Rosa's Cafe

Address: 4235 Sherwood Way, San Angelo, Texas 76901. 325.942.7597.

Review: Rosa's is my wife's favorite spot in San Angelo. I think she used to eat there fairly often in high school, and that habit's been tough to beat  over the years. Rosa's is sort of fast food, sort of not. It's not in the sense it doesn't taste like fast food. It is in the sense you receive your food quickly.

Let's talk about Rosa's interior for a moment. First thing you notice is color, lots and lots of vivid, eclectic color. In fact, it's like a Frida Kahlo painting blew up all over the joint. The other thing you notice is the tortilla machine churning out fresh-made tortillas by the dozen. My son and I can sit and watch that machine forever. 

The food. Well, it's good. We've had a number of items on the menu and we've liked the all. Demaree usually orders the taco carbon plate, while I usually grab fajitas or the like. Nothing is spectacular here, but everything is pretty darn good. The salsa bar contains the usually suspects: pico de gallo, mild and hot salsas, limes, etc. All are flavorful.  Quite honestly, I east at Rosa's for the tortillas. I love them. I crave them. I eat copious amounts of them at every sitting. The sopapillas are money: light, airy, steeming hot, sugary. Top them with honey. Mmm. And they come eight to an order for next to nothin'. 

Just and enjoyable place to catch a quick bite.

Rating: 6.5/10 (5/10 is average).

Hi Sushi

Address: 1400 Foothill Drive, Salt Lake City, Utah 801.906.8320.

Review: I have stated before that I am no sushi expert. I have never eaten sushi in Japan, nor have I eaten it outside the United States. This notwithstanding, I dig me some good sushi, and I don't dig me no bad sushi. Hi Sushi's sushi is the latter kind of sushi.

I started with the spicy squid and octopus rolls. 

Octopus is one of the better things you can put in your mouth, but not here. It was bland and tasteless. There was no spicy. The squid was even worse, to be honest. It was impossible to tell it was squid both because it didn't taste like squid, and because it had been chopped up into an indeterminate mass and mixed with other indeterminate stuff. Blah. The pickled ginger was very good though. 

I also tried a couple daily specials: black cod and monkfish liver. The black cod was tender and perfectly cooked. Among the best cod of any sort I've eaten. 

Monkfish liver is dubbed the foie gras of the sea. Foie gras is, of course, fattened duck liver, and is a beautiful, beautiful product. Maybe fresh monkfish liver approaches or surpasses foie gras, but not this stuff.

This liver was grainy and stale. It just wasn't good at all. The sauce added nothing.

Also, my buddy's salmon teriyaki was tough and overcooked. Not a good outing.

Rating: 3.5/10 (5/10 is average).

From Scratch

Address: 62 East Gallivan Avenue, Salt Lake City, Utah 84111. 801.538.5090.

Review: A lawyer and a CEO of a silencer manufacturing company walk into a restaurant. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, right? Nope, it was lunch a couple days ago. For this lunch, the lawyer and the CEO picked a new joint: From Scratch. It's premise seems simple enough: make good food from scratch. To do this, they trucked in an Austrian flour mill (one of ten or so in America, I'm told). And it really does appear they make everything in house, which is great. Now, let's see if this gristmill's in- house fare is good eats.

We started with the short rib.

It is what it is: meat and potatoes. (There was supposed to a be a polenta cake as well, but it didn't come on our dish, which is fine.) The short rib was good and flavorful, if a bit dry. Not sure if they wanted a firmer finished product so they didn't cook the short rib until it was uber-tender, but it was a little tougher and less succulent than I prefer. The potatoes, on the other hand, were perfect when matched with the honey au jus. Rich, thick, meaty, wonderful.

Next on tap was the pumpkin ravioli.    

Beautifully presented dish, although I have eaten this enough times in Italy to know presentation correlates relatively little to taste. Pumpkin ravioli is a lesson in contrasts, the contrast of thin sheets of ravioli with the sweet pumpkin and savory sage butter. That contrast is about balance; balance makes the dish work. The balance was off here. It was entirely too sweet. The filling was sweet, the brown butter sauce (which didn't have much browned taste to it) mixed with aceto was sweet. Everything was just sweet. The pasta was also a bit thick and gummy. It just didn't work.

Last: salumi pizza. 

Now, this pizza is sort of supposed to be Neapolitanesque, but not really, so I will try not to judge it on Neapolitan criteria. First things first, the crust. It's thin and thick at the same time. It's quite airy inside, although as you get toward the center it's thin enough that it droops. Best way to eat it is to fold it like you're eating a slice of New York pizza. From Scratch makes the mozz in house, which is much appreciated. It was good. The salumi is Creminelli, which is a high-quality product. The greens don't make a bit of sense, however. They wilt and don't add any flavor. They also added additional salt to the pizza, which, when coupled with the naturally salty salumi, made things a bit too salty. Overall, a good product that can improved with relatively few tweaks.

In sum, intriguing new place. I like some aspects quite a lot. Some didn't work at all. I'll likely be back to give it another shot and try more of the menu.

Rating: 6/10 (5/10 is average).

Stango's Coffee Shop

Address: 221 South Chadbourne Street, San Angelo, Texas 76903. 325.659.8999.

Review: First things first, Stango's isn't a coffee shop, at least not in the modern sense of the phrase. It's more an old-timey soda fountain than anything else. And while I don't normally comment on ambiance, Stango's is filled with kitsch (in the good sense) from the past and old video and pinball games. It's a fun place to hang. Now, on to the food.

The lion's share of Stango's menu is dedicated to sodas and ice cream dishes. Sandwiches are about the only savory dishes served. I ordered the roast beef on wheat. 

The bread was solid, although not particularly toothsome. (My wife ordered the Italian on white, and the white bread was superior to my wheat.) The roast beef was a good deli quality roast beef, and the horseradish mayo, a classic accompaniment helped round things out. My favorite part of any deli-style sandwich is the pickle, and the pickle was quality. All around, a solid sandwich.

For those who don't know, San Angelo tap water tastes like death. Honestly, it's just plain awful. So, while I'm in San Angelo I have learned to drink soda the entire time. Today's soda choice was Diet Coke. Now, most soda shoot out of a mixing system in perfect industrial ratios, but not at Stango's. The nice woman behind the counter mixed the syrup with water and then added the soda water at the end. It was all very 1930s, and it was nice to see. The result is a soda with less carbonation and more syrup. Good stuff.

My wife and son bought an ice cream cone, of which I did not partake, but about which they said good things. My son also enjoyed his very first pinball game.

Solid, fun place for lunch or dessert.

Rating: 6/10

Tsunami

Address: 10722 South River Front Parkway, South Jordan, Utah 84095. 801.748.1178.

Review: Utah. Sushi. One of these things is not like the other. Well, actually, both of these things are not like the other. 

A week or so ago, we, as University of Nebraska Law School alums, invaded Tsunami during the lunch hour to get our sushi on. Since two members of our group served their Mormon missions in Tokyo, and since they picked the restaurant, I harbored higher-than-normal hopes for sushi in the Intermountain West. 

I began with the sashimi sampler. 

To be honest, I don't know enough about sushi and sashimi to give them an in-depth analysis. I just know I like them, and this sashimi I liked. The fish, while obviously not abundantly fresh, was still fresh as you can expect under the circumstances. The wasabi was light and wonderful. (I received assurances from the waiter that the wasabi was actually freshly grated wasabi, as opposed to the normal paste crap you get in supermarkets or other low-end Japanese restaurants.) The soy sauce was flavorful and not too salty. 

I followed my friend John's lead on the sushi and ordered what he ordered. One roll was blue fin tuna and nothing more. Simple. Unadorned. Great. The other was a fried roll, which I was somewhat reticent about, what with it being fried and all. It was the D.T.H. roll. It contained tuna, salmon (an odd choice for sushi far as I'm concerned, but that's because my father ran a salmon hatchery when I was a child), and yellowfin. It was warm, but none of the fish was cooked. While I prefer the purity of nigri, sushi, and unfried rolls, this was pretty good, and the crunch was a nice textural element not normally present. 

All in all, an enjoyable sushi meal.

Rating: 6.5/10 (5/10 is average).

Cork and Pig

Address: 2201 Knickerbocker Road, San Angelo, Texas 76904. 325.227.6988.

Review: Where, oh where, to eat in San Angelo, Texas? It's not in the Hill Country, so barbecue isn't king. It's not south enough to have great Tex Mex. It's sort of in the center of Texas, without a culinary identity.

Today, we tried Cork and Pig. Standard American fare, and quite a few specialty pizzas, were on the menu. 

I ordered the Cuban sandwich, which came with a roasted peanut coleslaw.

Let's begin by extolling the virtues of the coleslaw. Coleslaw is so often a gloopy, mayonnaisey mess. Not this. This coleslaw was light, crunchy, and full of interesting flavor. The roasted peanuts gave the dish a pad thai feel. I've never experienced a coleslaw like this before, and I'd love to experience it again, and again, and again.

The sandwich was not as successful as the slaw. Cuban sandwiches are all about contrast. Contrast of the fatty soft roasted pork with the acidic pickles, and the fatty ham with the mustard. The bread (the most important component of any sandwich) is pressed and grilled and dense. While the pork in this sandwich was beautifully roasted and flavorful, I was completely unable to taste the ham. The contrasting elements (i.e., the pickles and mustard) weren't prominent at all. Like the ham, I couldn't taste the Swiss cheese. I knew there was cheese, but it could have been mozzarella or any other mild cheese. The bread wasn't entirely pressed, and portions tasted like Wonder Bread.

I also partook of my brother-in-law's Southwestern pizza. I'm going to assume because they had pizzas like Margherita D.O.C. and the like, that they were going for a Neapolitan-style pizza. If that is the case, then the pizza was entirely unsuccessful. The crust had huge air pockets (which are very easy fixed). It was also thick and tough. The roasted green chiles were tasteless, so the only prominent flavor present was the pepperoni. The cheese was exceedingly mild, as was the cream sauce. It was all just bland.

My wife ordered the cheeseburger. Quickly, it needed salt, lots of salt. The bun was the best component of the dish. Toothy and structurally sound. The rest was, well, bland. Meh.

So, again I query: where, oh where, to eat in San Angelo, Texas?

Rating: 5/10 (5/10 is average).

Ekamai Thai

Address: 1405 E 2100 S, Salt Lake City, Utah 84105. 801.906.0908.

Review: Sometimes you go to a restaurant and have a few things, and when you think about it after the meal, you say to yourself, "Wow, I wish I had just ordered five plates of X." That's how I felt when my buddy Dan and I ate at Ekamai Thai, so I'm going to focus on the X dish.

In this case, X stands for fried calamari. (Noted: I love that a Thai restaurant calls the dish fried calamari, since calamari is an Italian word which somehow became popularized in America even though we could utilize the perfectly legitimate English word squid.) The calamari (see, there I go again) was all rings battered and fried in a very light and crunchy panko-style batter. It was accompanied by a sweet cilantro sauce. Initially, I wasn't altogether sure about the sauce. I like cilantro, but it overpowers easily, and I've never thought it went particularly well with seafood. The sauce was light and not overpowering at all, however. I was surprised how well it married with the ultra-light calamari. Not sure if it was the unexpectedness of liking the sauce so much, but this was one of the better calamari preparation I've eaten. And I say this as one who actually prefers the legs of the calamari to the rings. One can only imagine what this recipe would taste like if Utah were located next to a calamari-rich ocean. 

Wonderful dish.

Rating: Hot dang good fried calamari/10.