Fuckin’ A. As long as I’m doubled over in defeat, I might as well go for a roundup of the foods that make this town the tastiest destination in Texas. While Austin doesn’t have the last word on variety, it does cater to three of my bottomless appetites: Mexican food, southern cooking and beer.

St. Arnold’s Lawnmower Ale

I’ll start with beer. Alcohol tend to play an overbearing role in my SXSW experience. This doesn’t mean that it goes down without respect. Case-in-point: St. Arnold’s Lawnmower Ale, a crisp, Kolsch-style Texan microbrew that ranks among my all-time favorites. Lone Star is fine, and Shiner is finer, but the clean body, slightly grainy malt sweetness and ever-so-faint hop lick that makes the Lawnmower a great session beer is usually the first thing I seek out when the sun sets in Austin. Setting out for a six-pack of St. Arnold is also a great excuse to stop by the Whip-In, a powerfully stocked beer closet with snacks, smokes, an outdoor patio and a new-age Indian cafe built into the premises.

Lambert’s Downtown Barbecue
Early on in the week, a recommendation from Robbie Richter and a brief stop between ice cream gigs landed me in Lambert’s, a triple-dollar-sign smokehouse restaurant in the heart of the city center. While I wasn’t completely won over by the restaurant’s brisket or hot links, the country smoked pork ribs – locally sourced, crusted with fennel, maple and coriander, and smoked with oak – were close to the best ribs I have ever tasted.

In fact, part of Lambert’s charm was the fact that a chef, not a pit master or hand-me-down manager, had ordained the servings with keen culinary touches. Each dish was carefully prepared and served with a specific pickled side (cabbage for the sausage, fennel and apple salad for the ribs), which worked wonderfully as a counterweight to the heft and fatty flavors of the meat.

It’s meals like this that snap me out of my curmudgeonly, anti-white-tablecloth demeanor and realize that while Sam’s might stand tall in Austin as the classic barbecue joint, there’s no shame with tipping my moist towellete to the barbecue joint with class. I only hope that when I return, my wallet will have caught up to my palate.

Hoover’s Cooking

On the opposite end of the southern spectrum is Hoover’s Cooking, an unabashedly super-sized family restaurant that bludgeons diners with plate after plate of caloric payload until their taste buds don’t know bread from breading. I’ve attempted to write about Hoover’s every time I’ve visited Austin, but it’s one of those places that’s so straightforward, it can’t possibly tell a story beyond the words, “chicken fried chicken.”

Chicken fried chicken – a pounded cutlet of white meat dredged heavily in seasoned flour, fried golden brown and served with country gravy – certainly is the star of the show here, followed closely by chicken fried steak and southern fried pork chops. Jamaican jerk ribs? Ham steak? Meat loaf? You could give them a shot, but no entree lacking the word “fried” in its title is going to be worth the marathon eating session you’ll have to endure to put it away.

Hoover’s sides easily comprise a meal of their own, especially the rich, barely piquant jalapeño creamed spinach and slightly sweet okra and tomato stew, two choices I come back to time and again regardless of how good everything else can be. With low prices, friendly staff and a great beer selection rounding out the joint, Hoover’s does just about everything right in the dialect of southern cooking.

El Gallo and Rosita’s Al Pastor
I’ve sung the praises of Austin’s breakfast tacos in the past and cannot possibly sing loudly enough when it comes to a fistful of migas, but this year’s highlights were decidedly outside the usual Tex-Mex venn diagram.

El Gallo, an unassuming building ensconced in an eternally half-empty parking lot in South Austin, is for the most part a standard place to get your fill of Tex-Mex cuisine. Queso, quacamole salad, enchiladas and fajitas, however, are accompanied by a number of specials out of regional bounds, including pollo en mole, cabrito al horno, carne guisada, and one hell of a chile relleno. While I can’t vouch for El Gallo’s menu as a whole, this poblano pepper, stuffed with ground beef, pecans, potatoes, carrots and raisins and an assortment of spices, is reason enough to make the drive down South Congress the next time you’re in town.

The best Mexican food I’ve had yet in Austin, though, is at Rosita’s Al Pastor, a sit-down/taco-truck combo in a strip mall just southeast of downtown. Rosita’s pastor, steeped heartily marinade and spit-roasted under pineapple, is tender and flavorful beyond the point of an Angeleno’s recognition. After four years of intermittently eating my way around the Texas capital, I’ve finally found a restaurant to unseat Hoover’s as my first stop for dinner.

Plus – thanks to Al Pastor’s wide screen television – after twenty-six years of enduring a meaningless existence, I’ve finally discovered the dimension of latin entertainment bliss that is 12 Corazones.

Smitty’s Market

No trip to Austin is complete without a smokestack sojourn outside city limits. I was hoping to drive out to Lexington, TX for a shot at Snow’s, but my work schedule limited my options to a Sunday afternoon at Smitty’s in Lockhart.

Smitty’s, of course, is no chopped liver. It’s beef and pork, slow-smoked in the central Texas barbecue tradition and served by the pound – a remnant of the restaurant’s butcher shop forebears. Harbored in the original Kreuz smokehouse thirty miles south of Austin, Smitty’s is one of several standards of this barbecue region.

Nowhere to be found are the honky-tonk exaggerations, dizzying southern sides and po’ boy affectations of urban food tourism. Steadily pushing people along the counter, where pinto beans, white bread, saltine crackers and a number of pickled vegetables are arranged as accompaniment to their barbecue, the staff at Smitty’s turns over hundreds of pounds of food and just as much history without about as much flair as a salt lick.

Brisket is at the center of the Smitty’s experience, and it’s central to whatever pride Texans might take in their reputation as barbecue royalty. It’s the brisket in this part of Texas that has ruined my ability to enjoy this cut of meat almost anywhere else. Plenty of barbecue joints serve tender brisket, and plenty more serve fatty brisket, but strips of stringy beef patched together by greasy globs of fat, no matter how well they’re cooked, can never match what’s on offer in Lockhart, Luling and the rest of the barbecue belt that fits snugly around Austin.

The best barbecue brisket, as proclaimed by my lowly and carnal senses, is seasoned with nothing more than salt and pepper and wood-smoked for hours, until a beautiful ring of pink has penetrated its edges and – most importantly – until the fats in the meat have been transformed into juices of pure flavor that lace the meat rather than suffocate it. A bite of good brisket is enough to make me forget, maybe even forsake, my indifference to beef and my disapproval of the feeding practices that must lead to this kind of marbling. Sustainability be damned for just one moment: The best barbecue brisket is an experience that I’ll take to humanity’s grave.

Smitty’s smoked sausages, mildly flavored and packed just loosely enough to fall apart in your mouth when you take a bite, wear the same halo that allows grease and fat to be interpreted as meat juices. Beef shoulder, dry and tough by comparison, is not worth the purchase.

Neither are the market’s pork ribs, which are tasty enough but just a little too simple to be on equal footing with brisket. Treating pork ribs like beef – seasoned with nothing more than salt and pepper – creates an interesting alternative to the Memphis and St. Louis styles of crusting, basting, rubbing and smoking, but loses the savory and textural complexity that makes those regions’ ribs so incredible.

Fortunately, the same can’t be said about Smitty’s smoked pork chop, which is hearty, juicy and best eaten while driving on the interstate, chop in one hand and steering wheel in the other.

All of this abbatoir adulation might send a stereotypically fatty message about the tastes of Texas. Austin, birthplace of Whole Foods, home to a booming community of enthusiastic taste buds and guardian of the slogan “Keep Austin Weird,” is in fact not solely the product of deep-fried, spit-roasted and pit-smoked animal carcass. Until places like Veggie Heaven stop sabotaging any case for the contrary, though, I’ll be unbuckling my belt every time I touch town at Austin-Bergstrom International.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Accordingly, I doubt that Frank Sodolak, owner of Sodolak’s Country Inn, has ever set finger to keyboard in praise of one of America’s most essential foods. To the cook who simply cooks, bacon is immune to the passions of meta-criticism. However, as Sodolak has shown in his roadside corner of Texas, bacon is not immune to the creative spirit.

I learned this fact firsthand on a five hour road trip along state highways to the town of Snook. I had first learned of chicken fried bacon in 2006, when Bob Phillips‘ video review of the creation found its way onto YouTube. Judging from Phillips’ harrying soundtrack cues and and the general hype-for-hype of “bacon mania,” one might expect a dish so extreme that it defies all good sense.

Fortunately, the reality of Sodolak’s chicken fried bacon differs greatly from the fantasy that has propelled it into the limelight. Those who expect the extreme, the chic or the vulgar are bound to be disappointed by what is little more than an appetizer, albeit a calorically prodigious one. The process behind this dish couldn’t be more transparent: Coat six strips of raw, thin-sliced bacon in lightly seasoned batter. Deep fry. Serve hot.

While the interview comments from Bob Phillips’ review could easily be filtered as sound bite-sized jabs at southern obesity, they make perfect sense when the platter of gold coated curls lies at your fingertips. A testament to Sodolak’s sensibilities as a cook, this is a surprisingly delicate dish- and it does need more salt. The breading of the bacon goes just far enough to provide a satisfying crisp, but stops far before it reaches the crusting point of a chicken fried steak (which is also on the menu). Because the bacon is cooked quickly, each bite is airy and tender. The flavor of neither the meat nor the breading is strong enough to overwhelm, and the accompanying country gravy is as authentically nondescript as the potholed marquee that posts its place on the farm road outside. In its understated beauty, Sodolak’s creation separates the stupidly simple from the simply stupid and makes seconds on deep fried bacon an entirely sensible notion.

However, seconds on any appetizer would be foolhardy at the Country Inn. While Frank Sodolak might have made his name on chicken fried bacon, he’s made his living on the impeccable southern cooking that underscores his restaurant. Front and center is a behemoth ensemble of Texas steaks: The “extra small sirloin,” for example, weighs in at a solid pound and covers an entire dinner platter like a beef blanket. Boldly pepper crusted and grilled medium rare to order, it’s probably the best steak I’ve ever tasted. Not coincidentally, it’s also the most inexpensive: At a cost of only $11.95 (including fries and toast), Sodolak’s sirloin smacks Peter Luger with a king sized Texas backhand, daring any witness to sell steaks at a more lopsided flavor-to-dollar ratio. When I make my way back to Snook, chicken fried bacon is sure to land on my tab, but it’s pork chops and porterhouse that I’ll be craving most.

If there’s a clear image that comes to my mind at the end of a meal at this restaurant, it’s not the bacon explosion, but the Skylight Inn of Ayden, North Carolina. Like the Skylight’s Pete Jones, who at one point had a cholesterol count of over 800, Frank Sodolak has no reason to concern himself with food fads. He’s been chicken frying bacon for ten years and eating bacon since before we were born. His love for the craft of southern cooking and perfect awareness of its position vis-a-vis the American heartbeat shines through any amount of memetic sensationalism as a primary source. If this isn’t where bacon belongs, I’m more than ready to cut a switch and clear some more room in its defense.

Sodolak’s Country Inn
9711 Fm. 60 Rd E.
Snook, TX 77878

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

We’ll also have 6,000 copies of Ice Cream Man’s annual free magazine, Off the Wookie (sic), which features stories, interviews and DIY guides from our crew and friends. You can download the complete online edition of OTW4 right now at offthewookie.com. There aren’t any Kool-Aid related stories this time around, but I do have a piece in the mag about my evening on night patrol with a real life superhero. There’s also a great article on the brunch mystique by the charming author of Not Eating Out in New York!

If you’re going to be in town, keep an eye out for Newt so you can score free ice cream sandwiches. I’ll also be at the Food and Wine Blogger Bash on Monday and in the audience of the food blogger panel on Tuesday. Let’s do this.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

When March rolls around, hundreds of music makers roll out to the city of Austin, flanked by armies of fans, suits, marketers and drunkards for the biggest weekend of live music in the world’s set list of mass performance. Parks become stadiums, bars become concert halls and holes in the wall live out their namesake in epic fashion as the entire city transforms into a boundless channel of song. The metamorphosis at once defies and embodies all commercial logic, tightening America’s proud grip on a culture of music that continues to grow new sets of wings as its body sinks further and further into the abyss created by its own evolution. In four short days, the amplified sound of this paradox fades away, vans and trailers fleeing into the desert as surely as they arrived for the onslaught.

I spend these four days not in the clubs of Austin, but on the streets, giving away free ice cream to springbound music lovers. Our mission is as improbable as that of the musicians: the massing and merging of happiness and commodity without a second thought given to profit. Bouncing between venues and street corners, we wave the banner of unwarranted happiness that has enveloped Austin. After 1,500 performances and over 11,000 free ice creams, South by Southwest 2008 has come and gone. It is a tiring triumph. All that remains is breakfast.

The Homesick Texan has already written extensively about her great big state’s great little secret. While central Texas at large has much to offer in the way of smoked meats, I shudder to think of anyone visiting the city of Austin with his hopes pinned on its mediocre BBQ offerings. The breakfast taco, distant Tex-Mex cousin of California’s breakfast burrito, is the capital’s true currency of flavor. Prepared on the daily at restaurants, taquerias and fast food outlets throughout Austin, these sunny pockets of the Lone Star fold any combination of eggs, meat, potato, beans and cheese into a wondrously bite sized building block of satisfaction. Whether they’re consumed as a prelude to a long day, in epilogue of a long night, or in the back of a 1969 Chevrolet Step Van atop a mountain of emptied ice cream boxes, breakfast tacos offer the diversity, value and convenience that cumbersome breakfast burritos only pretend to offer. They are the minutemen of hunger, bacon and chorizo peeking out from under a blanket of eggs and salsa, ready to offer their Tex-Mex style comfort at a moment’s notice.

After taking what may be my final bite of Austin for a full year, I throw my bags into Bessita and stretch out for the twenty hour drive to San Gabriel Valley. There’s gotta be a better way for me to tie this post into Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, but seeing how I’m still recovering from the trip, I’ll quit while I can still think.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.