Since the discussion here has switched to Texas, I just spent a week in Austin and visited a few restaurants. This review is my personal review of the restaurants that I visited. My rating system is as follows: **** - stop on by! *** - good. definitely go if you like this type of food ** - reasonable * - okay/poor With a little favoritism to places that have more of a "dinner" atmosphere than a quick lunch atmosphere. Also, I am biased to lighter food and interesting food. The listing is in order of favorite to least favorite. Pappadeux (****) - 35 north of 290 Cajun style seafood I loved this place. It was hopping when we got there. A fun atmosphere with excellent food and cute waiters (Rob.) The menu was limited but my dish was a basic Red Snapper with just a wonderful lightly blackened fish with capers and butter. Yumm. Almost as tasty as the fish in Mama's Fish House on Maui. A definite must! ZTejas (***) - 6th near Lamar "California Cuisine" Tex-Mex I tend to define any restaurant that serves creative food that is lighter in nature as California Cusine. ZTejas serves things such as duck enchiladas, stuffed pork tenderloin, and margaritas. Some of their food is great, most of it is very interesting, and nothing is bad. I enjoy going here for its creativity. I was disappointed in their Navajo bread because it was nothing like the Navajo Bread / sopapillas (sp) that I had in the Albuquerque area. County Line (***) - 360 & 2222 Barbeque place with a nice "steak house" atmosphere Good for lunch (quite reasonable $5-$6 lunch) and also dinner For lunch arrive by 11:30 to not have to wait. I was FLOORED that there was close to 40 people in the parking lot standing around at 11:30. You would never see that here in California. I had both lunch and dinner. My first set of ribs were EXCELLENT, the second visit they were only good??? Kyotos (**1/2) - Congress and 3rd Japanese The food here was quite tasty. All the sushi was suprisingly fresh including the octopus. The rating was dropped though because of poor service. We had to be aggressive to get our bill and afterwards, they yelled us down as we were walking out because she forgot to charge us for one menu item! Elletto's (**1/2) - SE corner of Braker and 1 Italian Basic Italian lunch spot with quite tasty lasagna. Bread was store bought but reasonable. Azumas (**) - 183? Japanese I went to Azumas a few months ago, so my memory has dimmed. I remember it being perfectly reasonable, more casual than Kyoto's, but not as good. Very crowded at lunch. Antoine's (**) - in the Well's Branch Area Tex-Mex lunch spot Good fresh chips with frequent refills on chips, water, and ice tea. Lunch plates were pretty good, not great. Corn tortillas, - I prefer flour - were better than expected. Aldos (*1/2) - 183 just south of 620 heavy Californian Italian The menu was seafood oriented, and sounded light. Actual dish of scallops over linguine had a huge amount of very heavy white sauce. Only a few people in the restaurant.
Texas