Monday, January 12, 2009

A Trip to Oxford to Visit Augusta

If you’re not a vegetarian, I think ya just gotta be impressed with a place that can pull off a duck and asparagus omelet for a Sunday brunch. Augusta, the newest and perhaps only restaurant in Oxford, Iowa, can do just that. My friend Elizabeth and I were duly impressed by the specials, if less so by the young bus-girl crumpling up the large paper tablecloth at the next table down. Besides, ya gotta figure that any place that can pull off a duck and asparagus omelet for Sunday brunch can pull off French toast and sausage.

Well, not so fast.

The story behind Augusta is that a couple Hurricane Katrina refugees returned to their Iowa roots, met a business partner in Oxford, and set up a bistro with a small town location but with Big Easy flair. Rave reviews are proliferating on the web since their opening in January of 2008.

My friend and I liked Augusta… in the end… overall. It was good but quirky, the problem being that the quirks weren’t all of the charming variety. Uncharming quirks may be better known as annoyances. We might have had an overly romantic idea as we set of on the fifteen mile westward drive from Iowa City, thru Tiffin, to Oxford. We wanted to feel like we were driving to some unknown culinary jewel lost in the backwaters of Iowa – a place with charming tablecloths and leisurely feasting and old world charm, not to a small town diner with a competent chef and local high school girls as wait staff. Arriving we were met by a gregarious woman who smiled but unceremoniously deposited us at a table topped with a large sheet of paper by the door. The interior was quaint in a neuvo-rustic sort of way, and I got the feeling that it might develop a bit more over time as it settled into its style and developed its wait staff. The farmland bistro atmosphere extended through the single rectangular room with the bar and kitchen at the far end and a number of smallish tables which they didn’t mind pushing together.

The waitress mentioned a few an impressive sounding specials, all of which were still available even tho at a bit past 1:00, we were perhaps the last customers to arrive. Elizabeth went for the Duck omelet - to which they offered to add whatever other traditional omelet stuffings she wanted – and sides of fruit and a pancake. What I liked about the menu for the regular breakfasts is that they all came with three sides. That’s right – uno, dos, tres.. This means that one doesn’t have to choose between the biscuits and gravy and whatever else looks tempting, or try to get a single biscuit and gravy along with the meal. One can simply order the French toast and get biscuits and gravy, cheesy grits, and AND sausage on the side, then eat the bacon that your friend gets with her omelet. I was smiling, but all the while thinking of the damage I would do to my heart.

The bacon was fine, better than average even; good but otherwise unremarkable. Nothing else was what I expected – the aforementioned quirks. The biscuits were almost scones, layered and flaky inside, browned outside, but strangely sweet and a bit dry, not I thought a great match for the gravy, which was a bit thin but very rich. The cheese grits I had expected maybe in a bowl or maybe on the plate, but definitely scooped out of a pot and amorphous. They arrived in a sharply geometric triangle, seemingly deep fried, and potentially pre-formed and just taken out of a deep freeze, with a crispy outer coating and mushy interior. Nott bad, but not super, and definitely quirky the wrong way. The home-made sausage had an interesting flavor – very, very peppery with black pepper, not hot but biting. It was a very fine grind with an interesting round along one edge and flat along the opposite edge crispy not on top and bottom but around the outside, that led me to suspect it was cooked as a meatloaf and sliced. It was okay but not especially to my liking – too dense and too peppery, didn’t go well with syrup – but definitely distinctive.

The French toast was the thing that was most disappointing in a way, although it also partly redeemed itself in another. Again, this may be a personal preference, so I’ll try to explain. I think to be good French toast needs to be soaked in the batter long enough to soak it up. It doesn’t need to be so saturated that it resembles some custardy bread pudding slice, but the grilled bread with a thin shellacking of egg on the outside and a cooked dry interior that some places try to pawn off as French toast is a crime against breakfast. Augusta’s variety was closer to the latter, and disappointing on that front. But it wasn’t the average white bread, either. In fact, the French toast was made out of something almost resembling brioche, soft and moist and a bit eggy. It almost made up for the lack of saturation of the batter. But only almost.

I think our disappointment came from overly high hopes, and as I said earlier, in the end, we liked Augusta. I like the idea of Augusta, and I like the drive to Oxford. We’re thinking about going back next weekend. I hope that some of the quirks will seem more familiar and others will have been changed. I want to support a small town diner that knows its crowd yet maintains its ambition to be something other than another small town diner.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Bluebird Diner: My extra 2 dollars worth

I don’t usually see the value in saying what’s already been said. Sometimes, though, it’s worth it; I can think of it as building solidarity or engaging in conversation… or bitching. And I suspect that not everyone has had a chance to read the review I’m echoing from my friend’s Panoptibolg. But I, too, went to the Bluebird Diner.

I was meeting Gail, a professor / friend / advisor from out of town for lunch, and told her about this new place and Mike’s review. On the strength of his endorsement she paused before agreeing. “Any place,” I said wryly, “this mediocre, I just gotta try,” and she said she’d meet me there at noon.

The place in question was pleasantly full, and for what is essentially a large room with tables strewn across it, being pleasant and anything like full simultaneously is itself a success. Perhaps the mood was benefiting from holiday cheer. Gail and I sat close to each other so as to hear our conversation over the din and talked shop until the waitress came, nice but flustered.

I’ve sometimes talked to my friend Rich, a bar tender and cook and waiter at a local bar that caters to a tradesman lunch crowd, about the staff’s idea of being busy. Now, I don’t mean to have implied earlier that other folks don’t also not see the value in saying what’s already been said; folks look for ways in which to make the same story interesting. This generally isn’t by making it mediocre. One exaggerates… ‘Can you believe how busy we were at lunch…?’ one asks instead of, ‘did you notice that just slightly more than half the tables were full?’ Rich looks on them with scorn. ‘This isn’t busy,’ he says to me after. ‘This isn’t hard. Everybody orders the special. You put it on a plate and give it to them. It’s not really something to get worked up about.’

Of course, I appreciate that people have reasons beyond conversation for their conversation. It’s probably much more interesting for many folks a lot of the time to perform some role other than ‘average day at work.’ That is, it can be nice to consider oneself busy, or bored, or otherwise engaged in an exceptional activity. And, hey, I’m all for whatever gets people through the day. So long as they can perform that role competently. So long as it doesn’t mess with my lunch. You know who I mean, the waitpeople with good observation skills, that handle multiple tasks with easy grace, that make few mistakes and deal efficiently with the ones they do make. The ones who can look around and think, ‘Huh. It really *is* busy here today. Good thing I’m good at my job. It’s not really something to get worked up about.’

Our waitress at the Bluebird was nice but flustered. I can imagine her saying, ‘Wow. It’s really busy in here today,’ and Rich rolling his eyes. I say this by way of extended introduction to explain why, when she brought me the eleven dollar steak and eggs instead of the nine dollar chicken fried steak I ordered, I was neither especially surprised nor especially upset. Half anticipating a moment like this, I hadn’t even asked for my hash browns to be cooked crispy. ‘You ordered the chicken fried steak?’ she asked, looking at the crunchy, well done meat on the plate. Now, the question that follows ordering a steak is, ‘how would you like that done?’ and if I’ve ordered a steak, I reply ‘medium rare’ and if I’ve ordered chicken fried steak I reply, ‘huh?’ and any mistake gets sorted out before I’m eating something unordered and overcooked. No such conversation here.

So, after we told the waitress her mistake and she looked confused before claiming they were out of chicken fried steak, I took the food because I don’t like the idea of it getting thrown away any more than I like the idea of waiting another twenty minutes for something else.

Now, I’m not saying that they should have given me this lunch for free. I’m mostly just saying that they should bring me what I order. And when they don’t, well, at least they shouldn’t charge me extra for having messed up my order. Paying the nine dollars I had agreed to pay for the lunch I wanted for the lunch that I didn’t isn’t really compensation but would have been better than paying the eleven dollars I hadn’t agreed to pay for the lunch I hadn’t ordered. This is a subtlety apparently lost on the Bluebird staff. I would have liked to get the meal for free, sure. I would really have liked a manager or some such person to come out and apologize and check if the situation had been resolved to my satisfaction. That would suggest to me they are trying to say, ‘we’re human and make mistakes but we’re trying, and want to do a good job’ instead of saying, ‘we’re incompetent, and we don’t care.’

I still had hopes for the food. Both meals came with toast. Not every breakfast does, but every breakfast, regardless of time of day and even if it's French toast, should come with toast. So, a plus. Gail’s corned beef hash was strange, less hash then corned beef julianne tossed with fried potatoes. She said it was good. The steak wasn’t shoe leather. The egg – scrambled – had been sizzled dry on a large flat griddle, paper thin and chopped into strips like Gail’s corned beef, a sort of visual motif. My hash browns, if not brown weren’t exceptionally bad, but tasted strongly of artificial butter flavored shortening that I wouldn’t want to waste cholesterol intake on. The portions, like Mike said, weren’t large – enough, but just barely enough, not enough had I been really hungry. In short, the food was nothing special and pretty pricey, and that’s a disappointing combination. We didn’t stay for pie.

But, oh – despite my harping, the waitress was nice. She refilled my iced tea a couple times (that a *miserable* Earl Gray concoction with extra tannins and apparently the philosophy that lots of flavor that is bad is better than little flavor that is good) and smiled through her flustration.

The botched order is fun to write about but not that big of a deal. Food that proves to be mediocre and service that seems consistently sub-par is. I’ve had worse food, and I’ve been in worse places than the Bluebird, but given the local options I’m not sure why I’d go back.