Everyone else is out of the house this evening—M is at a Girl Scout weekend camp, L at a square dance in Kingsland—so I decided to please myself and go somewhere for dinner that I’d never been. I drove out Burnet Road to Anderson and MoPac and back without finding anything to tickle me, so on the way back I took a detour down Hancock Drive and ended up at épicerie. I’d been meaning to try them for some time now, so this seemed a good time.
I was seated right away, and started to put together a dinner off the starters menu. I’d intended to combine French onion soup and fried green tomatoes, but found they were out of soup. In the end, I decided on the shaved-beef sandwich on ciabatta with arugula and horseradish, and a side of onion rings.
My sandwich was rather a long time coming. The restaurant was full, I acknowledge, but the wait seemed unusually long even so, and I was getting a bit diabetic-crashy by the time my food came.
The food itself was good; the meat a non-marinated carpaccio, the arugula dressed with olive oil, and a schmear of horseradish on the bottom bread next the meat, where it belonged. The whole thing was overall well balanced, though I was startled several times with jolts of artisanal salt (or at least kosher salt), and a feeling on my lips at the end of “whoa, just ate something rather salty, didn’t I?” The onion rings were also tasty and the batter coating had a nice crunch, but they were clumped together, as though they’d been dumped all at once into slightly too-cool oil and not shaken up to insure individual cooking.
My server was, I thought, rather lackadaisical and inattentive. At one point I was left with a water glass at low tide and I had to flag him and ask for a refill, which should not have happened. He also missed an opportunity to upsell the dessert menu, something I did hear another server at a nearby table do to good effect, and at his last appearance he had already removed his uniform apron, signaling to me that he was in a hurry to shoo me out the door so he could leave himself. Very bad appearances, that.
Bottom line: go for the food. It’s good. But be prepared to prod the staff as needed.
