I thought Doña Emilia's offered a lot of bang for the buck. The "Taste of the Mountains" plate was $10, and included a sizeable portion of rice, egg, plantains, steak, and a chunk of thick-cut bacon. (Really thick-cut: it still had skin attached, which put me off a bit. Yes, I'm familiar with pork rinds and cracklings: I decided a while back that those were no longer part of my balanced diet.)
The other appetizer plates were quite reasonably priced as well. One really odd thing is that they don't serve iced tea. At all. Nada. It may be somewhat ethnocentric of me, but I've never encountered an Austin restaurant of any flavor, ethnic or non-ethnic, that didn't have iced tea. WTF? WTFF? (Lawrence quibbles and mentions Ararat as another place that didn't have iced tea: I note his quibble here. My recollection is that it was listed on the menu, and I had the impression they were out and too lazy to make more.)
Unfortunately, since we ate there, Doña Emilia's has moved to a new location closer to the convention center (101 San Jacinto Blvd., 478-2520). Though they haven't opened yet (the web site says March 19th), the menu has clearly changed, and I expect a price increase of probably about 50% at the new location.
I liked it as a cheap hole-in-the-wall place in East Austin. I'm dubious about a less cheap place in downtown.
Instead of TexMex, Dona Emillia's serves Colombian food, and there is a difference; not many TexMex places served fried plantains. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it's compelling enough to send people out their way looking for it.
The appetizers are cheap, but they're also sized for one; save for the tiny portions of fried yuca chips, they aren't easily divisible. The empenadas were OK but little more. For my entree I had a salad (which they forgot, then brought out with the meal), which turned out to be one of the smallest salads I've ever received (on an equally small plate, which made stirring in the dressing without getting salad on the table difficult). The "Taste of the Mountains" plate, the portions for which, while adequately sized for the price, were certainly far from generous ($1 worth of thin steak, a hefty chunk of bacon, a fried egg, three platain chips, and a heap of rice). Chuck's pork dish looked like a btter deal for the price. Other than the salad fumble service was decent.
I wouldn't mind trying some of the other dishes on the menu, but I'm not rushing back.
Really, what can you say about all-you-can-eat beef that's as well cooked and flavorful as Do Brazillia's?
Well, for one thing, pace yourself. Another: drink plenty of fluids. And, while the beef is pretty tender, I still would have liked a slightly sharper knife than the butter knives they gave us. And how come the waiter didn't offer to let us play with his knife, the way that the waiter at another table did? (To be fair, that waiter had a much cooler knife: it looked exactly like something one of the Klingons used in a bad Star Trek movie. (Oh, wait: "bad Star Trek movie" is redundant, isn't it?) Also, don't neglect the seafoods and other non-beef items.
And I liked the odd stuff on the salad bar.
Our trek to Do Brazillia was one of the longest road trips the Saturday Dining Conspiracy has undertaken: a ninety minute drive to San Antonio, a couple of hours to eat, and ninety minutes back. Was it worth it?
Oh yeah. Big time.
Do Brazillia is a churrascaria steak house; for a fixed price they bring around cuts of grilled meat on long skewers and you can ask them to cut off pieces of whatever you want. I didn't care for the Tilapia or the pork loin, but everything else ranged from good (flank steak), to very good (ribs), to great (the "Picanna Sirloin," which was so flavorful that I could have been brought a cut at a high-end steakhouse and not have been disappointed in the slightest). $40 per person (including drinks and tip) gets you all you can eat of the above and the other meats they have (lamb, ham, salmon, etc., some of which you'll see two or three different versions of, having been cooked in different sauces), in addition to a fairly extensive salad bar (I'd never seen candied pineapple slices at a salad bar before). And the strawberry cheesecake was excellent.
The only drawback was that the salad bar lacked fixings variety if you wanted an actual lettuce salad.
Oh, and everything was so good that it tempted me into over-eating. It actually hurt to walk afterwards. But, again, it was worth it.
Lawrence was visiting relatives in Dallas.
Manny Hatten's does a really good (and very dense) potato pancake. And that's about it, I think.
My burger was a bit on the small side, and the fries weren't great. Worse still, in my opinion, is that everything was a bit pricy. (Authentic New York deli experience?)
Sorry, Manny, but Mark Katz has nothing to fear from you.
I can't say I was terribly impressed with Manny Hatten's. The onion rings and potato pancakes were good, and they make a very credible blintz. But the bread my pastrami was served on was uninteresting, the potato salad was thin and bland, and I was hard-pressed to find any difference between my vanilla shake and the kind they make out of the mixing packet.
Maybe I just ordered the wrong thing, but right now I can't see any reason, other than distance, to choose this place over Katz's.