I wasn't feeling well, so I don't feel comfortable commenting on the food. I will say that the waitstaff was efficent, friendly, and attractive, and that the new quarters are a vast improvement over the old Sampaio. (Especially the men's room, which Actually! Had! A! Working! Door!)
The last time we visited, we liked the food (or at least I did), but the space left much to be desired. This time, the food was even better, and the space is much improved over the old cramped quarters.
The appetizers got things off to a good start. The sauce the mussels came in had a nice zesty garlic tang, and the "Pastel de frango com passas" (sort of like a chicken empanada) were quite delicious, especially with the mango relish, and we ended up ordering another plate.
I ordered the mixed grill for two for myself, and it turned out to be just the right amount of food for me that night. There were three meats on the mixed grill plate: steak, which was good but not particularly innovative, the chicken, which had a nice rub on it, and the sausage, which was really excellent. And they make a very credible crème brulee.
Service was very good, especially considering our Amazing Expanding Party and handling a water glass spill.
Drawbacks: They don't seem to offer just a regular side salad with your meal. And prices have gone up, which is understandable considering changes in the Austin dining scene and the upgraded digs.
I would still like to see a real churrascaria restaurant move into Austin. But Sampaio's is certainly interesting enough to be worth your Austin Fine Dining dollar.
Am I supposed to come up with something clever every time we don't have an SDC?
This is another one of those difficult problems for me, like Drakula: a restaurant serving an unusual style of food, run by hard-working immigrant folks who I have a lot of sympathy for...and where the style of food turns out to be one I'm not really fond of.
I'll just say: I think this is worth trying if you know and like Filipino food, or if you've never had it and are curious. I'm not compelled to run back, but I hope these folks do make a go of it.
We'd never tried a Filipino restaurant before, and I really wanted to like Mang Dedoy. It's a small mom-and-pop operation near my house. And I do sorta kinda like it, but only for an adventurous diner or those looking for really cheap food.
By restaurant, I mean "six or seven tables in the half of the strip mall location not taken up with the general store". Having been forewarned that only a limited number of dishes on the menu were available, were will still disappointed by how few that was: of the eight items on the whiteboard, two were no longer available and after ordering a beef dish, they came back 20 minutes later and told me they were out of that too.
And the food itself? A mixed bag. We started with the only appetizer available, the eggrolls, which were excellent, very crispy and flavorful, and second only to Kim Phung's among Austin eggroll offerings. Both my entrees on the "2 for $5.50 dinner special" plate were small bowls of meat-all-but-boiled-off-the-bone with vegetables, which is not my favorite method of preparation, but they were reasonably tasty. With both "Mom" and "Pop" distracted by ringing up sales in the front, we decided to skip dessert.
What you have here is a chicken-and-egg problem. With such a small restaurant, they don't have most of the ingredients for the dishes ready to go, but with such a small selection it's nearly impossible to draw walk-up crowd business. The first thing the need is a website that tells you what all the available dishes are; the second thing they need is a daily menu that tells you what's actually in each of the dishes ("Pop"'s English was too limited to sufficiently convey this information). Also, when they have diners, they need to shut off the TV rather than letting their rug rat sit there and watch the animated Hellboy right next to the paying customers. Buy him a Nintendo DS or something.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of Mang Dedoy, but they need to at least make an effort to meet their customer's halfway.
This is a very decent restaurant if you're hungry for a burger: they have a pretty good selection, and much better burgers for the price than Red Bud Grill.
Here's my problem: unless you want a burger, or to sit in a decent bar with free Wi-Fi watching sports on TV, there's nothing else here to appeal to the average person. None of the non-burger options really struck me as sounding good, and the establishment itself is somewhat off the beaten track (though I bet they do get a good bit of business from the nearby office parks).
Nice enough: I just don't have any good reason to go back.
A bit of an atypical choice for the SDC, but I was busy enough Saturday that I wanted to eat someplace nearby, and had a coupon for this place.
Well, you can't say that the name doesn't warn you: the "bar" part comes before the "grill" part, so it isn't a surprise that the interior is centered on an octagonal bar, and that there are TVs tuned to sports on all eight ceiling facets. (It did fit Hemingway's "clean, well-lighted place" definition, which gives it a definite leg up on Casino El Camino.) However, the food, despite it obviously being the tail on the dog here, was actually pretty good. Though the hot wings were nothing to write home about, the onion rings were pretty good and my "Some Like It Hot" double-meat hamburger was among the best I've had in Austin, large and juicy with a nicely toasted bun.
Unless you like sports bars, it's hard to recommend this as a destination spot, but I can heartily recommend the burgers for the grab-and-go crowd.
Mediocre Tex-Mex.
Everyone but me seemed to enjoy their food more than I did. But the nachos were bland and gooped with "out of the drum nacho cheese product", my beef fajitas were sub par, and my pineapple tres leches cake, though not bad, was a bit too dry on the leches part. The chorizo queso was good, though.
I wouldn't object to coming back to try something else, but I can't recommend it for any of the dishes I had.
See the logs for February of 2007.