The best little steakhouse in Texas

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texas beef

Above: Now THAT’S a fine piece of meat! Bone-in rib eye is the preferred cut for steak in Texas.

Now, mind you, Pearland, Texas is not exactly on my beaten path. In fact, it’s a suburb of Houston about 40 minutes south of the city.

Last night, I gladly made the schlep with cousins Joanne and Marty to have dinner with their friend Deedee Killen at her family’s Killen’s steakhouse in Pearland. For months now, my cousins have been raving about the amazing meals they’ve had there and so last night we made the plunge.

texas beef

Above: The key to Chef Ronnie’s iceberg wedge with blue cheese was the creaminess of the dressing.

As much as Texas is known for its beef, its love of beef, and its tide of steakhouses (Dallas has its own “steakhouse row”), I have to admit that I’ve been disappointed with my own personal steakhouse experiences here. But all that changed last night.

texas beef

Above: Chef Ronnie’s crab cake is made with hand-shredded crab meat as opposed to ground. This was, hands-down, the best crab cake I’ve ever had.

The American steakhouse is like a sonnet. Using a rigid and highly codified format, the steakhouse chef is like a poet who has to assemble the same elements given to every troubadour and that artifice must be delivered within the confined space of 14 lines. The success of the poet and steakhouse owner is based on the ingenuity with which that reassembly takes places. Scanning and parsing dishes and the packed house at Killen’s on a Tuesday night, I’d have to rank Killen’s in the same league as Shakespeare.

texas beef

Above: The American steakhouse canon is happily frozen in the 1950 and 60s. Is that a baked potato the way you remember them from when you were a kid or WHAT?

Down at Killen’s, which retains the homey air of a family-friendly restaurant while allowing plenty of wiggle room for the fat cat high rollers, they’re still talking about a 2008 visit from Food & Wine executive wine editor Ray Isle (a great guy and super fun to taste with). That meal landed Chef Ronnie and family in the magazine’s Top Ten Best Restaurant Dishes 2008 for their bread pudding.

texas beef

Above: Even I ate dessert last night. Tracie P will be the first to tell you that I rarely enjoy sweets. But, man, when it’s this good… Chef Ronnie makes the brioche in house.

There was even more than one bottle of wine I could drink on the list, which had judiciously restrained pricing on all the usual suspect Napa Valley “Cabs,” a refreshing surprise for the steakhouse category, where 300% and 400% markups are generally the norm.

Marty and Joanne couldn’t believe how much I ate. I was like that little kid, who gets taken to a steakhouse for the first time, and just can’t believe how big the baked potato is. Everything you want a steakhouse to be…

In other news…

Tracie P on Greco di Tufo…

Ribolla and guacamole, Nebbiolo and chili dogs with the Uomo Armadillo

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chili dogs

Above: Italians and I are fascinated by hotdogs. Last night Tracie P and I shared a meal at Man Bites Dog and Torchy’s (south Austin) Trailer Park and Eatery with the “Uomo Armadillo” (Armadillo man, above left) and his daughter Marta.

Supreme Italian wine blogger Mr. Franco Ziliani will probably defriend me on Facebook for this: last night I paired 2006 Barbaresco by Produttori del Barbaresco with a lipsmackingly delicious chili dog by Man Bites Dog at the South Austin Trailer Park and Eatery.

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And that’s not all: we also paired a gorgeous Ribolla from the new “Adriatico” label by Bastianich with chips, guacamole, and salsa. (The fruit for this transnational project by the Bastianich empire comes from Simčič vineyards.)

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I know that it’s a sin but what were we to do when the Uomo Armadillo showed up with the 06 Barbaresco and the 07 Morgon by Lapierre in tow?

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The 07 Lapierre Morgon was brilliant with the dogs, btw. The 06 Barbaresco was tight but opened up nicely… (Uomo Armadillo and his buddy Massimo, who was also there last night, have visited Lapierre for his annual blowout party and we all raised a glass to remember the iconic winemaker who left this world for another last month.)

This was certainly an extreme and decadent pairing but I also believe wholeheartedly that the folks who make these wines intend them to be served at the dinner table and with people you care about. In the U.S. we tend to fetishize our wines and are overly selective IMHO in how we “apply” them. Rest assured, they were applied very well last night!

And on the subject of chili dogs, here’s a less pretentious dog that I bit into a week ago Sunday at Ginny’s Little Longhorn when Alice Feiring was in town and we took her to play Chicken Shit Bingo at Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon.

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And in case you’re wondering about the Uomo Armadillo: we actually met thanks to Mr. Ziliani, whose blog we both follow. Uomo Armadillo (Alessandro) comes to Austin from Milan every year in the fall to get his honkytonk on. His happy obsession with the Groover’s Paradise even earned him a song…

Thanks for reading! More on Friuli tomorrow… And in the meantime, check out Tracie P on Fiano d’Avellino.

Friuli! Day 1: Valter Scarbolo and how he reshaped the way Americans think about Italian cuisine

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Today’s post is the first in a series on my recent trip to Friuli with sommelier Bobby Stuckey and chef Lachlan McKinnon-Patterson, owners of Frasca in Boulder.

Above: Valter Scarbolo (pronounced SKAR-boh-loh), right. His family’s landmark restaurant La Frasca in the province of Udine (Friuli) helped to create a new paradigm for Italian food in the U.S. That’s Shelley Lindgren of A16 (San Francisco) and Joe Campanale of Dell’Anima (New York) in the foreground. When Valter speaks, North American restaurateurs listen intently.

Few if any Italian food and wine insiders, I’m sure, would disagree with me: the first place you need to eat when you visit Friuli for food and wine tourism is Valter Scarbolo’s La Frasca in Lauzacco (not far from Udine).

When I arrived in Friuli in mid-September, the first place my good friend Wayne took me to eat was Valter’s place. (Here’s the post I did the next day on our amazing meal.)

Above: Among other key elements to contemporary Italian cuisine in the U.S., Valter has introduced a generation of North American restaurateurs to the concept of “cult prosciutto,” in this case Prosciutto d’Osvaldo.

A note on the term frasca… frasca (Italian) or frasčhe (Friulian) means simply branch. Linguistically and culinarily, it represents a wonderful instance of metonymy (“the action of substituting for a word or phrase denoting an object, action, institution, etc., a word or phrase denoting a property or something associated with it,” OED online edition). In Friuli, a frasca was a roadside stand where producers of cured meats, cheeses, and wines would set up shop to sell their wares. Some believe a branch was placed by the side of the road to draw attention to the stand, while others believe that the vendors would display their products under the shade of a branch. Of course, where wine, prosciutto, and cheese are sold, customers will want to taste with the producer. Ultimately, the term frasca began to denote (as a metonym) a place where patrons gathered to eat (there is a kinship here with the word trattoria). Today, the term is regularly used to denote a restaurant, although Valter’s venue, “La Frasca,” remains the frasca by antonomasia.

Above: One of the amazing dishes that didn’t make it into my post about dinner with Valter Scarbolo was this orzotto, a “risotto” made with barley instead of rice, chanterelle mushrooms and squab ragù.

We all (or at least some of us) remember the “Northern Italian Cuisine” revolution of the 1980s, when restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco seemed determined to expunge “Southern Italian Cuisine” from their menus. In fact, it would more properly be called “pseudo-Northern Italian Cuisine” because the true regional Italian cuisine shift toward the north didn’t take shape until the Bastianich-Batali powerhouse Babbo opened in New York City in the late 1990s.

With the rise of the Bastianich empire in the late 1990s, a new generation of high-end American diners were introduced to Friulian cuisine, first through the Istrian clan’s Frico bar in Manhattan, which I believe opened in 1996 and closed in 2007 (see Eric the Red’s 1996 review here), and then later through Frasca in Boulder, which was opened by Bobby and Lachlan in 2004 (IMHO, one of the top-five Italian restaurants in the U.S. today).

I can tell you from personal experience that both sets of restaurateurs view Valter and his restaurant (which can trace its origins back to the 1960s) as a paradigm for Italian cuisine and hospitality.

Above: The Tagliolini “San Daniele,” actually made at Valter’s using prosciutto by D’Osvaldo, which is made in Cormons, not San Daniele.

The Friulians are an industrious people. Valter is the apotheosis of that spirit and his bright personality and spirtuality express themselves in the metrics of his family’s wines, his superb cuisine, and his warm hospitality. Anyone who knows the man personally, I’m sure, would share my impression.

To know Valter is to know true Friulian gastronomy and I consider myself lucky to know both.

There are many places I’ll be taking Tracie P to dine when we go to Friuli for our vacation in February. But the first will be Valter’s Frasca.

Next up: Ronco del Gnemiz, one of my favorite Friulian wineries…

Teutonic partytime: scenes from Wurstfest 2010, New Braunfels

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Tracie P and our friend Austin jazzer Liz Morphis got their smoked-pork-chop-on-a-stick on at the behemoth 50th annual Wurstfest 2010 in New Braunfels, Texas yesterday night. Entirely delicious with a cold lager beer on the side…

I knew that Central Texans were proud of their German heritage… but, sheesh, these folks dig them some Teutonic party time…

The music tents were packed and pumping the oom pah pah. And the musicians were smoking hot… You could hear some of the traces of what helped to shape the Tex Mex sound of the 1970s, a fusion of German music with Spanish instrumentation, the tuba meets the 6-string (Doug Sahm would have been right at home here).

Got sauerkraut?

Where I grew up we called them potato latkes.

The great hall of the Comal County Fairgrounds was a sight to see, and the folks, however sloshed, were super polite and well-behaved… only good times here…

And, of course, there were hot German babes…

In other news…

Tracie P is blogging again… Check it out here…

My baby loves her some Little River Band

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Reminiscing… Tracie P and I went on a super fun double-date last night with aunt Holly and uncle Terry… Cocktails, Mexican food, and then the Little River Band at the intimate One World Theatre (Austin).

The boys got the girls t-shirts and the girls got their t-shirts signed by the band…

You see, not only does my baby love her some Little River Band… “Reminiscing” (1978) was the song that made it all happen for aunt Holly and uncle Terry when they were high school sweethearts back in Orange, Texas… uh huh…

Come on… you know you love it, too (here, sung by Australian super star John Farnham)…

What does the Little River Band have to do with wine? The band took its name from the town of Little River in Victoria, Australia. I’ve been told they make wine not far from there…

I hope ya’ll are having fun today. Tracie P and I are headed to Wurstfest in New Braunfels, home to early German settlers and our good friends Seana and Josh… and you just know we’re going to find something blogilicious… stay tuned…

Who said there’s no good sushi in Texas?

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I did and now I’m eating my words…

It’s a tough job but someone has to do it… I’m currently developing a new blog for a new client and I have to admit, I’ve been completely floored by the food I’ve tasted with him. I can’t reveal the restaurateur or the blog but I will once it’s ready to launch.

In the meantime, I just had to share the singed yellow tail with white soy sauce and battera kombu dressing.

In case you were worried that we weren’t eating well here in Texas…

Buon weekend, ya’ll!

Colli Euganei, where Petrarch and great wine meet (and an unsung hero of the Veneto)

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petrarch

Above: Winemaker Luciano Gomiero of Vignalta (center), pioneer and unsung hero of one of my favorite appellations in the world, the Colli Euganei (Veneto). That’s my friend, the aptly named, Marco Tinello (right, the Veneto’s “best sommelier” 2008), who led our vinous journey to the Euganean Hills so beloved by Petrarch in mid-September.

There is no place in Italy that I feel more at home then the Veneto, where I spent many years at university and playing music. And there is no other place where my interests converge more mellifluously than the Colli Euganei, the Euganean Hills south of Padua, where my beloved Petrarch and great wines meet.

Petrarch took refuge in these hills toward the end of his life and it was here that he transcribed and edited his life’s work, including the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, his fragments of vernacular things, a songbook composed of 366 poems written for Laura.

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Above: La Casa del Petrarca, Petrarch’s house in Arquà in the heart of the Euganean Hills, is adorned with frescoes inspired by the narrative culled from the Fragmenta.

Petrarch’s favorite poet was the Latin writer Virgil and there’s no doubt that Petrarch knew and appreciated the line so often repeated from the Georgics, Bacchus amat colles, in other words, Bacchus [the divine embodiment of the vine] loves hills.

To understand why Petrarch loved this immensely beautiful place and why it is ideal for raising fine wines, here are a few photos.

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Above: That’s a view from the hills looking eastward toward Venice and the Adriatic.

The eastern plains leading to Venice are otherwise flat but south of Padua, the Eugeanean Hills rise up suddenly and violently from the flats.

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Above: Petrarch wrote that the Euganean Hills reminded him of the Vaucluse where he met Laura.

The soil types range from volcanic to ancient seabed to calcareous clay and the different growing sites deliver rich mineral flavors in the Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot that have traditionally been grown there.

petrarch

Above: Luciano ages all and vinifies some of his wines in recycled tonneaux and barriques — no new wood here! You could hear his 2009 Alpianae fermenting again (in other words, it had been fermenting on and off, depending on the temperature of the cellar, for more than a year!)

The Colli Euganei are best know for their red wines. Luciano doesn’t barrique his wines and you never find woodiness in them. His reds are defined by their rich, earthiness and minerality, tar and goudron notes. And while I’m not generally a fan of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, I gladly drink his wines, which never show woodiness, and are extremely well priced (generally around $25-35 in the U.S.). I highly recommend them.

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Above: The 2008 Sirio (dry Moscato) was stunning, with great minerality and fruit. BrooklynGuy would have loved it.

But the wines that truly fill me with emotion are his white wines, Sirio (dry moscato) and Alpianae (dried-grape Moscato Giallo) in particular. And the best news is that, like his reds, Luciano’s white wines are more than reasonably priced (the Sirio should cost about $20 retail).

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Above: The name Alpianae actually came from a typo, Luciano told me. It was supposed be called Apianae, a reference to a name used by the Romans for sweet wines “belonging to the bees” (in the sense that bees are drawn to sweet wines, i.e., the best wines).

Luciano was the first to popularize dry Moscato in the Euganean Hills and he successfully lobbied the consortium and the Italian government to create the Colli Euganei Moscato DOC (previously you couldn’t write Moscato on the label). With the 2010 vintage, Fior d’Arancio (the local name for Moscato Giallo) will be the appellation first DOCG, also thanks to pioneer Luciano.

The Vignalta whites, including the dried-grape Moscato Giallo, are some of my favorite wines in the world. And I love how they are connected to a topos so imbued with cultural riches. Indeed, Petrarch’s transcriptions and collations during the last years of his life in Arquà (a stone’s throw from Luciano’s winery) are considered to by many to be the birthing of Renaissance humanism.

Like Bacchus, I love Euganean hills, too.

I posted on the fantastic lunch we had that day here.

Next up: my September trip to Italy continues with a series of posts from Friuli…

A new bone marrow delivery system (and a food bloggers paradise in Houston)

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Last night I was invited to participate in a food bloggers summit hosted by Caffè Bello Taverna e Pizzeria in the hipster Montrose district of Houston (the newest member of the Tony Vallone family of Italian restaurants).

That’s Jedi food blogger Houston Foodie showing off his newly patented bone marrow delivery system (a straw!).

I must say that I’ve never met such a collegial (however geeky) and simpatico group of food bloggers. (And we all know how grouchy food and wine bloggers and tweeters can be!)

That’s Food Princess (above, left, my new BFF) and Bitspitter (right). Mr. Vallone and waitstaff treated the group of 10 or so bloggers to a 4-course tasting menu.

I like Tony a lot (he’s a good friend of cousin Marty) and he’s one of our country’s leading Italian restaurateurs. But the best thing about Caffè Bello (his taverna, as he likes to call it, a family-friendly unassuming Italian eatery) is that it has one our favorite wines on the list, SP68 by Occhipinti!

The rigatoni alla bolognese, everyone agreed, were cooked perfectly al dente and the bone marrow in the lamb shank? I think the photo above speaks a thousand blog posts…

A radiant champion is born in Montalcino

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Isla, above, stole my heart about a month when I was the dinner guest of her parents, Laura and Marco, who manage Il Palazzone, producer of Brunello di Montalcino. (Of course, Isla stacked the cards by designing the place setting for me below.)

Today, Isla has a newborn little sister: Nia Rose came into this world over the weekend. (“Pronounced Nee-ah, meaning radiant champion in Gaelic,” writes Laura, whom I imagine is quite radiant herself right now.)

Mazel tov, Laura, Marco, Isla, and James! Tracie P and I are so happy for you and are sending you lots of love! And man, this baby fever is contagious! :-)