Blue Star Cafeteria Looks Fab, But Isn't.

I’m a sucker for diners. I have vivid memories of stopping in at the Red Geranium Café in Grand Rapids Michigan on snowy mornings, sitting in a booth eating French Toast while the steam fogged up all the windows. I find deep comfort in Austin originals like Kerbey and Magnolia – the Neptunian Landscape is my adopted comfort food. And I love the new breed too, places like Monument Café in Georgetown, which takes a local-organic angle on classic diner food and is one of my absolute favorite restaurants in the universe.

So I was excited to see the Blue Star Cafeteria (45th and Burnet) the other day driving back home from North Austin. Excellent name, a nice patio, and walking in, a case full of pie. All very good signs. It was crowded too, full of what I imagined were Rosedale pedestrians from the neighborhood, since there were many more people inside than cars in the parking lot.

While Blue Star started out strong, the meal didn’t quite hold up to expectations. I ordered Eggs Benedict, and my wife had the cheeseburger. Both good diner standbys. The kids had burgers too, but that was a little complicated. Blue Star sort of undecided on kid-friendliness. There’s not really a kid menu, but there sort of is, if you ask.

Service was friendly, but not speedy. The coffee was hot, but nothing special. And the food was competent. Individual aspects sparkled – the ham in the eggs benedict, for example was amazing. Other elements – the fries and the fruit – were uninspired. And while the presentation was good, it seemed to me a little caught in the space between upscale and nostalgia, without hitting either one with much gusto.


In the end, the place wins on ambience, with clever architecture and a trendy look. And it wins on menu, which has all the right things in all the right order. Where it falls short is the food – decent competent stuff compared to the old Red Geranium, but less than you’d expect from a place with aspirations (and prices) so much higher.

Judging Chili

Every year, starting sometime in early fall, Chili trash talking starts at the Florida Department of Revenue. It gets to the point where you have to account for a good 10 minutes of chili-baiting before a meeting starts, where to inquire about prior year results is as likely as not to lead to a tirade against crooked judges and unjust outcomes.

I've been doing Grubbus a while, reviewing food from a step back and with a little anonymity. This year, I was asked to be a judge in the contest, to judge on the spot, in full view. The experience was awesome.

All four judges were ushered into a conference room and presented with trays with all 13 entrants placed in a unique order for each judge. We were given water, palate-cleansing saltines, and a score sheet. For each chili, we were asked to rate aroma, texture, and taste on a scale of 1 to 5. The final score was aroma + texture + (3 x taste).




The entrants were all good solid Florida Chili, which is to say not Texas chili, and while I was prepared to award an extra few points to any beanless entry, none presented itself. We had African-fusion, Indian-fusion, and a green-chili entrant that seemed loosely based on New Mexico Green Chili stew. Nothing too spicy (again, a lost opportunity for extra points in my book), but plenty of spice; and though all but two followed the same meat/tomato/bean/onion formula, plenty of variety. Some were harder to eat than others, but in the moment, as much joking and playing and costumes were in place leading up to the contest, it was very serious, and very quiet.

In the end, there was a pretty clear top 3. But the one that mattered was third place. After years of pouring heart and soul into chili, after years of showing up in costume, after years of coming just this close to some chili-recognition, Susan took home a medal with her mild and subtlety spiced Nun Better Chili.

The Importance of First Impressions: Boca Raton

Last week, I managed to spend a night in 4 different cities, a whirl wind tour starting Sunday morning with Boca Raton, Boca to Tallahassee Tuesday, Tally to Boston Wednesday, and Boston to Austin on Thursday. Those weeks suck the breath out of you: it's exciting, but its also exhausting and a little disorienting. All of that together highlighted the bliss on arrival in my hotel room at the Boca Raton Resort and Club.

I'm not sure that a skewer of absolutely perfect raspberries is the best use of global resources right now, and I am certain that the water they provided derived no tangible benefit by being packaged in a Christian Lacroix bottle. But the effect of the whole, together with the room, and its stunning view of the South Florida sunset was completely energizing and fortifying.






I had several meals at the resort, and while all we're good (the room service wedge salad was as good as anything I've had delivered to a hotel room), none of them had quite the staying power of the raspberries that first night.

And that's the power of a perfect raspberry. To make 7 flights in 5 days feel more like an adventure than a chore. To make a 2-hour prop-plane flight over the gulf feel a little like Indiana Jones, instead of just a headache. To turn a slog through an airport into something exhilarating.

Las Colinas Pizza Makes Me Sad

I'm in Irving, TX this week for a bit of project management training. It's a nice change of pace, good to be a little closer to home, and it's been a good class, but if there's good food here - food with soul and body, food made with love - I've yet to find it. Maybe there's some little diner out there, with good people who make delicious pies or something. There's a couple of days yet, there's still hope.

A couple of small illustrations from two area pizza joints, both highly recommended. First: I Fratelli. The Cookie.

Faced with a night of catching up on all the work I'd missed during the day's training, I opted for in-room dining. Not wanting to brave the downright scary room service here for a second night, I ordered dinner from a local pizza place right up the road. Everything looked good. And, to their credit, the pizza was pretty decent. Thin crust, a little crisp, hand-shaped, good cheese. All in all, solidly competent. But even competent pizza was not enough to redeem this cookie.

Here's what the website says:


Here's what they brought me:


I mean, good lord. They didn't even bother to take it out of the wrapper.

The second try was tonight. I was angling for tex-mex, but the team prevailed, and 6 of us headed out to Fireside Pies. More Pizza, this time in nearby Grapevine.

I'd heard from a few folks that this was a good local spot, a little upscale but not too fussy. And on entering the place, that seemed true: Fireside looks like a dark-wood-and-leather version of California Pizza Kitchen. It's got a delicious brick-oven smell, a small but not entirely terrible wine list, and cleverly named, memorably presented pizzas. But, like the I Fratelli cookie, the pitch doesn't really match the delivery.

The pizzas were giant and despite every attempt at making them fancy, they were almost impossibly greasy. I got a Hot n' Crumbled - sausage, ricotta, and chopped tomatoes, so maybe I was a little asking for the greasy, but as a group we got several different pizzas and shared slices across the table. Despite whimsical names and fancy ingredients each of the pizzas had exactly the same set of flavors - heavy on the grease, a little tiny kick to the sauce, a non-descript but decent crust, a flat sameness. The meatier the pizza, the harder it was to eat, but even the veggie options were without anything light or inviting.

Neither one of these places was bad, exactly. But neither was what they claimed to be. In that, they mirrored this little corner of this most corporate of suburbs, a thin veneer over a generally joyless landscape.

I Miss Bread: Revisited

I've been in my Tallahassee corporate apartment for a few months now, enjoying the space and familiarity after years of the Hampton Inn and Courtyard hotel.

More than anything else though, I love my kitchen. It's nothing special - standard issue new apartment appliances, cabinets and counters - but it's solid, well laid out, and it makes me happy.

This week, I finally made it back from work early enough to make a loaf of bread. It wasn't perfect, but the act of engaging the dough, the 10 minutes of kneading (tiring!), the quiet that comes from waiting for dough to rise, and the smell rising from the loaf while it baked were enough to tide me over happily into my long, drawn out week.

Making bread, especially here without the stand mixer or cooling rack or any of the other special gadgets I've got at home, connects me to something really elemental about eating. It's alchemy, the transformation of a few ingredients - this bread was just flour, yeast, water, and salt - into something completely unrelated to any of its parts. So Monday was construction day. While the bread baked I made a simple dinner and was happy to slow down.



Tuesday morning, it was on to bread deconstruction number one: French Toast. It was a simple deal - eggs, milk, vanilla, and a little sugar with the first slices of my bread and a few strawberries and grapefruit sections along the side. (Grapefruit life hack here - cut your citrus this way, and it'll change your life).

A couple of forgettable but decent meals got me through to Wednesday night, and Deconstruction Number Two: Fried Chicken.


What a blast. I took a couple of thick slices of the bread, cut them into chunks and had at them with the blender at a relatively low speed. Bread chunks in; bread crumbs out.

I cut my remaining chicken breast from Tuesday night into 4 thin, flat slices, and melted an obscene amount of butter in my frying pan. I also added some dried oregano, basil, salt and pepper to the bread crumbs, started up the rice, and got my assembly line set up.



Four slices of chicken, first into flour, then into egg, then into a gallon ziplock bag with the spices and breadcrumbs. Gave it a few good shakes, and then into the buttery pan. While the chicken cooked - which didn't take long on account of the thinness - I cut up the one tomato I had left into thin slices and layered them with red onion slivers and a quick little balsamic vinaigrette.

I'm not saying this was earth shatteringly good food. But it was Good, and it had the meaning that things get when you cobble them together with your own clumsy hands. Life is better with kitchen.

new camera should arrive next week - no more fuzzy cell phone shots!

Closed: Bye Bye Rubie Sky

Another day, another attempt at creatively spelled upscale cuisine in Tallahassee. Actually, attempt might not be quite the right word here. Attempt hints at effort, it suggests ambition, it has a whiff of nobility. The whiff at Rubie Sky? Not noble.

I'd heard good things in passing and seen the relatively professional logo in a couple of spots around town. Thinking we'd branch out from our team-dinner standards, and feeling like it'd be a good idea to completely destroy any food credibility I had with my colleagues, I recommended we do the dinner there.

Rubie Sky is way up on the north side of Tallahassee, off Thomasville Rd. The facade is promising, with a large covered patio and classy circular drive in front. Walk in and there's a vague stale smell - old beer maybe? - and a whole lot of empty tables. I think the restaurant started out as a sort of bar-centric date place for 20-somethings, and made a hasty attempt to go "family friendly". The upshot was that a decor better suited to dim and dusky lighting was lit up like a gaudy christmas tree. We were seated in a private room that inexplicably featured a large presentation screen smack-dab in the middle, and two wine cabinets, both locked, on the wall.

We had 15 or so of us there, so we ordered a round of every appetizer on the menu to pass around. The mozzarella appetizer was breaded with what tasted like shake and bake, and fried a la TGI Fridays. The crab cake was tasteless and limp. Everything, from the seared Tuna to the crab cake, was structurally similar to what it claimed to be, but lacked so much on every detail - over cooked, under spiced, sloppily displayed - that it ended up blending together in sort of lowest common denominator mess. Entrees shared the same fate. Wedge salad? Iceberg, but not wedgy in the least. I ordered a steak (Rubie Sky bills itself as a steak house), and was delivered the toughest, most gristly, most well done medium rare ribeye I've ever laid eyes on. It was served with a small ramekin of what I'm fairly certain was A-1. Generally, at these sorts of events, the conversation rambles on and everyone oohs and ahs over the dessert menu. Not so here - despite a jovial group, and I think we had fun on the whole despite the place, people were ready to flee as soon as the check was signed. If there were a celebrity death watch for Tallahassee Eateries, I'd put money on this one not making it through the year.

Intelligentsia: Behold the Clover

Spent the early part of this week in Chicago, where I was able to check another must-taste espresso joint off my list: Intelligentsia.

These guys are right up there in the CoffeeGeek pantheon, producing a good share of US Barista Championship top contenders, and blazing the trail for single-origin micro-lot coffees nationally.

I got to check out two of their shops in Chicago - in both places getting hopped up enough on caffeine to walk out a little wobbly. Geeky, I know, to risk getting cut off at a COFFEE bar. Both were excellent, though the Lakeview store had a much better vibe - more sparse, more funky and more fun than the more bustling, business-like Millennium Park location.

Truth is, though, I'm still struggling a little with my take on the place. It was clearly top notch - the barista in Lakeview tossed two macchiatos before she got one she liked enough to serve - but the drinks themselves, and the experience overall didn't quite hold up relative to Victrola or Stumptown.

Two minor quibbles:

Black Cat, Intelligentsia's espresso blend, is roasted significantly darker than other places of this caliber. The roast yielded an espresso that was exceptionally smooth, but with less body less nuanced flavors than I was expecting.

I was also a little disappointed with the texturing of the milk. Keep in mind, this is relative to expectations, not run of the mill; these were exceptionally tasty drinks, beautifully presented. But still - check out the head to head with my current all-time fave Victrola:


The Victrola latte was clean, clear and silky smooth. The Intelly latte was by comparison, choppy and heterogeneous, with larger, less consistent bubbles.

Just before I left, I went back up to the counter and ordered a coffee from one of the only operational Clovers in the country. The Clover is a $20,000 piece of coffee genius. It allows complete control of the process of making a single cup of coffee - temperature, brewing time, grind, dosing. Word was that the Clover was going to change the way the world drank coffee, and I must have read a dozen first person accounts of how the Clover had revealed flavors in coffee that no one had ever dreamed of. Then, Starbucks bought the company, and clamped the window shut on independent stores like Intelligentsia getting more. Expectations high? You betcha. But I found the actual result - I ordered a cup of a micro-lot Honduran - a little disappointing. There was an exceptionally clean finish, and crisp citrus flavor that reminded me a little of lemongrass. But as with the espresso, the body was lighter than I expected, and I had to strain to taste the richer undertones. It was an excellent cup of coffee, but didn't compare to the depth of Paradise Roasters Lake Tarwar or Cuvee Coffee's micro-lot Brazilian in my humble little french press at home.

There's no question that my expectations of this place were sky high; and my quibble were really just that. If I lived around the corner from an Intelligentsia shop, I'd be in there every last chance I got, drinking in the smells and sounds and feel of a place clearly passionate about really good coffee.