310 East 6th Street
Austin, Texas 78701
512.478.2491
www.oldpecanstcafe.com
If you have never experienced the joy of a Texas summer, let me tell you: don’t. I am a kid born in Washington (District of Columbia, not Mount St. Helen’s), enjoying changing leaves, blinding snow, cherry blossoms and mild summers. That all changed when Texas came a’calling for our family. My third-grade self was brutally uprooted and plopped down in the middle of urban sprawl, also known as the Greater Dallas Metroplex.
You learn quickly why things move a little slowly here. It’s just too damn hot for anything resembling speed or efficiency. I grew accustomed to sayings like, “slower than molasses uphill in January.” The reprieve from 87 consecutive days of triple digit heat is the great indoors. In the Lone Star state, we enjoy any excuse to escape the heat: bowling alleys, school, shopping malls, movies. I once had a friend who tried to get himself thrown in jail for taking a leak on the sidewalk because his air conditioning had broken. In July.
Perhaps one of my greatest heat distractions is finding new restaurants. This is best done on Saturdays or Sundays, when you can spend an afternoon lounging and eating slowly. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. On just such a weekend, I made some late Sunday lunch plans with a couple of great friends. Weekend afternoons are about the only time downtown is quiet, so we took advantage and visited The Old Pecan Street Café.
Let me just say: wow.
First, it’s hard not to love a corner café with a blue awning that’s part of a brick building older than a re-gifted Christmas fruitcake. Pecan Street is not a big place, but comfortable and pleasant with good music and art on the walls. We arrived after the lunch rush, which made us want to linger and relax even more. Plus, we were blessed with fantastic service.
Here is what I really loved about this place: it’s real. As in, you can simply taste that the sauces and marinades -and even bread- are made from scratch, right there in that very kitchen. We started off with a shrimp cocktail. Unfussy, yes, but the cocktail sauce was spicy and fresh and absolutely not from a jar.
When our salads came, I had to know what dressing they used and where I could find it. What I learned is that they make their own house vinaigrette, from cottonseed oil and white wine vinegar, with a bit of honey for sweetness. Clean that up with a pillowy soft piece of their French wheat bread (made with Grandma’s molasses) and I could have stopped right there.
But we didn’t.
Between the three of us, we had a crepe de mer bursting with seafood and mushrooms in a creamy, white wine and yellow curry sauce. The curry was done well and really took me by surprise; I could not believe how much I enjoyed that particular savory combination. We also ordered the brunch special of the day: blackened yellow fin tuna steak. Cooked perfectly medium rare and snuggled up in a bed of rice pilaf with toasted pine nuts, we cleaned that plate (including every last bit of grilled zucchini and squash) so bare it almost felt wrong. Again, the crowning achievement of that dish was the sauce- a rich cilantro hollandaise.
As we went around the table discussing potential names for our newly conceived food babies, we naturally also decided to order dessert. Two of them. This being Texas and this being a restaurant with “pecan” in the name, we could not pass up a piece of their self-proclaimed famous pecan pie. Note to my mother: stop reading here.
This pecan pie is better than my mother’s. Please understand, I risk an untimely death at the hands of a 63 year-old-woman by saying this, but it must be said. It is that good. The Old Pecan Street Café even creates a pecan pie stuffed crepe. Genius? Hell yes. For good measure -and to make sure those food babies were growing strong- we also shared crepe extases, plumped with sweet cheese and topped with sliced strawberries and whipped by hand cream.
It is places like The Old Pecan that make the dog days bearable. A few iced teas later and we were praying for a wheelbarrow to roll our asses out of there. Instead, we braved the heat, hoping the walk to the car would help us sweat out some of those hard earned calories, like maybe nine of them. After all, we were moving slower than molasses uphill in January.
by Phyllis Anastasia Gasper
[Photo: Don Mason]
