stones and Shakespeare . It gave us Monty Python and Mary Shelley and “ Masterpiece Theater .
” It also gave us something else, something not quite as noble. That something is our wax-museum infatuation with the British pub. Hard as we try to make it look like the real thing, it’s never quite right. Get a Guinness, get a selfie, move on. The Lion & Rose moved on, or so it seemed, when the last link of Allen Tharp’s local British pub chain closed at The Rim on the downside of the pandemic in late 2021. It had a strong run, starting on Broadway in 2001 where The Winchester is now, then expanding and contracting in accordion waves that rippled across San Antonio and even Austin for a brief moment. The lions came back to life late last year, planting their big stone pawprints on a long stretch of Interstate 10 near the Dominion, on the same side of the highway as Texas Roadhouse and Tardif’s American Brasserie. By the end of January, the Lion & Rose was reborn. But don't call it a comeback. The new Lion & Rose isn't a collection of used furniture from the old spots, but a brand-new space with a marquee bar, a shaded patio framed in limestone, an outdoor bar with conversation pits and a fire feature, a side room with honeyed wooden rafters and a main dining room of leather and brass and warm mahogany wood tones. A seven-figure resurrection, twinkle-lights and all. UNDERRATED NO MORE: An unexpected Top 10 They were setting up for karaoke on the patio one night, with trivia going on in the side room. Another night, they flash-mobbed a Land Rover car show next to the frontage road just as tariffs were laying a question mark on the British automaker’s immediate future here. And just in case the bangers and mash and the double-decker party bus and the “Dr. Who” phone booth and the Union Jack cornhole boards weren’t British enough, the host made a point of letting me know where the “loo” was located. Trying too hard? Or not hard enough? I’ve got to admire the brass of anybody who would build from the ground up something this big and basic in a part of town that expects something more. I’m not talking about the brass and wood on the walls and the bar, but more of a “Glengarry Glen Ross” kind of brass. Except the second prize isn’t a set of steak knives. It’s a homely $28.95 plate of overcooked beef tenderloin bites with a few crumbles of blue cheese and an indeterminate cream sauce that didn’t match the menu description. A side dish of beer-battered, grocery store-quality button mushrooms was fine for what it was, but one thing it wasn’t was cheap, and at $14.95, I was expecting something less… expected. And I wasn’t sure what to expect from Angels on Horseback. Shucked oysters wrapped in fatty English bacon? What could possibly go wrong. Everything. Taste, texture, price. It felt like a $19 bet on whether I could finish it . Could the menu’s promise of a goat cheese croquette have saved it? I’ll never know. It didn’t show up to the party. My mantra at Lion & Rose became, “It may have been bad, but at least it was expensive.” That mantra extended to a tired and greasy Union Pepper Jack Burger on a shiny Kaiser bun; to a single Scotch egg for $12.95 as stiff as a sausage-and-egg charley horse; and chicken wings that most any sports bar could beat, with a whole lot less English football on the telly. Having missed those easy penalty shots, Lion & Rose surprised no one by air-balling the bigger challenge of vegetable curry by trading velvet and silk for gravy as sticky as liquefied Velcro. Still, it was better than cottage pie with all the charm of Dinty Moore beef stew under a blanket of mashed potatoes bearing the weight of faded hopes. I found relief in fish and chips, as we so often do at a British pub. If you can’t make crunchy golden fish with french fries, you’ve missed the whole point. The Lion & Rose located the point, the same as they did with a posh salad of beets and goat cheese that looked like it came from a different party altogether, the same party that was passing around Sir Winston’s Cheeseboard, a personal paddle of three English cheeses, tomato jam, figs, walnuts, fruit, honeycomb and a goat cheese croquette. At $16.95, it was the restaurant’s all-around value king. That cheese board found a kindred soul in the King’s Cup cocktail, a fruitful and radiant version of a Pimm’s Cup from Lion & Rose’s prolific menu of whiskey drinks, vodka drinks, lager drinks and cider drinks. But before we get all Chumbawamba about it, consider the Irish Mule in its sweaty copper cosplay mug. It melted away in the Holiday Inn ice machine ice that I thought we had gotten over as a bar culture in the early 2000s. And it tasted like sweet-and-sour mix and ginger beer with no Jameson kick at all. If all I wanted was sloppy bar craft, I could have gotten it a lot cheaper at a sloppy bar. But the core of the Lion & Rose bar experience? I’ll let the Guinness answer that. In three separate configurations, I couldn’t find a proper pour of the black gold. Not in a half-cocked Blacksmith that amounted to dumping one on top of the other. The idea is to pour the Smithwicks first, then pour the darker-colored but lighter-bodied Guinness over the back of a spoon to create a crisp ecotone division of black and red in the glass. Not here. A full Guinness by itself was as dishwater foamed as any old draft beer, not the velvet cascade of the slow pour and the proper settle time of the Guinness that gave rise to the British pub industry in the colonies. The best pour of Guinness came in a baby glass with a flight of two other U.K. standards: Harp Lager and Smithwicks. And maybe someday they’ll grow up and join me for a proper pint. 5-STAR REVIEW: Petit Coquin’s perfect score I’ll give Lion & Rose its props. It’s not as cringey as the Tilted Kilt, nor as tourist-thirsty as Mad Dogs on the River Walk, nor as aromatic as Durty Nelly’s or Waxy O’Connor’s, both of which smell like bathroom soap and bad decisions. I might be tempted to call Lion & Rose a jumped-up River Walk Euro-pub, except that I’ve had better fish and chips, a more accomplished pour of Guinness and better cottage pie on the River Walk. No, Lion & Rose has problems of its own. And I mentioned Mary Shelley up top for a reason, not just for alliteration. The same with “Masterpiece Theater.” Because together, they synthesize the chaotic tragedy of Frankenstein’s monster and the ongoing agony of the human condition into two perfect words for the reanimated Lion & Rose: Disasterpiece Theater.
Beatles Lion &Amp Angels On Horseback Texas Roadhouse Union Jack Land Rover Kaiser Dinty Moore Tilted Kilt Cheeseboard Chumbawamba Holiday Inn Rose Mike Sutter Mary Shelley Shakespeare Monty Python Allen Tharp Tardif Blacksmith Petit Coquin Durty Nelly Frankenstein Sir Winston British San Antonio Dominion The Rim American Brasserie Lion &Amp Austin Broadway Interstate 10 English River Walk Euro-Pub River Walk Disasterpiece Theater Irish Union Pepper Jack Burger King's Cup Velcro English Smithwicks Lion &Amp Waxy O'connor's Stones Harp Lager Pimm's Cup Guinness Disasterpiece Masterpiece Theater The Winchester Mule Dr. Who Glengarry Glen Ross Mad Dogs
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