Legends of the rise (and fall) of Mexican restaurants, comfort food, coffee with no carryout cups and something called a Chickichanga, writes Mike Sutter.
It’s been a bell curve, covering San Antonio restaurants this fall. Research for the city’s Top 25 Mexican restaurants took me from places a few weeks old to places open for half a century. Scouting for Top 10 comfort food and coffee shops touched all the compass points and most of the price points.
And November brought the biggest news in years: The Michelin Guide came to Texas for the first time and awarded Mixtli a star and rained recognition on 11 more San Antonio restaurants. These are the best and worst things I ate the last couple of months. Call it legends of the rise . The best Tale of Two Worlds at Mixtli: A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a taco shell. That captures San Antonio’s pioneering Mexican restaurant Mixtli. Part formal fine dining, part molecular flavor lab, part Mexican history seminar. Take the two-bite taco called Tale of Two Worlds that kicks off the current La Conquista menu. The shell was formed by the crunchy rice left at the bottom of a paella pan called socarrat. The filling combined frijoles with pork fat and chicharrón, with a side of golden mole made from tomatillos, serranos and corn masa. Elements of Mesoamerica and elements of Spain, finding harmony they never found in 1519. But Mixtli found it. It only took 500 years, about how long it seemed for Michelin to finally catch up. 812 S. Alamo St., Suite 103, 210-338-0746, restaurantmixtli.com TOP 25: San Antonio’s best Mexican restaurants Massaman curry at Thai Curry: It was a tough act to follow on Broadway. Thai Curry took over this space in 2022 from Tiger Wings, the city’s best place for chicken wings at the time. But they fill the tiny brick box of a building with 10 pages of Thai satay, tom kha, papaya salad, noodles, stir-fries and namesake curries. Massaman curry set a strong example with a rich, tawny coconut-milk curry base built out like a stew with beef and potatoes, with ornaments of avocado and whole cashews. 8210 Broadway, Suite 1, 210-888-1155, thaicurrysa.com Coffee at NoFi slow bar: They don’t do wifi at NoFi. That’s why it’s called that. The “slow bar” part means coffee and tea worth settling in for. Emphasis on “in,” because there’s no carryout. They don’t even have cups for it. What they have is a room with the muted colors and modest setting of a Vermeer painting, filled with the warm sounds of vinyl from a turntable. And they have coffee, maybe 10 varieties on a given day, coffee with the same confident skill of their other venture, Bright Coffee, the city’s best overall coffee shop. It’s built one cup at a time, mostly with pourover cones, with some reserved for espressos, cortados and cappuccinos. But no lattes, no syrups and no basic drips. In one cup of Prodigal Finca La Roca made from Colombian beans that cost about $100 a pound, I tasted earth and sky and the freedom to appreciate coffee as both art and science. 819 Fredericksburg Road, Instagram: @nofi.slowbar Oxtails at Mamma Lou’s Soul Food Kitchen: Besides giving us a place to sit for lunch, the best thing that’s happened to Mamma Lou’s since it moved into this big restaurant space from a little drive-thru shack a block away is that they have oxtails all the time now instead of just the weekends. In my research for December’s upcoming ranking of Top 10 Comfort Food Restaurants, I knew I wanted oxtails for their straight ratio of fat and lean, the kind of half-rendered gloss that goes to your heart and your head with equal speed. Mamma Lou’s does oxtails in a molten gravy braise the color of weathered wood for a homecoming with rice and yams and greens, if you’re doing it right. And they do. 4941 Walzem Road, 210-277-7847, Facebook: Mamma Lous Soul Kitchen Syrniki at Lova Cafe: At this year-old breakfast and brunch cafe in Stone Oak, they do avocado toast, crepes, croissants and coffee like you’d expect. What I didn’t expect was the farmer’s cheese pancakes of Eastern Europe called syrniki. Think pancake, sure. But also think blintz and blini and crepe, with sweetened condensed milk, fresh berries and a dusting of powdered sugar. 19202 Stone Oak Parkway, Suite 101, 210-281-5267, Instagram: @lovacafe.official Pastel Azteca at Paladar Fusion Mexico Cuba: Chef Arturo Villegas couldn’t help himself. At the Mexican-Cuban startup cafe that rose to San Antonio’s No. 2 Mexican restaurant in the blink of an eye, Villegas felt compelled to add one more layer of fusion: lasagna. That’s how he described his new Pastel Azteca, a dish layered with masa cakes, grilled chicken and Oaxaca cheese, all of the layers covered in a rich, dark Veracruz mole with five chiles, peanuts, bread, plantains, raisins and cacao. Lasagna by any other name, as long as it’s Pastel Azteca 3615 Broadway, Suite 4, 210-267-1329, paladarfusion.com MORE BEST AND WORST: A buffet of bad decisions The worst Chickichanga at First Watch: Maybe it’s my fault for ordering something called a Chickichanga in the first place. But I was restless at this otherwise reliable national brunch and breakfast chain, and I was curious what a chimichanga with chicken, eggs, chorizo, green chiles and avocado might look like through a sunrise filter. It looked like a burrito, a $13.49 soft-sided burrito that also kind of looked like SpongeBob, sealed at each end with sticky yellow “Veracruz sauce,” with a little beanie hat of sour cream in the middle. It tasted about like it sounds, something so comically contrived it could only happen in a cartoon. Or at First Watch.830 Northwest Loop 410, Suite 107, Park North Shopping Center, 210-366-9000, firstwatch.com Alaskan halibut at Dean’s Steak & Seafood: I mostly liked Dean’s Steak & Seafood at the new Kimpton Santo hotel when I reviewed it, especially the raw bar and a couple of the steaks. But the “& Seafood” part has some “& problems,” starting with little Band-Aid tabs of raw fish crudo, extending especially through wild Alaskan halibut hijacked by red pepper chutney too big and brassy for the mild white fish, cooked until it waved farewell to flaky on its way to chalky white. And while the finished plate included a head of grilled radicchio for architectural lift and drama, it created drama of its own with a bitter toughness like sawing through a wet dishcloth. 431 S. Alamo St. at the Kimpton Santo hotel, 210-759-7441, deanssteakandseafood.com Breakfast egg rolls at breakfast: Hashbrowns, scrambled eggs and bacon? Good. All that piled into an eggroll shell and fried? Hold on. I like the way this bright, new, lowercase cafe adds a degree of cosmopolitan flair to a strip mall in New Braunfels. But there aren’t enough bloody marys and boozy coffees to wash down this one-note deep-fried diner plate. 2168 Oak Run Parkway, Suite 102, New Braunfels, 830-837-5268, breakfastnbtx.com General Tso’s chicken at Kawser Chinese & Thai Restaurant: This beat-up building’s been a taquería, a botanica and a barbershop with a vape counter, among other things through the years. And now another taqueria banner’s been slapped over the sign facing Zarzamora. Inside, it’s still the halal fusion spot called Kawser, a one-man show with a menu that goes all the way up to 98 things, a shotgun mix of Thai, Chinese, bubble tea, milkshakes, an ice cream counter and sushi. But whatever this building is now, it’s not the place for General Tso’s chicken, a pile of bewildered knobs of globby chicken over vegetables that got lost on the way to one of the other 97 things on the menu. I like the guilty pleasure of General Tso’s, like fried chicken nuggets on a sweet-and-sour bender. But the general’s AWOL, and Private Tso is so not getting the job done. 311 N. Zarzamora St., 210-530-1073, Facebook: Kawser Chinese and Thai
Tiger Wings Nofi Band-Aid Tso Kawser Chinese Broadway First Watch Arturo Villegas Mike Sutter Mamma Lou La Roca Vermeer General Tso Dean San Antonio Mexican Thai Texas Oak Run Parkway Stone Oak Parkway Broadway 812 S. Alamo St. Comfort Food Restaurants Spain Mesoamerica Park North Shopping Center Lova Cafe Alaskan Kimpton Santo Stone Oak Fredericksburg Road Soul Food Kitchen Walzem Road Earth Colombian Veracruz Eastern Europe Paladar Fusion Mexico Cuba Cuban New Braunfels 431 S. Alamo St. Chinese 311 N. Zarzamora St. Steak &Amp First Watch.830 Northwest Loop 410 Pastel Azteca Mixtli Bright Coffee Facebook Suite 103 Thai Curry La Conquista @Nofi.Slowbar Oxtails Instagram Mamma Lous Soul Kitchen Syrniki Suite 102 @Lovacafe. Zarzamora Breakfastnbtx.Com Suite 107 Steak &Amp Paladarfusion.Com Firstwatch.Com Suite 101 Tale Of Two Worlds The Michelin Guide Pastel Azteca 3615 Spongebob
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