Welcome to the land of bad hotel food. I will admit that one diner during Armadillocon this year claimed to have had an excellent steak in the Courtyard Café, so you never know.
Since I'm doing the dining guide for this year's Armadillocon, I thought I would do my duty and try the restaurant in the Doubletree, this year's convention hotel. However, when we arrived, we found that the Courtyard Café was closed due to "low occupancy," which tells you how popular the Courtyard Café is with local Austinites. Instead we ate in the "Courtyard Lounge" (AKA the hotel bar); since they share the same menu and kitchen, comments on the cuisine of one should be applicable to the other.
And the food was...hotel food. (I know, it's a shock.) Adequate but significantly overpriced quesadillas. Overpriced deep-fried hot wings which were also a bit on the crunchy side. Adequate but overpriced burgers, fries, and onion rings. Decent service with one unfortunate drink refill oversight, and a bit faster than that at Ma Ferguson's, in that we were not able to witness the onset of the next ice age while waiting for our meal.
With Pappadeaux on one side, and Pappasitto's, Fuddrucker's, and Owen's Country Restaurant on the other, the only reason ever to eat here would be involuntary hotel confinement due to a torrential rainstorm or civil insurrection.
There are many things I could write about TinTinNio. I could write about how much I enjoyed the Pesante, a wonderful sausage/pasta/pancetta dish with a cream and chicken broth sauce. The serving looked kind of small, but the dish was incredibly rich and filling. I could write about the prices, and how hard it must be to keep competitive with the Olive Garden across the street, especially when you're using better quality ingredients.
But there wouldn't be any point to writing about those things: TinTinNio closed a little more than a week after our visit.
Welcome to another Restaurant Site of the Damned. This space was previously occupied by Lone Star Cafe, a solid if uninspired eatery, and then by Iron Chef, which came and went too quickly for me to try it. (I may have missed an incarnation or two along the way.) Will TinTinNio break the curse?
Let me put it this way: If you're looking for a site for your new restaurant, I know a swell place that will probably be available in about six months.
The interior decor (which I am given to understand is left over from Iron Chef) is quite nice. And service was reasonably attentive (though I was irritated by both that mandatory 18% gratuity and our waiter's failure to offer us fresh ground pepper on our salads or entrees).The calamari was very good, though still a notch below reigning champion The Clay Pit; by contrast, the mussels were merely adequate. And the Crème Brulee-like "Dolce al Formaggio 'Che Crollare'" was excellent, though I think the top layer should have been just a touch more caramelized.
Alas, between the appetizers and dessert came the entree. My veal ravioli was undersized and underflavored, redeemed only partially by the presence of prosciutto; frankly, I think I could have gotten a better Italian entree across Burnet at The Olive Garden.
The problem isn't that TinTinNiois bad, the problem is they're a merely adequate Italian restaurant in a crowded market (Reale's is all of five minutes away and, with the possible exception of dessert, does everything better) stuck in an oversized space whose overhead probably won't allow them time to work out the bugs. Compounding the problem is that they've gone the trendy restaurant route of emphasizing looks over taste.
It is a nice looking place, which makes me wonder what the next tenant will do with it...
This appears to be part of a chain (though as far as I can tell, this is their only Austin area location). It also turns out to be surprisingly good and reasonably priced: I think they're actually cheaper then Red Lobster, and the food is definately better.
We also got pretty good service: at the end of our meal, the chef actually came out and apologized to Andrew "Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children?" Wimsatt. (He had ordered dessert, which was delayed due to what the chef described as "whipped cream difficulties". Dolores Erickson was, I guess, not present in the restaurant that night.)
I like it. Though they don't have quite the same structure as Rockfish (which, for some odd reason, has suddenly disappeared from the Austin area. Mostly, that is: last I checked, there was still one open down south past Ben White. If anyone can shed any light on the reasons for this, please send email.) I think they do a decent job of filling the gap.
OK but somewhat expensive seafood for what you get, and the place is loud. Eh.
Turkey City.
Lawrence was wandering through UKoGBaNI (mostly the UK part of it). I was in Las Vegas. So how about some more Vegas notes, baby?
Special note of thanks, and a tip of the Hatlo hat, to Mike Lynn.
See the logs for August of 2005.