We'd been avoiding the Mesa location for a while now, due to bad service and rude management. (Gee, you think those things might be related?) So we figured it was time to give them another chance. The service was acceptable: I didn't have any need to talk to the management, which is probably a good sign. The pizza and salad remain consistantly good.
Same as it ever was. Great pizza, good cheese garlic bread, OK salads. Service seems improved from previous years, with regular Dr Pepper refills, but there were still a few lapses (like not asking us if we wanted dessert). Still the best stuffed/deep dish pizza in town by a considerable margin.
Another year older. Another trip to Ruth's Chris. I liked our waiter, who was willing to engage in debate on the merits of various Hanna-Barbera cartoons: I would have liked him more if it weren't for that unfortunate "who do I have to kill to get more tea?/oh, look, I have three glasses of tea now." incident.
Other than that? Quality steak. I wouldn't order the potato skins again.
For what you pay for one full meal at Ruth's Chris Steak House, you could buy 640 servings of ramen (more if you get it at Sam's). Throw in a bottle of vitamins to prevent scurvy and you have more than half a year's worth of survival rations for what one night of truly indulgent steak and sides will set you back. Is it worth it? Well, yes. Everything was truly excellent (except for the potato skins, which were merely OK and could have used some bacon), but I'm beginning to think that other restaurants (say, Hudson's On the Bend, for instance) may offer you more bang for your Fine Dining buck.
Service was generally good except for varying between too few and too many drink refills. Alas, Ruth's has also gone to the UNACCEPTABLE mandatory 20% tipping policy for large parties. I am beginning to think this war may already be lost. But it also makes me wonder if we should try Sullivan's instead.
Sunflower strikes me as an attempt to do something interesting: an upscale Vietnamese restaurant that you could, say, take your girlfriend to comfortably. Nice tables (with cloths), good chairs: more pleasing than the average "one step above fast food" ambiance of pretty much every other Vietnamese place in Austin.
Looks don't matter that much, though: how's the food? We didn't order pho. (People we know who have eaten here actually warned us off the pho.) I'm not 100% sure I'd order the shrimp & squid dish I had as my main course again (the proportions of shrimp and squid to veggies seemed a bit out of balance), but I really liked the beef stuffed with carmelized onions. And the bit of Lawrence's "shaken beef" entree I had was remarkably tender and delicious. (While I'm thinking of it, a public service announcement: never, ever shake a baby. Babies should be stirred.)
I was slightly disappointed that Lawrence's bana flambe dessert wasn't actually served flambee, and the service was a bit iffy. Also, the prices are (shock!) a bit higher than average for Vietnamese food in Austin: after all, you're paying for all that ambiance. But Sunflower is certainly worth trying again.
Sunflower seems to be one of the few Vietnamese restaurants in Austin that aspires to be more than just another Pho joint.
The food itself is very good and quite interesting. My Shaken Beef entree, consisting of cubes marinated in a tasty garlic sauce, was delicious. As for appatizers, the imperial rolls were good and cheap, while the beef stuffed with caramelized onion appetizer was tasty and artfully presented (in a star shape on a webbed bed of thin cellophane noodles), but, at $7.50, was a little pricey for what you get. (I also wasn't fond of the peanuts on top). My banana flambe dessert with ice cream was also very satisfying and, at $3.50, fairly cheap. There are also a number of other dishes on the menu I'd like to try.
The only real drawback was the service, which seemed indifferent even by Austin Asian restaurant standards. There was only one waiter on duty (I assume the owner's son), and while he wasn't hostile or unpleasant, I got the distinct impression that he would rather have been skateboarding/playing Nintendo/surfing the Internet than waiting tables. I can relate, and can only imagine how sullen a waiter I would have been if my parents had put me to work at a family business. Still, it doesn't change the fact that, while the food come out quickly, drink refills were hard to come by, and it seemed hard to catch our waiter's eye.
Still, the service wasn't bad enough to keep me coming back for food this good. Plus the prices, while higher than the average Pho joint, were still pretty reasonable (we got out for around $20 a person, including tips). Right now, Sunflower has made a strong case for being the best Vietnamese restaurant in Austin.
Decent enough sausage, pork ribs, and brisket. As Lawrence notes, they were out of mutton and pork steak: the rest of the barbecue was okay, but not worth driving in from Austin for. I will concede that their new building is much nicer than the old place.
This biggest disappointment here was that they were out of mutton, which is what they do best. (They were also out of the "pork steak," which I would like to try.) While the possibility of running out of something is always a concern for any BBQ joint, it seems to me particularly bad planning to be out of anything on 6 PM on a Saturday night when you're open until 10 PM. Alert diners might want to call ahead before dropping by. The pork and beef ribs were very tasty, but I still miss the mutton.
Good news: The new building (just a couple of blocks south of the old one) is larger, less dingy, and has both a soft drink dispenser (no more cans) and acceptable indoor plumbing.
See the logs for May of 2001.